Photographic rhetoric involves symbolic subtleties of social class, attesting to power and wealth, in a specific period running from the middle of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth. The place is the Brazilian north-east, the state of Pernambuco; the society oligarchic, patriarchal and aristocratic, set against slavery.

An economic and agrarian territory of sugar cane, a colonial legacy soaked in difference and possession — of land as of people. The world of the great house, the slave quarters and a discreet urban bourgeoisie: a history of splendour, opulence, ill-treatment and melancholy.