Flávio Damm e a história das fotografias do linchamento de Chapecó

Abstract

This Undergraduate Thesis analyzes the lynching of four men that occurred in Chapecó, Santa Catarina, in October 1950, through the lens of visual history, photography, and documentary analysis. The central objective is to analyze the interpretative and ethical contrast between the images captured by photographer Flávio Damm, published in the magazine O Cruzeiro, and the ten forensic photographs attached to the judicial records of Criminal Case No. 183/1950. Methodologically, the research relies on periodical press, judicial, and photographic sources, utilizing the theoretical frameworks of Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and Ariella Azoulay to analyze social control over what is exposed to the public gaze and to debate the historical and ethical role inherent in the very existence of a photography of barbarism. The results demonstrate that the media narrative operated in the construction of a spectacle of pain, employing panoramic framing and visual selectivity to domesticate violence and associate the interior of Santa Catarina with an imaginary of savagery and social backwardness. In contrast, the images preserved in the judicial process expose the crudeness of death in its most immediate and dehumanized face inside the cells. These records bring to light the materiality of torture and the practical vestiges of the crime that the journalistic discourse chose to silence. It concludes that the act of photographing in contexts of extreme vulnerability does not constitute a passive record, but rather an extension of sovereign power. Thus, the recovery of censored photographs fulfills the ethical commitment to break with institutionalized forgetting, restoring historical dignity to the subjects victimized by collective barbarism.