The disciplinary emergence of the human sciences, specially Geography and Ethnology, has evolved, from the beginning of the century, alongside the formation of photographic collections and other figurative series inscribed in the construction of internationally comparable national representations, anchored on regionalism. In this article, Percy Lau's drawings for the series "Types and Aspects of Brazil", in a section of the Revista Brasileira de Geografia magazine from 1939 onwards, are compared to other "iconographic views" of modern Brazil - in this case the photographs by Frenchmen Pierre Monbeig and Marcel Gautherot. A visual culture in the process of generalization is highlighted in the association of images in correlated series, at a moment when both the solo journey and the act of photographing ad become increasingly common and accessible practices. The convergence of representations by one same generation invites us to detect in the mise-en-serie the visual conventions and the documentary style parameters of one and the other, so that a synthesis of the imagistic thought of the era is arrived at. The images evidence geographically coincident figurative itineraries, resulting in representations that, by extension and repetition, become icons. The types and aspects of Percy Lau's series and the texts accompanying it are inscribed within the Vidalian geography, one of the intellectual matrices of Brazilian geography, in its moment of institutionalization, during the Estado Novo period. If history, travel and image lean on comparativeness, weaving persistencies, appropriations, transformations and hybridisms of the iconographic in all levels, then it constitutes a vast research program open to interdisciplinary dialogue.
Geographic Iconography; Types and Aspects; Human Landscape; Regionalism; Images of Nation; Human Geography
