Apresentação

Abstract

Photography and Urban Culture(s) is the main theme of the dossier composing this issue of Varia História. A result of urban culture at the end of the first half of the nineteenth century, photography is one of the few artifacts since then to register the variety of social practices emerging from and experienced in the public and private spaces of city life. With more than a century and a half of existence, photography today has a history that permits an analysis of its technical and aesthetic transformations as well as its social uses and functions. One of its dimensions, the analogical, may induce many to insert photography in the world of the recognizable, that is, as linked to its referent. The growing volume of studies on its visuality connect it to the culture of the look. Guided by aesthetic, commercial, political, and cultural motives, among others, photographers metamorphize the real; they create their own social times and spaces. Thus conceived, photography is no longer seen as a simulacrum of the real; it becomes a cultural and intellectual space in tune with the systems of perception and representation historically and culturally conceived and produced. Not by chance is it said that photography belongs to the category of reductions; it is the symbolic representation of another object. Even more, it has an active social role: it can both erase the memory of an event and reinvent it. If figurative photography is what most interests the historian, the existence of abstract photography, that which is created for conceptual ends, cannot be ignored. In the same way, it is important to take into account the uses attributed to photography originating from the decontextualized production of images. Whether or not they carry on a dialogue with artistic movements such as surrealism, hyper-realism, and others, professional and amateur photographers have the technical resources capable of creating uncommon objects and even imagined figurative realities. Even if a large part of such photographs are produced for specific ends, namely, aiming at creating strictly conceptual or formal objects, it is the case that their interactions with other fields of photography and visual culture are informative to analysts of socio-cultural questions proper to contemporary systems of visual perception. This means that