2025 Theses Doctoral

Seeing Bahia: On the Limits of Photographic Representation in Black Brazil, 1835–1977

Onabanjo, Oluremi Cecilia-Anne

This dissertation underscores the central position that Brazil occupies within the Atlantic world. It takes as its focus the city of Salvador—often called The Blackest City Outside of Africa. Over centuries, Bahia’s ties to Africa have been consistently affirmed through the spheres of arts and culture and solidified through modes of photographic representation. Mobilizing specific episodes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this dissertation applies pressure to these stable visual formations by examining how histories of photographic representation have functioned in tandem and tension with practices of black struggle, spirituality, and self-determination.

Chapter One surveys nineteenth-century visual representations of blackness alongside Bahia’s dense history of slave revolts—veritably nonexistent in visual accounts of the era, but which ultimately ushered in the 1888 abolition of slavery in Brazil. Through an analysis of black women’s images, Chapter Two asserts Salvador’s foundational role in the national story of modern identity during the post-abolition era. Tracking the construction of the baiana (woman from Bahia) as a gendered social trope of the racially coded negra (black woman), I demonstrate how the baiana’s iconicity functioned in tension with the solidification of black matriarchal power within the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé.

Chapter Three unpacks the stakes of photographic representation of and for Candomblé practitioners during the mid-twentieth century by unsettling the preconceived notion that all forms of image-making are unwelcome in Candomblé terreiros (temples). Here, I analyze ancestral photographs as indexes of axé (vital energy) in the barracões (central halls) of two of the most prestigious Yorùbá oriented terreiros in Bahia—Casa Branca do Engenho Velho (Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká) and Gantois (Ilé Iyá Omi Àse Iyamasé).

The Final Chapter orchestrates a critical art historical analysis of the French polymath Pierre Verger’s (1902–1996) photographic oeuvre. In so doing, I characterize his photographs as modernist pictures—produced in the mode of photographic humanism, fundamentally informed by primitivism. Marshalling a wide variety of photographic genres and visual forms, this dissertation offers the first critical Anglophone study of the entanglements between blackness, visuality, and photography in Bahia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.