A política das imagens e a pobreza. Mulheres do Bolsa-Família no fotojornalismo entre 2003 e 2013

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to analyze, in the light of reflections proposed by researchers like Jacques Rancière, Marie-José Mondzain, Georges Didi-Hu-berman and Benjamin Picado, how the politics of images manifests itself in the creative composition of scenes of consensus in which political subjects emerge, appear and constitute themselves through noticeably adjusted spatial and temporal arrangements in photojournalistic images produced over a ten year span of the Bolsa-Família Program (2003–2013). The paper also examines how a politics of images is constructed by analy-sing how media represent poor women beneficiaries of the Program. The politics becomes visible in the tension between the logic of the reproduction of the discursive register and the possibilities of deconstruction and denaturalization of pre-established discourses on poverty, social assistance, dependency, vulnerability and the like. Generally, the photographic cap-ture of the bodies and faces of these women is done through angles that “speak for them,” rather than letting them speak.The creative and political power presented by these images are tied to acts of survival: activities and arrangements that make possible and yet resist the photographic capture, the vacuums and the excesses of pre-constructed institutional, governmental and media discourses.