Images of the Green and the Rust: Crisis and Duration of Railroad Work in South Brazil

Abstract

This essay is an approach to the imagery of the crisis of the railroad transport starting by the point of view of the railroad work community among whom I realized fieldwork, in the city of Pelotas, south of Brazil. The set of photos congregate around two main concepts: crisis and duration. The crisis is the rupture with the lived times organized by the work and the discontinuity of the affective and identitarian ties, the ruins of the workplaces, the precarity and unemployment. The duration is the insubordination towards the finitude of time, actions of an resilient aging of the retired railroad workers and of his families. As informed by the fieldwork experience I realized how much the crisis and the duration are inseparable. The accusations and critics of the railroad community towards the railroad crisis are both, nostalgia and mourn, and powerful actions toward duration of the identities in time. Because of this double characteristic of the railroad workers narratives, I selected images produced during my fieldwork whom also fulfill this double challenge of regreting and denouncing. Mourning and insubordinating. Images of the green grass and the rust. Images of the fences that separates the people from they old working places. Of the paints peeling on the walls and of the falling walls of the railroad union. Images of the crisis and the duration.