Contra-Retratos. A subversão do grão fotográfico

Abstract

The following essay aims to list the most common themes for the practice of trick portrait photography in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. It aims also to reason them in the light of the concept of play (Caillois, 1958), and the notion of montage (Benjamin, 2012, 1991, 1989). Once diffused in illustrated postcards, in the press, in the amateur photography manuals and in the family albums, nowadays displayed in the museum and recuperated in the cyberspace, the playful portraits from the turn of the century, here grouped under the designation of recreational photography, were produced by amateur photographers in a domestic context, but also by commercial photographers in studio, in popular fairs and amusement parks (Chéroux, 1998, 2005). Allowing the reestablishment of the double belonging of photography to the magical world of the spectacle and the technological world of science, these counter-portraits exhibit a peculiar encounter of the human with the technique, breaking down the photographic automatism, as they turn its reproduction device into a recreational one, and they convert the fixation of time into an animated pastime, which exorcise any mourning play.