This research presents an ethnographic and photoethnographic experiment with digital equipment. The research aims to register the transformations through which a rural fishing community is going through, in Viamão, in the vicinities of Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil. The Vila, called Vila de Itapuã, is surrounded by the Guaíba river on one side and by the Patos lagoon on the other; in the year 2002 the paths to the Vila were asphalted and a wild life reserve park was opened, inviting visitors to end this Vila's isolation. The former isolation of the place was a fundamental reason for the establishment, in the 1940's, of the Colony Hospital, a prison-leprosarium. The present research registers the remaining Azorean culture and, above all, our goal is to think of the modern in relation to the traditional, with all the implications of such a relationship in the construction of a local identity. Running side by side with this modernizing process in the field, the present research also has methodological novelties, by testing and widening the uses of digital photography for photoethnography. We discuss these resources and their limits, as other resources, such as the internet, once our field notes are systematically published online at <A HREF="http://www.ufrgs.br/fotoetnografia">www.ufrgs.br/fotoetnografia</A>, since July 2003.
field work; identity; photo-ethnography; photography
