Between Lenses and Lives: Visual Anthropology and Contemporary Art in the Representation of Dissident Subjectivities

• Grant number: 25/00423-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: February 01, 2026
• End date: January 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Sylvia Caiuby Novaes
• Grantee: Fabio Luiz Silva de Oliveira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project sets forth an ethnobiographical enquiry (Gonçalves, 2012) into the work of two significant Jewish immigrant photographers, Madalena Schwartz and Claudia Andujar, attentive to images produced between the 1960s and 1980s that render visible bodies in dissidence with normative configurations of sex and gender. The research emerges from a formative encounter within the context of undergraduate research, shaped by a process of attuning the gaze (Caiuby Novaes, 2021) in response to Schwartz's photographic practice, and seeks to weave together these photographic trajectories with the ongoing anthropological formation of the researcher.In dialogue with theoretical perspectives that apprehend the body, gender, and dissidence not as fixed entities but as contingent and situated political-epistemological constructions - as elaborated by Michel Foucault (1984a), Judith Butler (2021; 2023), Paul B. Preciado (2018; 2021), and Vi Grunvald (2015a; 2015b) - this proposal aims to contribute to the anthropology of expressive forms, engaging the image both as a mode of ethnographic knowing and as a site for bearing witness to alterity.Methodologically, the project unfolds along two intertwined movements: first, a situated and processual engagement with the photographic archives held at the Instituto Moreira Salles; second, a reflexive exploration of the biographical interlacings among the life trajectories of the photographers, the subjects portrayed, and the researcher's own path of becoming within anthropology.Beginning with Madalena Schwartz's work - already approached through previous research as a site of apprenticeship - the enquiry extends to a comparative engagement with the oeuvre of Claudia Andujar, with particular attention to the ways in which both photographers have acted as protagonists in the Brazilian context, contributing to the constitution of photographic archives that foreground non-normative sexualities.Ultimately, by tracing the resonances and frictions between artistic and anthropological practices in the representation of the Other, the project seeks to interrogate how contemporary visual practices might open paths for renewed dialogues with anthropological ways of knowing and doing (Schneider and Wright, 2006; Caiuby Novaes, 2015). In this sense, the enquiry is positioned less as an objectifying analysis than as a movement of correspondence - attentive to lines of relation, practice, and affect - through which anthropology may be reimagined in its engagement with expressive forms. (AU)