The archive in question belongs to Roberto Monte-Mór, professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, architect, economist and urban planner who worked in and photographed Amazonian frontier settlements throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s while developing his concept of extended urbanization. His photographs were originally gathered as fieldwork evidence: documentation of how industrial capitalism and state infrastructure were penetrating remote territories. That theoretical framework went on to be widely influential in urban studies.
Working alongside Monte-Mór in a series of collaborative viewing sessions, Junia found that his images contain more than that framework could accommodate. Photographs of river platforms, palm-thatch construction, and everyday riverside life record, apart from the arrival of industrial modernity, the persistence of long-practiced urban-nature knowledge: ways of building and dwelling with water, forests, and land that continued within and alongside capitalist urbanization.
The methodology developed in the paper to engage with this excess is called transvisualization, drawing on quilombola epistemologies that understand knowledge as relational rather than singular. Rather than analyzing an archive from the outside, transvisualization involves collaborative interpretation: looking with the archive's maker, attending to what neither party might see alone, and remaining open to temporal layers and spatial logics that a single theoretical framework would foreclose.
The paper argues that how we look at visual materials (and with whom) shapes what counts as evidence in urban research. Changing the interpretive framework doesn't just produce new readings of old images; it makes previously invisible presences visible.
The paper is available now in Urban Studies: doi.org/10.1177/00420980261444233
You can find out about Junia and Roberto’s work on two episodes of our podcast Urban Radar:
Seeing the City: A Conversation with Junia Mortimer and Felipe Magalhaes
RIVER/CITY: A Conversation with Olivia Casagrande and Roberto Monte-Mor