Imagens do Nordeste: representações dos Sertões áridos no fotojornalismo da revista O Cruzeiro (1950-1960).

Abstract

Between the 1950s and 1960s, O Cruzeiro magazine stood out as one of the main vehicles for the circulation of information, narratives, and images in Brazil. In this context, its photoreports on the Northeastern backlands occupied a prominent place, contributing to the formation of social and cultural perceptions of the region, often guided by specific framings, which ultimately crystallized stigmatized views. Thus, this study aimed to understand how photographic visuality, articulated with textual discourses, contributed to the consolidation of narratives that shaped the social and cultural perception of the region as a space of backwardness, mysticism, and precariousness, in contrast to the rhetoric of national modernization. In the theoretical field, the research was supported by the historiographical problematization of conceptions of the Northeast (Albuquerque Júnior, 2011) and studies on culture and representation (Hall, 2016), which provide support for analyzing how images reinforce stereotypes and establish social identities. The method adopted involved categorizing and analyzing imagery and text (Bardin, 2016) into thematic categories such as drought, retreat, religiosity, and social practices. To examine the meaning of the photoreports, five categories — Operator, Spectrum, Spectator, Studium, and Punctum (Barthes, 1984; 1990) — were examined, as were the perspectives of photojournalistic visuality (Sousa, 2002; Monteiro, 2016), which highlight how framing, textual anchoring, and image planes valorize or subordinate elements, intensifying expressiveness. Thus, we sought to understand how O Cruzeiro's photojournalism contributed to solidifying visual narratives of the sertão and its people, transforming subjects and social practices into stereotypical signs of backwardness.