This talk tracks the production and circulation of illustrated travelogues alongside the dense history of slave revolts in nineteenth-century Brazil—veritably nonexistent in visual accounts of the era, but which played a crucial role in the making and remaking of societal structures during this period. In particular, I examine two of the most popular nineteenth-century European illustrated travelogues crafted by Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768–1848) and Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–1858), whose respective representations became central references for contemporaneous and subsequent travelers to Brazil. By analyzing the fractures between these widely circulating visual accounts and written accounts of intense insurgency, upheaval, and revolt throughout Brazil, I demonstrate how modes of visual production, consumption, and circulation operated in tension with experienced political realities and practices of struggle enacted by enslaved, insurgent, and free black people leading up to the 1888 abolition of slavery and ultimate establishment of the Brazilian Republic in 1889. In so doing, I expose how dominant visual representations of blackness across Brazil have historically been forged by European and North American travelers visiting from abroad—each arriving with specific motives and sensitivities, all the while maintaining limited fields of vision.
Oluremi C. Onabanjo is Curator of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she leads the stewardship and interpretation of The Walther Collection, while working collaboratively across the Museum to expand the presentation of photography within an interconnected narrative of art. From 2021–2026, she worked at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), managing MoMA's holdings of over 35,000 photographs spanning the history of the medium. She holds a PhD in Art History and a BA in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University, and an MSc in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from Oxford University.
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