Versions of "development": modernization as subject and dilemma for photographer Militão Augusto de Azevedo

Abstract

This article centers itself in the inheritance of Militão Augusto de Azevedo (1837-1905) with the objective of investigate the different ways he represented the modernization process in the last decades of the 19th century in brazil and especially in the city of São Paulo. The Militão's documents analysis - photographs, letters and a Índice das fotografias de antigos paulistas - configures a multiplicity of meanings about the transformations occurred in the São Paulo city since 1860, and in the brazilian politics after the Republic's Proclamation. The character's comments about his changing world asseverate that, less than directly related to the "progress", the photographer's representations form an amalgam of mismatched temporalities, which imbricate and tension themselves.