This article explores methodological approaches to reading personal photographic archives through the concept of “seeing with,” a practice of collaborative interpretation that challenges individual mastery of visual materials. Working with Roberto Monte-Mór’s 1980s–2000s documentation of Amazonian frontiers, originally linked to his theories on extended urbanization, we demonstrate how collaborative viewing sessions can reveal what theoretical frameworks initially obscured. Through transfluence and transvisualization, concepts drawing on quilombola epistemologies, the research shows how photographs contain multiple temporal layers and spatial logics. Rather than documenting modernity’s arrival in the jungle, these images also reveal urban-nature practices: the persistence of river-based mobilities, palm architecture, and environmental knowledge within industrial capitalism. The methodology foregrounds relational research practices with personal archives, the ethics of seeing with rather than looking at, and how changing interpretive frameworks make previously invisible presences visible in existing collections.
Junia Mortimer (2026) studied this question.