Photography as Anthropotechnique and the Legacy of Canudos
This chapter explores the ways in which Flávio de Barros’s photographic documentation of the war in Canudos (1896–1897) has become a conceptual prism through which to consider the role of photography in both the maintenance and contestation of biopolitical control in Brazil. The photobook Desterro (2014), a creative archive of a “fictional ethnographic” expedition to the site of the war led by artist Ícaro Lira, sets up a dialogue with De Barros’s photographs and their role in the violent foundations of the Brazilian Republic at the end of the nineteenth century. By incorporating these photographs into an assemblage of texts, objects, and images that includes narrative, photographs of the desert landscape surrounding Canudos as well as rocks gathered during the expedition, Desterro shifts the focus from photography as a biopolitical technology to its role in the displacement of anthropocentrism in favor of a perspective that privileges the human’s constitutive entanglements with the nonhuman. As well as an engagement with the legacy of De Barros’s photography, Desterro is also a meditation on the artist’s book itself, a form that draws on a number of photo-textual traditions (including ethnographic photography and traveller-artists’ books), in order to intervene into changing conceptions of the human.