Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil provides a major contribution to the field of visual culture through a study of still and moving images of Brazil in the first four decades of the twentieth century, when the camera played a key role in making Brazilian peoples and places visible to a variety of audiences. The book explores what is distinctive about the visual representation of Brazil in an era of modernisation, also attending to the significance of the different technical properties of film and photography for the writing of new histories of visual technologies. It offers new insights into the work of key writers, photographers, anthropologists and filmmakers, including Claude Levi-Strauss, Mario de Andrade, Silvino Santos and Aloha Baker. Unearthing a wealth of materials from archives in the USA, Britain, and Brazil, the book seeks to contribute to the postcolonial theoretical project of pinpointing locally distinctive histories of visual technologies and practices.