Since the late nineteenth century, Brazilian informal urbanism—the many forms of citybuilding that are not sanctioned by state law—has been its own visual regime. From centrally located favelas and “beehive” tenements to informal peripheries, poor and mostly Black people have built urban landscapes that demand new ways of seeing.

Yet for most of the twentieth century, Brazil’s Black urbanities were mostly photographed and painted by outsiders: a tedious gaze fixed them as rustic, exotic, dicey, ephemeral, and anti-modern.

In Johann Moritz Rugendas’ Habitation de Nègres (c. 1827-35), we find the template. A white woman in European dress watches from the second-story balcony while Black people of all ages, depicted in scanty clothing, go about their everyday tasks in public view. Their home is small, precariously finished, scarcely distinguishable from the mud it sits on or the palms that shade it.

An anonymous city photographer transposed this way of seeing in a 1912 photo from Copacabana’s Babilônia favela. Here, two women, three children, and a dog pose in front of a home, pictured as a fantastical assembly of mud, fiber, and scrap. The detached gaze of a dandy white man in the bottom right heightens the viewer’s sense that the ramshackle hut and the residents in their outdated full-length dresses are a disjunctive and anomalous presence in the modern city.

In a 1920 photo of Rio’s Morro da Favela by well-known city photographer Augusto Malta, the photographer’s gaze re-inscribes the neighborhood’s atavistic exoticism; racial mixture, frayed fashion, ramshackle construction, alcohol, samba. But this time the residents stare back. Through their eyes, Malta is the stranger. ■

Since the late nineteenth century, Brazilian informal urbanism—the many forms of citybuilding that are not sanctioned by state law—has been its own visual regime. From centrally located favelas and “beehive” tenements to informal peripheries, poor and mostly Black people have built urban landscapes that demand new ways of seeing.

Yet for most of the twentieth century, Brazil’s Black urbanities were mostly photographed and painted by outsiders: a tedious gaze fixed them as rustic, exotic, dicey, ephemeral, and anti-modern.

In Johann Moritz Rugendas’ Habitation de Nègres (c. 1827-35), we find the template. A white woman in European dress watches from the second-story balcony while Black people of all ages, depicted in scanty clothing, go about their everyday tasks in public view. Their home is small, precariously finished, scarcely distinguishable from the mud it sits on or the palms that shade it.

An anonymous city photographer transposed this way of seeing in a 1912 photo from Copacabana’s Babilônia favela. Here, two women, three children, and a dog pose in front of a home, pictured as a fantastical assembly of mud, fiber, and scrap. The detached gaze of a dandy white man in the bottom right heightens the viewer’s sense that the ramshackle hut and the residents in their outdated full-length dresses are a disjunctive and anomalous presence in the modern city.

In a 1920 photo of Rio’s Morro da Favela by well-known city photographer Augusto Malta, the photographer’s gaze re-inscribes the neighborhood’s atavistic exoticism; racial mixture, frayed fashion, ramshackle construction, alcohol, samba. But this time the residents stare back. Through their eyes, Malta is the stranger. ■