Photography and its meanings in The portrait painter by Luiz Antonio de Assis Brasil

Abstract

This paper examines some aspects of photography and the photographic arts as conveyors of meaning in the novel The portrait painter by Luiz Antonio de Assis Brasil, and considers how the commentary on the evolution of photographic techniques and of the character’s views on photography mirrors, in a metafictional way, the transition of the novel both as genre and within the author’s literary body of work. Bibliographical research was used as methodology, pertaining to studies of the photograph as object and means of expression, especially Roland Barthes (1984), Natalia Brizuela (2014), Susan Sontag (2004) and François Brunet (2009), as well as specific studies of that novel, mainly Carlos Reis (2001), Aurora Gedra Ruiz Alvarez (2011) and Nubia Jacques Hanciau (2006), and interviews with the author. It is concluded that photography’s artistic status intertwines with the protagonist Sandro Lanari’s journey in search of affirmation as an artist and an author; that the text promotes more than one superimposition between the themes of the passage of time, mortality, and the art of the portrait; and that it expresses the course of a profound transition (chronological, artistic, personal), mirroring the eventual intersection between literature and photography as a crossing of frontiers similar to that which is literally and figuratively present in The portrait painter.