Based on the fact that photographic postcards start to be edited in São Paulo at the end of the 19th century, this article analyses if the cards, as modern iconographic documents in the paulistano past, basically propagated, to the society of that time, visual representations of a modern city par excellence - thus free from rural and slavish cultural references, which were brought about in its colonial past. In order to answer this question I evaluated the relation between sign and referent in postcard photographs of tramways in downtown São Paulo in the turn of the 20th century by contextualizing the day-by-day experienced by pedestrians in the photographed streets . The study reveals that the common association between turn-of-the-century São Paulo urban photographs and the image of a "modern" city is not a sufficient explanation if the aim is the comprehension of that society's own conception about the photographs, in that time.
modernity; photography; postcard; São Paulo; turn-of-the-XXth-century
