When Roberto Monte-Mór photographed Amazonian frontier settlements across three decades—the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—he was documenting evidence of how industrial capitalism was creeping into remote territories. The architect, economist, and urban planner at the Federal University of Minas Gerais had a clear theoretical lens: capture the arrival of modernity in the forest. But decades later, when his photographs were revisited through fresh eyes and different minds, they revealed something his original framework had quietly overlooked.
Urban Studies Foundation fellow Junia Mortimer discovered this while working collaboratively with Monte-Mór himself, sitting together through a series of viewing sessions with his archive. The same images that had documented industrial penetration also preserved something far older—Indigenous knowledge about living within and alongside water, forests, and land. River platforms, palm-thatch construction, the rhythm of riverside life: these weren't just relics of a pre-modern past being erased by urbanization. They were knowledge systems that persisted, adapted, and continued to flourish even as capitalism arrived.
The key insight wasn't simply that the photographs contained more information than anyone realized. It was that the method of looking had changed what could be seen. When Mortimer and Monte-Mór looked together—when they attended to what neither could see alone—previously invisible presences became visible. The paper, published in Urban Studies, calls this method "transvisualization," a term drawn from quilombola epistemologies that understand knowledge as relational rather than singular. Rather than analyzing an archive from a distance, transvisualization invites collaborative interpretation, remaining open to temporal layers and spatial logics that a single theoretical framework might foreclose.
This work matters because it reshapes what counts as evidence in urban research. For decades, Monte-Mór's photographs served one story: the triumph and penetration of industrial modernity. But they were always telling another story too—one about persistence, adaptation, and the enduring ways Indigenous peoples navigate the urban-nature relationship. The difference wasn't in the images themselves. It was in who was in the room and what questions they were willing to ask together.
The implications ripple far beyond this single archive. If how we look shapes what we see, then changing who does the looking—particularly by centering Indigenous frameworks and epistemologies—fundamentally reshapes historical understanding. The photographs didn't change. The method did. And in that methodological shift lies an invitation to revisit countless other archives, photographs, documents, and materials that may be quietly holding stories we've been trained not to see. What other presences are waiting behind the frameworks we've inherited? What knowledge persists in plain sight, waiting only for us to look together, and differently, to make it visible once more?