Anthropological reflections about physiognomy atlas of August Sander

• Grant number: 15/13221-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: September 01, 2015
• End date: August 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Andréa Cláudia Miguel Marques Barbosa
• Grantee: Rodrigo Frare Baroni
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project wants to reflect about the use of images in the anthropology research, more specifically in what concern about the study of body and corporal techniques, or either, about the concept, elaborated by Marcel Mauss and developed after by Pierre Bourdieu, of habitus. For this will be analyzed the pictures taken by August Sander published in the book Face of our time. This selection of pictures, sawed by the Germany essayist Walter Benjamin as a physiognomic atlas with, at the same time it moves away from the anthropometry and from the criminal photography of that times (as the pictures taken by Lombroso), could help us to think in the possibility of a body cartography done through images. By this, the objective of this research is, through a analysis of the portraits realized by August Sanders, try to comprehend how he organizes and classifies a series of gestures, features, and postures that are constitutive part of the habitus when he perform a specie of imagery cartography, or a physiognomic "atlas", starting with the portraits of social personages of he's times.