Building São Paulo with Concrete and Photographs: Benedito Duarte’s Documentation of Francisco Prestes Maia’s City Improvements (1938-1945)

While serving as the secretary of roads and public works from 1926 to 1930, Prestes Maia published his Study for a Plan of Avenues for the City of São Paulo. The plan combined elements of the classically-inspired nineteenth-century urban designs of Chicago, Paris, and Berlin with twentieth-century skyscrapers and motorways. Prestes Maia firmly believed that São Paulo needed to verticalize in order to modernize, and the city’s upward progression became a primary goal of his mayoral tenure (1938-1945). To promote his vision amongst a populous largely resistant to vertical growth, Prestes Maia recruited the Parisian-trained Benedito Duarte as head photographer for the city’s Department of Culture. In 1944, at the end of Prestes Maia’s tenure, Duarte’s photographs were compiled and published in an album entitled The São Paulo City Improvements. Although Prestes Maia’s massive restructuring of the city center earned him the epithet “the Haussmann of São Paulo,” the link between his plan’s implementation and its documentation has largely gone unstudied. My presentation explores the symbiotic relationship that developed between photography and architecture in mid-century São Paulo, focusing on the emphases and erasures evident in a careful reading of Duarte’s photographs as they appear in the city’s municipal archives and official government publications. Such an analysis demonstrates not only the propagandistic value of Duarte’s photographs, but also how they helped to shape the city’s physical space and iconographic representation.