A Violent and Expansive Medium
Since its invention in the nineteenth century, photography has been bound up with modern fantasies and fears as much as with defined artistic, scientific, and even political projects. As I have argued elsewhere, the camera is never neutral. The point of view implicit in photographs results to some degree from the position of the photographer, literally where she stands, as well as the basic design of the monocular camera. Unlike human bodies, which look with two eyes onto the world, the camera recreates the kind of view art historians ascribe to Renaissance illusionism.4 Toward the end of the nineteenth century that photographic vision becomes associated with a new hemispheric and world order, thanks to its use to represent the US military expansion into the Caribbean, the Philippines, and Hawaii. Throughout the twentieth century, the increasing presence of US popular culture globally carries it further (see Schmucler 1978). Much as Brazil has disputed France's claim to the invention of photography, critical theorists and photographers from Latin America have debated and distorted the camera's way of seeing and embedded politics and ethics as much as form and frame in their analysis of the medium.
The photographs exhibited in museums and galleries as fine art represent just a fraction of a broader history of the circulation of photographs in mass media, literature, and social scientific studies. Thinking about the movement between these sites, rather than instituting disciplinary divisions between them, produces a multiple object of photography, includes multiple forms of photography, and allows multiple meanings and insertions of the same photograph. Rather than provide a chronology of fine art photographs in Latin America that obeys aesthetic values determined by European modernism, this essay traces how avant‐garde movements in the region developed photographic values. These aesthetic regimes were shaped by a broad variety of photographs that appeared in literature, ethnography, journalism, and art.5
The concept of errancy captures Latin American modernism's aesthetic, ethical, and political experiments. The first definition of errancy goes hand in hand with the violent expansionism of the medium; it is in the camera's nature, it seems, to energetically explore the world. Its second meaning, of making a mistake, appears as Latin American vanguardists, painfully conscious of photography's role in the expansion of European modernity, found ways to make the camera take a “bad” picture. That is, the very characteristics of the medium that seemed to bind it naturally to European modernity were attacked and distorted. Errant modernism provides a window onto ignored images from Latin America (both within the region and outside it) and ultimately offers a means of conceptualizing modernity not as a definition, or state to achieve, but rather as a fraught process that produces inequalities and pain as much as artistic triumphs and pleasures. Errancy is a theoretical and methodological mode to track the movement and disruptions of key ideas out of place, rather than to judge their originality or condemn their submission to influence.6
Returning now to this history of the medium, in the decades before the modernist avant‐gardes began to take shape, an explosion of photographs appeared in books, archives, and journals. These images and the violent events they portrayed would deeply mark the circulation of the medium across the Americas, thanks to the coincidence of several events. First, the Spanish–American War (Hemment 1898), which marked the beginning and full realization of a twentieth century defined by military, political, and economic intrusions by the United States in Latin America. Second, the invention of the halftone process of printing (1890s), which permitted the simultaneous reproduction of photographs and text on a printed page and so made possible the creation of photographically illustrated books, magazines, and newspapers. The two‐volume, lavishly illustrated set, Our Islands and Their People (Olivares 1899), embodies the excitement to use the camera by foreign military powers, new tourists, and ethnographers, as well as the potential to turn the camera against these new powers.7
Photography's relationship to violence is not quite as direct or all‐encompassing as the metaphor of the Western camera as imperialist weapon implies. Allan Sekula (1986) reminds us that, like the gun, the camera can harm its owner if it falls into other hands – as he puts it, photography has functioned both honorifically and repressively. It was not just foreign armies that came with cameras and guns: the pictures produced and archived by Latin American citizens and governments also were used to discipline and punish as much as to liberate. As much as photography allowed people of lower classes to experience the esteem of individual portraiture, formerly limited to the upper‐class art patrons who could commission paintings, it was also a new means of social control, used to criminalize people by means of visual signs of racial, gender, or economic “inferiority,” and to elaborate the logic of the modern state. Soon after the Spanish–American War, a decade‐long civil war in Mexico (1910–1920) was documented by roving photographers led by the brothers Agustín Víctor and Miguel Casasola. The Casasola Archive demonstrates that the violence of photography continues beyond the events represented, and into the institutions that hold and reproduce them.8 The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI), the party that held exclusive power in Mexico from 1929 to 2000, relied upon the Casasolas' archive of images of the war's battles and protagonists in their effort to transform the historical representation of chaotic civil war into the celebrated Mexican Revolution. Out of a photographic archive filled with images of death and displacement, the PRI composed a triumphant narrative of modernization that would govern narratives of Mexican history until today.
Photography, therefore, has the potential to create hegemonic images as much as to resist them. We see these divergent possibilities especially clearly in images of indigenous, black, and female bodies in the 1920s and 1930s. During a period marked by the centralization of state power and strong nationalist discourse, photography moved errantly from its role as an instrument to categorize hierarchies of racial types to experiments that challenged both the possibility of distinguishing “races” and the privilege enjoyed by those declared to be “white.” Similarly, as much as photography continued an art historical tradition that treated women as objects of desire, the accessibility of the camera led to fantasies, fears, and the reality of women photographers who could present other images of women, and of modern society more broadly. In what follows, we see how these errant pictures offer a mode of critically passing through modernity.
5.2 The Gender of Modernity9
Throughout the avant‐garde decades across the continent, the connection between photography and women was cemented in illustrated journals, in which she is photographer and editor as well as the photographic subject. As I have shown in depth elsewhere, although examples of “art photography” began to appear in Mexican exhibitions of the now well‐known work of Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, theories of modernist photographic aesthetics were still profoundly tied to other uses of the medium. The fluid boundaries between types of photographic practice appear in the constant crossover between press and art photography. Despite early exhibitions of “art” photography – or fotografía de autor – in the 1920s, it was common to see the same photographs shown in these exhibitions reproduced in illustrated journals. In Mexico, Salvador Novo, a member of the avant‐garde group known as the Contemporáneos, declared photography to be the “prodigal daughter of art” implicitly connecting its popular reproduction with femininity (Novo 1931, p. 169). The other leading avant‐garde group in Mexico, the Estridentistas, combined photograph and literary experimentation in the popular weekly supplement, El Universal Ilustrado, which explicitly addressed its large readership of women. The photography journal Imagen defined itself as a hybrid space, in which the editors make photography central but the photographs range from works by the icon of Mexican modernist photography, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, to Hollywood
