The following analysis considers four abolitionist satires produced by Agostini, a satiric lithographer of genius who worked in Rio de Janeiro in the second half of the nineteenth century. Agostini is shown to have evolved a unique graphic language in order to describe the co-existence of modern urban capitalism with ancient social abuses. Agostini emerges as having fused new ways of looking which came out of photography with the older symbolic and emblematic languages of European print satire.