Images of Beauty: Making Up and Making Over in Brazil

• Autores: Samuel Elliott Novacich
• Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Nº. 5, 2023, págs. 615-619
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The images in this essay are of cosmetics enthusiasts, makeup artists, and their clients in the northern, working-class, and predominantly Afro-Brazilian suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They were taken during fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2020 and include a combination of candid and portrait photographs. These images, focused on bold styles and an aesthetic that is at times deliberately extravagant, are juxtaposed with a single photograph of the Maracanã soccer stadium. Maracanã, which opened in 1950, underwent significant construction in anticipation of the 2014 World Cup and might be taken as metonymic of the broader transformations to the urban landscape that have characterized the past decade. The image of the stadium and surrounding neighborhoods provides both geographical context and a conceptual analog to the other images of made-up, partially transformed faces. As a whole, the collection examines the centrality of beauty and aesthetics to productions of race, gender, sexuality, and national belonging in Brazil. Instead of foregrounding aesthetics as only representative of these latter realities, these images explore the ways by which the manipulation of material surfaces—of both bodies and landscapes—can actively produce, rather than simply reflect, everyday life in Rio de Janeiro.