Ordinary
Faces

In her early twenties, took photographs for Time and Fortune, and for the Associated Press. When she was twenty-five, Naylor and her husband, the painter Misha Reznikoff, were offered an opportunity by the Office of Inter-American Affairs to travel to Brazil. At this time, in the early years of World War Two, the U.S. wanted to bolster its relations with Latin America lest the Axis influence outweigh the Allied. As Robert M. Levine puts it, "Naylor's job in Brazil was to create propaganda, to photograph the country in ways that would convey to Allied audiences the essence of Brazilian life, to educate Americans about Brazilians, to reassure Americans that Brazilians were reliable wartime partners."

Between 1937 and 1945, Brazil was under the somewhat benevolent dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas, benevolent in the sense that Vargas was generally well-liked and would in fact be re-elected president in 1950, five years after the country had reverted to a democratic constitution. But in 1940 the Vargas regime controlled the media and set down the rules.

Just as the United States wanted upbeat images of Brazil (it must be remembered, Levine points out, that Naylor had been hired by a wartime propaganda agency), so, too, did Brazil want to project upbeat and positive images of itself. On the Brazilian side, Naylor was discouraged from being too creative with her camera; she was, rather, expected to focus on the picturesque. The U.S. position seems to have been that they didn't want Naylor offending her hosts. In short, there were railings on both sides of her. Being a woman, however, may have worked to Naylor's advantage in the long run. If her hosts didn't take her as seriously as a male photographer, they were perhaps more tolerant and accommodating.

As it turned out, Naylor was a professional and worked well, even comfortably, within tight guidelines. Hers was not a documentary or confrontational approach (except, to an extent, in the Northeast, where ignoring the poverty would have been impossible), and thus there's quite a rift between the harsh, Depression-era photographs of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, and the photographs of Genevieve Naylor. "Above all," Levine says, "she captured ordinary people going through their daily lives with optimism. Few of her photographs capture despair, in stark contrast to the photojournalistic tradition of the United States out of which she emerged."

Although Levine himself repeats it too many times, he correctly informs us that Naylor didn't demean, belittle, or condescend to the people she photographed. Throughout the one-hundred plates in this handsome volume, she's left her subjects with their dignity intact.

It's possible, of course, that had the political climate been different, or had she been older and cynical or rebellious, Naylor might have broadened her range. But there is nothing here to the effect of the photographer looking back over twenty or thirty years and saying whether she would or wouldn't have done things another way. And so the work must speak for itself, which it does, eloquently.

Naylor and Reznikoff stayed in Brazil for two years and nine months. In 1943, Naylor became only the second woman to have a solo exhibition at MOMA in New York. She became Eleanor Roosevelt's personal photographer, and in the '50s and '60s took pictures for Harper's Bazaar. She died in 1989.

Robert M. Levine, who has published seventeen books on Latin American history, has written an informative and thorough introduction to Genevieve Naylor's Brazilian photographs, balancing an account of the Vargas-era protocol with an overview of the U.S. effort to prevent Brazil and the rest of Latin America from giving their support to the fascist governments of Italy and Germany. If indeed we lose sight of Naylor for a page or two, here and there, Levine's readable and well-written lines certainly place her travels in the context of the times, enabling us to understand and enjoy her photographs all the more.

Taken nearly sixty years ago, Genevieve Naylor's photographs of Brazil make for as compelling a collective portrait as any other that can be found.

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The Brazilian
Photographs of
Genevieve Naylor155 pp