Fotografia, memória e Ensino de História: trabalhadores do café no interior paulista

Abstract

The present work intends to raise thoughts on the world of work matters and its representation through photography, aiming to problematize these questions as well as the use of photographic records in History Teaching. The research focus is the work of coffee production at Tejupá-SP county, in order to launch a search for the coffee workers on photos recorded by traditional families of the county, in a way that allows us a reading of the remarkable elements that pass through these records, aiming to offer, by the end, a didactic material with some possibilities for the use of the photography as historical document for the classroom. For that, it was necessary an interdisciplinary approach with the theoretical discussions about photography as a language, a historical document, and a didactic resource, dialoguing, mainly, with the contributions by Jacques Aumont, Boris Kossoy, Ulpiano Bezerra de Meneses, Maria Ciavatta e Ana Heloisa Molina. The use of photography in the teach-learning process can greatly enrich the production of historical school knowledge. At Tejupá, where I work as a teacher of the Elementary and High School, we identified a gap in the work with local questions, mainly for lack of available materials. The coffee culture was for a long time confused with the local identity, but the preserved memory has always privileged the economic aspects considered the most relevant. By studying the collected photos, we identified an absence of workers, and, when they appear, it is as a “secondary/marginalization” on photography framing. In this sense, raising these questions in History Teaching is about recognizing the importance of workers in the sociocultural dynamics and the development of reading images ability by students.