Seeing/selling the body, seeing/selling the image: self-representation of woman and travestite sex workers from Jardim Itatinga, Campinas, Brazil

Author(s)

Luiz Carlos Sollberger Jeolás

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Artes
• Defense date: 2009-08-19

Examining board members

Fernando Cury de Tacca; Luiz Eduardo Robinson Achutti; Maria Filomena Gregori

• Advisor: Fernando Cury de Tacca

Abstract

This work was developed with woman and transvestite sex workers from Jardim Itatinga, prostitution neighbourhood in the city of Campinas (São Paulo, Brazil). Its goal was verifying whether or not the photographic practice of those subjects present gender marks and whether the interference of the photographic technique could conspire in favour of their self-representations. In six months of field activity, nine of these professionals, collaborators in the research, collected images with digital photographic cameras supplied to them. Weekly workshops were held with two groups: in one week, one of the groups kept the cameras; in the next, the images produced in that period were downloaded and saved in a computer and the cameras were transferred to the other group. In the workshops, we discussed photographic techniques and imagetic repertoires. At the end of the field work, six collaborators who stayed in the research - five of them participating from the beginning - made, as the last activity, a final selection of their images, which was juxtaposed with testimonies about the chosen pictures. (AU)