Prof. Dr. Isabel Porto Nogueira (Federal University of Pelotas - RS, Brazil)
Musical iconography in an interdisciplinary perspective:
a methodological proposal for the study of photographs
We aim to present the work of the Musicology Research Group at the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPel), which since 2001 has been focusing issues on music iconography. The group also includes professors Francisca Vergara Cerqueira and Fabio Michelon, and its main research project is being structured around two aspects: (a) the organization of memory storage media in order to establish a center of musical documentation and (b) the correspondent researches developed on those different media.
The research group activities will be exemplified by discussing the study of a set of black and white photographs of musicians, belonging to the iconographic collection of the Music Conservatory of the UFPel, proceeding to their systematic content description (including their attribute identification and classification) and scene narrative analysis (seeking the understanding of their inner logic), ending by the resulting emic wide understanding of each and every image included (considering both the technical and social nature of the photographic object, as well as the meaning of the photographs as individual items and as a unique serie, thus, resulting a catalogue that accompanies the aforementioned discussion, offering an important perspective for the study of representation forms of artists and their webs of social relationship, so structuring a methodology that can be extended to other documentary imagery media.