Uma Bahia ilustrada: cultura visual, imprensa e cidade na Renascença, 1916 - 1931

Abstract

This thesis investigates the emergence and presence of Renascença, an illustrated variety magazine that circulated in Salvador, especially between 1916 and 1931, questioning its role in the constitution of an urban visual culture in Bahia and the Bahian capital. The aim is to link the emergence and development of this magazine to all the changes that took place in Salvador and its press, identifying the social groups and subjects and their interests involved in the production and consumption of those magazines and the images they mobilized. The intention is to think about how the wide production and publication of images, specifically photogravures involving mundane events, by the editors of the magazines underpinned a way of experiencing the city, of seeing, showing and being seen in the changing city through these magazines. Based on the interpretation and understanding of these processes, we formulate the hypothesis that magazine images, rather than informing or illustrating the changes and permanence of practices and values present in Bahian society at that time, were constituted as a way of producing a social reality that not only dialogued with the desires for progress and modernity of certain groups, but also dialogically and conflictually recovered, excluded and updated aspects related to Bahia's traditions and past. It also seeks to discuss the process of perception of this visual culture by the subjects and the tensions that surrounded the way they produced these magazines and their images. Using theoretical references from the field of Cultural Studies and Visual Culture as a horizon and understanding images and magazines as a source and object of research, the aim is to analyze how illustrated magazines and their pictorial images were conceived, produced, and disseminated, as well as the content they contained.