Two Photos, Two Gazes

writing exercises on Photographs

Abstract

This paper has as its general objective to think through images, from two distinct perspectives.
To this end, it examines the frames of two photographs taken during the twentieth century,
in the context of the Pedra Fundamental monument in Planaltina (DF), which predates the construction of Brasília. This is carried out through theoretical investigations based
on readings of Didi-Huberman (2012), Azoulay (2010), and Barthes (1984), as well as a
joint critical exercise on the photographs, inspired by Varda’s Une minute pour une image
(1982). The starting point is the idea that writing about images is an act of insurgency: it is
a refusal of the archive as something closed and neutral, in order to see it instead as a field
of imaginative potential—that is, to transform it into a burning memory through imagination.
In the first photograph, women appear lined up, looking toward the only man in the image,
who points to the Pedra Fundamental. In the second, suited men and military officers pose
for the photographer around the Pedra Fundamental, in a supposedly spontaneous scene.
Faced with these images, what is it that touches us? By writing about images, the authors
propose a poetic and critical gesture toward imaginable silences, opening space for new
histories and possible futures.