Image and word: relations between photography and literary poetics in Maureen Bisilliat's books

• Grant number: 19/13727-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: September 01, 2019
• End date: August 31, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Sylvia Caiuby Novaes
• Grantee: Beatriz Rego Vinci de Moraes
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project intends to analyses the books of the photographer Maureen Bisilliat that mixed literary texts from great Brazilian authors with some of her authorial photographers. The photobooks, produced since the end of the 1960's to the beginning of the 1990's, composes possible analytic universes that aloud to establish various relations between verbal and visual languages. From the perspective of the poetic experimentation - present both in the literary narrative and in the image - it proposes to see in what manner the different languages are related: is there approximation, complementarity? Or dissipation, detachment? In this sense, the project will need to discuss the central points and concepts of the visual anthropology and relate them to the dialogues established by the photographer with the Brazilian authors. It is important to emphasize that this intercross movement between photography and literature is also guided by the personal trajectory of affection and memory of Maureen. Her entire work, composed by the book and also by 16.251 images, is available for consultation in the Instituto Moreira Salles archive.