Biography
José Christiano de Freitas Henriques Júnior (Ilha das Flores, Azores Archipelago, Portugal 1832 - Asunción, Paraguay 1902). Photographer. He immigrated to Brazil in 1855 and settled in Maceió, where he began working as a photographer. In the early 1860s approximately, he moved to Rio de Janeiro and associated himself with Fernando Antônio de Miranda in the studio Photographia do Commercio. Between 1866 and 1875, still in Rio, he took on Bernardo José Pacheco as a partner, in the Christiano Jr. & Pacheco firm, in the same city. During this time, he portrayed people of African origins, enslaved or emancipated, focusing on their facial traits or staging their professional activities in the studio. Besides these pictures, his studio also commercialized portraits in glass plaques (ambrotype), reproductions of engravings, landscape views for stereoscope,¹ enlarged pictures printed on handkerchiefs, porcelain and ivory, cartes-de-visite of monarchs, the military, men of letters and others. In 1866, he was awarded the bronze medal at the National Exposition of Rio de Janeiro. In the late 1860s, he moved to Buenos Aires, where his business prospered and he eventually came to run two studios simultaneously. He was awarded the gold medal both at the National Exposition of Córdoba, in 1871, and the Scientific Exposition of Buenos Aires, in 1876. In 1876 and 1877, he published two editions of the album Vistas y Costumbres de la Republica Argentina [Views and customs of the Republic of Argentina]. In the late 1870s, he sold his business and his collection of negatives to the English photographer, Alejandro S. Witcomb (1835 - 1905). Christiano Júnior is considered one of the most important photographers to have worked in 19th. Century Argentina.

Critical Commentary
During the period he lived in Rio de Janeiro, the most significant and well-known photographic work of José Christiano Junior was the collection of cartes-de-visite of Africans and their descendants, slaves or emancipated, made in the 1860s. At that time, the city's population was nearly 266.000, of which 110.000 were slaves, accounting for the largest urban concentration of captive workers since the end of the Roman empire.  

Christiano Júnior brought the slaves inside the studio, at times portraying them against a backdrop painted with landscapes of European woods. The pictures show facial traits in close-up or people from head to toe, in poses staging their professional activities. Most pictures show bearers and the so-called negros-de-ganho [profit yielding-blacks], men and women who worked as street sellers in Rio de Janeiro and whose earnings went to their owners at the end of the day. Items such as water, baskets, flowers, fruits, legumes, fowl, books, textiles, shoes, knifes, clay jugs, crystals, porcelain, sweets, twisted rings of bread and cakes, stored in cans or cases carried over the bearers' heads, were sold at the itinerant trade. 

An advertisement of Christiano Júnior's studio published in the Almanaque Laemmert, in 1866, clearly identified who were the customers for his pictures. Among other services, the photographer offered a "Varied collection of costumes and types of Blacks, an item most fit for those leaving for Europe". A peculiar feature of these images is that, for the most part, they do not show the slaves as individuals, but rather as "African types" or general illustrations of the activities pursued by them. The cards bring captions as "Slave basket-maker", "Slave chair vendor" etc. People were nearly always photographed standing, framed at the center of the picture, in frontal or side view, so as to clearly show their physical features, costumes and work implements.  

The 19th. century positivist science considered everything that could be visualized in a photograph as something necessarily true. The portraits focusing on black faces also served for the physiognomic studies common at the time. Recorded against white backgrounds conveying a notion of neutrality, they took on a scientific connotation.   

The cartes-de-visite of the slave masters were a sort of social introduction of those portrayed. As the slaves could not afford to own such items, the photographs of black men and women were like postcards, showing exotic characters to Eurocentric eyes. In the photographs signed by Christiano Júnior, black people seemed constrained. Their poses are rigid and few subjects face the camera; when they do, it is to show a frightened countenance. The images convey a notion of slaves disciplined and submissive to their masters. They show the captive as pacified, giving no hint as to escapes or tensions such as those generated by the strong abolitionist movement of the time.

His images are an important study source for researches in the areas of history, anthropology and sociology concerned with social relations in 18th. century Brazil. Even though taken in a studio setting, they are as helpful as the engravings of Debret (1768 - 1848) to re-create everyday life in the streets of 19th. century Rio de Janeiro. Furthermore, the photographs stress one of the paradoxes of Brazilian society at the time: Brazil had an Emperor who encouraged the arts and sciences, and was viewed as a promise of wealth and development, yet it was the last Western country to abolish black slavery.

From the 1870s onwards, after moving to Argentina, Christiano Júnior documented the people, habits and landscapes of Buenos Aires and the provinces of the interior. Due to these records, he is considered one of the most important photographers to have worked in 19th. Century Argentina.

It is worth stressing that the authorship of photographs taken at that time is always disputed, since the studios commonly employed assistants and the pictures were often commercialized by different firms. Even though the cartes-de-visite bear the inscription of Christiano Júnior's studio, it is not possible to determine if they were always the work of the same author.

Note
¹ Binocular instrument through which two pictures of the same object, taken from slightly different angles, are viewed with a three-dimensional appearance.