O olhar de Assis Horta: tradição e dignidade em retratos de operários

Abstract

Assis Horta, one of the most important photographers of Minas Gerais worked for SPHAN, current IPHAN, in the so-called heroic phase of the institution, when it was directed by Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade and had as part of its staff great intellectuals linked to the Brazilian modernist movement. Horta‘s photographic records contributed for the listing of Diamantina in 1938 and later, in 1999, for the recognition of the city as Unesco World Cultural Heritage Site. Together with the documentary work, Horta developed his successful career as a portraitist with great production as evidenced by more than five thousand negative glass plates that are part of his collection. In his photographic studio and under his attentive observation, the whole society of Diamantina passed between the 1930s and the 1980s, but it was the portraits of workers, made between the 1930s and the 1940s, that gave him greater projection since 2008. It was thanks to the Consolidation Of Labor Laws (CLT), decreed by Getulio Vargas' government in 1943, and the obligation of 3x4 photos in work documents that many workers had contact with photographs for the first time ever. The portraits of poor Afro-Brazilians, their relatives and friends made at Photo Assis are heirs to the traditions of the nineteenth-century photography and of the carte de visite. The approximately 200 visual records published in exhibitions and cultural fairs so far are only analogous to the portraits of Militão Augusto de Azevedo, produced at the end of the 19th century in the city of São Paulo and in the work of Chichico Alkmim, also from the city of Diamantina, held at the beginning of the XX century. The photographs highlighted here are a proof of the empathy between the talented photographer and his new clients, a part of the Brazilian population that, according to historiography, was traditionally commercially exploited in picturesque or exotic photographs and then forgotten. In the beautiful images made by Assis Horta that are analyzed in this research we can notice that the photographic game is completed in an effective way and the ones photographed, are no longer an object of scene. They are worthily subjects of their own portrait ... ultimately, citizens.