Photographs of "the Sun City": a registry of exposure and concealment

Abstract

Among the different media the photograph stands out as an important visual document that establishes the tension between concealment and revelation, crucial to understanding the social and imaginary aspects. The most important relation between photography and tourism is precisely in both don´t being the picture of society, but rather, they are a representation and fragmented memory, capable of continuous interpretations. Photographs are circumscribed by definite social and cultural issues, as there are from a process of creation and assembly consisting of choices and decisions about what deserves to be photographed. This paper discuss the role of photographs of Natal City concatenated to tourism, searching for what is specific that contributed to the construction of tourist landscape in the Natal city and analyzing the ideological elements that motivated its materialization in the spaces of the city. The photographs of Fatos e Fotos magazine published in 1968 will be analyzed through iconographic and iconological observation suggested by Kossoy (2003, 2006, 2009) and directed by dialectical reading of José de Souza Martins (2009), who claims photography’s mediation in the interests immersed at the social life, resulting by the dynamic expression of the exposure, a result of presences and absences that reveal the denials and contradictions of the real world. Finally, means that the landscapes do not exist in themselves while a fixed space, but were consolidated through the discourses and images linked to the hegemonic logic of the capitalist society.