AA-2026-5BDEBF
On the image
Someone rode the Bondinho up Sugarloaf Mountain in the 1960s and did what every visitor did at the top: pointed a camera at the view and trusted the cable car engineers completely. The wires slicing across the frame were, at the time, a genuine marvel of Brazilian engineering, strung across granite in 1912 and still doing their job of hauling tourists over Guanabara Bay without asking them to think too hard about it.
Below, Rio spreads out in the obedient grid of a mid-century boomtown, apartment blocks crowding right up to the waterline the way cities do when land is scarce and ambition is not. The bay is stitched with small boats going about business that has nothing to do with anyone's holiday photograph. Somewhere in that haze sits the mountain everyone actually came to see, patient about being upstaged by a cable.
The photographer got the postcard shot and, more usefully, an accidental document of a city mid-expansion, all those white towers rising toward a hillside that has since filled in considerably. It is the kind of picture where the tourist thought the subject was the view, and the subject was actually 1960s Rio building itself as fast as it could.
Visually related — by likeness
Sugarloaf Cable Car View over Rio de Janeiro, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-5BDEBF. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/sugarloaf-cable-car-view-over-rio-de-janeiro-1960s.
@misc{aaAA20265BDEBF,
title = {Sugarloaf Cable Car View over Rio de Janeiro, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-5BDEBF},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/sugarloaf-cable-car-view-over-rio-de-janeiro-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Sugarloaf Cable Car View over Rio de Janeiro, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-5BDEBF UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/sugarloaf-cable-car-view-over-rio-de-janeiro-1960s ER -
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