Photographer of goodwill.

• Author: Levine, Robert M.
• Position: Genevieve Naylor's photographs of Brazil in the 1940s - Includes related article

ON A MISSION TO ENHANCE WARTIME RELATIONS BETWEEN THE U.S. AND SOUTH AMERICA, GENEVIEVE NAYLOR PRODUCED A RARE PHOTOGRAPHIC RECORD OF BRAZILIAN LIFE IN THE 1940S

In October 1940, Genevieve Naylor, a twenty-five-year-old photojournalist from New York, arrived in Brazil with two cameras, one light meter, a battered black wicker suitcase, and a creative ambition: to document visually not just Brazil's faces and places, but the essence of its life. "My first striking visual sight," she wrote her sister, "was not the bustling energy of the Copacabana beach, or the billboards and slums, but a solitary young Negro girl sitting crossed legged in the center of a street intensely focused on constructing a wooden flute. If there ever was a moment to have my camera! Unfortunately the Brazilian authorities have confiscated my equipment while they scrutinize my background to make sure I'm not some fifth columnist subversive!"

The three-year sojourn that took Naylor and her husband, the painter Misha Reznikoff, up and down the coast and interior of Brazil, began in the late summer of 1940 when they were recruited as cultural emissaries for the newly created Office for the Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations, later known as the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA).

During the 1930s, to counter aggressive Axis activities in Europe and the ominous threat of fascism that partially dominated political, economic, social, and intellectual discourse in Latin America, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to broaden his Good Neighbor policy, which had been implemented a few years earlier. In 1936 the Special Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace was convened in Buenos Aires. With the participation of twenty Latin American countries, the conference unanimously approved the first treaty devoted to promoting inter-American cultural relations and intellectual cooperation among nations of the Western Hemisphere.

By 1940 dramatic events in Europe produced a new climate of action on all fronts. It became imperative for the Roosevelt administration to counter Axis aggression worldwide. The U.S. government, which had never, until this period of its history, allocated substantial resources to sponsor international cultural exchanges, authorized the creation of the OIAA - a diplomatic vehicle dedicated to upholding the aspirations of the Buenos Aires resolution, as well as to persuading the neutral governments of Latin America to back the Allies and the principles of democracy. Coordinated by Nelson A. Rockefeller, the OIAA established as its goal the organization of a collaborative inter-American exchange program that would engender mutual respect for the common and diverse cultural heritage of the Americas and secure peaceful solidarity for present and future generations.

Funding cultural operations began immediately. With an appropriation budget that was large for the early 1940s - $94,047,442 in depression-era dollars - the United States expeditiously imported and exported art exhibitions and symphonic orchestras, supported archaeological digs and...