Everyday Fashions, Urban Modernities and Unpolished Photographs: Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Snapshots of São Paulo, 1935–7

It is 1937 and a dark-haired woman in a horizontally striped, simple modern dress cut below the knee strides purposefully across the bustling Avenida São João in central São Paulo (Figure 1). Her streamlined ensemble is accessorised with black sandals and a neat felt hat. She gazes intently at the photographer whilst holding her young daughter tightly in her arms. Dressed all in white, the child looks beyond her mother’s shoulder, fixated, not by the noisy motorcars rushing past and the sensation of speed that they incite, but by another pedestrian, who is wearing a dark hat and is almost entirely obscured from the viewer by her mother’s f igure. The child’s father, to her right, wears a single-breasted loose-fitting dark suit with a chequered tie over a white shirt with wide lapels. His hair is neatly styled to the side and his gaze, like that of his wife, is fixed intently upon the photographer. There is a certain self-assurance in his body language as he allows his arms to swing nonchalantly by his sides. The couple’s clothing is adorned with modernist prints, which are offset by the linear architectural façade that dwarfs the right-hand side of the photograph. This symbiotic relationship is emphasised by other visual indicators of modernity: electricity cables crisscrossing the sky and powering the Belle Époque street lighting, modern transportation, signs and billboards, and the seemingly infinite avenue that stretches towards the concrete-framed Edifício Martinelli, the first skyscraper to be built in Latin America in 1929. Directly in line with the Edifício Martinelli, to the left of the photograph, a man in a black fedora and leather shoes moves away from the viewer’s gaze, the creases and folds of his crumpled linen suit accentuated by the spare, monochromatic palette. Photographed from behind, his dissonant mode of direction injects a sense of dynamism into this urban scene, resisting any notion of a linear pathway to modernity by exhibiting different speeds, modes of direction and ways of inhabiting the modern city. Pedestrians of different ages and ethnicities stand stationary on the side of the pavement, reminding the viewer that São Paulo is a city in constant flux and traversed by individuals of various generational, social, racial and economic backgrounds.