Between the prestige and the penury: the Paulista Museum and the acquisition of a photographic laboratory

ABSTRACT This study shows the institutional trajectory of the Paulista Museum during the 1930s, essentially in the relation with the visibility processes of its scientific and historical projects. Photography and prints are treated as central points of this process, in which the photographic laboratory and the publication of the Revista do Museu Paulista play a key role in sustaining it. Parallelly, the study focuses on its precarious financial condition, which prevented rapid access to the needed resources to maintain the international prestige. The debate is in between the visual culture and the intellectual history of the first half of the 20th century.