at all alone in the importance of photographically illustrated women's journals and the importance of femininity in the theory and practice of avant‐garde photography and literature. In countries as diverse as Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, the rapid growth of a national mass media opened up an important new cultural space whose character was largely defined by the inclusion of experiments with photography and graphic design. These publications combined avant‐garde and popular, texts and images, with an appeal to modern women as both citizens and consumers. Jorge Luis Borges, perhaps the most‐read Latin American writer inside and outside the region, began publishing during the period of the modernist avant‐garde and also contributed for many years to the popular illustrated magazine El Hogar. Although several anthologies containing these texts have been published, they tend to downplay his investment in them and do not analyze them as serious sites for artistic experimentation.10 El Hogar included style tips for middle‐class women, tourist sections, and a view on a kind of cosmopolitan life to which the emerging middle class aspired in many countries. It also included reviews of avant‐garde literature, music, and art. In Brazil, Mário de Andrade declared in an essay on modernist aesthetics: “Through the journal we are omnipresent” (A Escrava que Não é Isaura 1980 [1925], p. 265). The pages of illustrated journals for women, where photography and text coexisted, were fundamentally important in the history of modernism in the region.
Alejo Carpentier, famed Cuban author of the theory of an American literary real maravilloso (marvelous real), began his literary career publishing in popular media including women's journals such as Chic. He was the editorial director and a regular contributor to Carteles. In addition to articles about new art and music from around the world published under his own name in Social, from 1925 to 1927 he initiated a section dedicated to women's fashion written under the pseudonym “Jacqueline.” He did this popular work simultaneously with his initiation into the Cuban avant‐garde. During the same year, he published in the journal Revista de Avance, signed the manifesto “Declaración del Grupo Minorista,” and wrote the first draft of the radical novel ¡Écue‐Yamba‐Ó! while he was imprisoned for having signed a Communist workers' manifesto. What Carpentier and the others make so fascinating and clear, then, is that Latin American avant‐garde and modernity are figured in the pages of these different publications through the shapes of photographed women.
It is crucial to note that women were not only and easily the subjects featured in modern photography. Familiar expectations of femininity were troubled in these pages, and women artists held the camera in their hands and played very active roles in the creation of the illustrated journals directed at women readers. In Argentina, the editorial director of the illustrated journal Sur was Victoria Ocampo, who from the second issue in 1931 emphasized the number of “láminas de fotografías documentales y artísticas” (artistic and documentary photographic plates) by landmark photographers Horacio Coppola, Víctor Delhez, and a Mexican called only Agustín, who may have been the famed Agustín Jiménez. In Mexico, the director of publication of El Universal Ilustrado in its early years, immediately preceding Carlos Noriega Hope, was María Luisa Ross. Through photography, women took unprecedented control over the printed page.
Tina Modotti's work is exemplary of an errant and “feminine” photographic avant‐garde. Born in Italy and raised in California, she rightly has entered the canon of Mexican art photography as well as that of the politically engaged avant‐garde artists in Latin America. Her entire photographic career took place in Mexico, and it is quite clear that the country's postrevolutionary debates over the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of modernity indelibly marked her artistic production. Modotti arrived in Mexico in 1923, initially as the apprentice and lover of famed US photographer Edward Weston, but she ultimately parted ways with him over questions of sexual liberation as well as of art and politics. Her oeuvre includes intimate portraits of leading figures in avant‐garde art and letters and of Tehuana indigenous women living in matriarchal societies, as well as self‐portraits posing in their embroidered clothing. Modotti captured technological innovations such as telegraph wires and typewriters, as well as artisanry including puppets and baskets. Large sports stadiums that gathered the masses of people who contributed to the idea of a modern state were paired with images of the oppression of indigenous people who suffered its violence.
As a photographer and a model, Modotti played as much as captured the New Woman, the figure of a radical and liberated femininity that spanned the globe. She was declaredly interested in sexual experimentation, independent from traditional social and economic structures (she made a living from her photography), and active in communist politics in Mexico and internationally. Modotti's work as a nude model for Weston has been interpreted as evidence of her submission to her older mentor and lover. Yet when considered in the context of her broader experimentation with photography, sexuality, and modern femininity, her activity as a model reveals an active participation in the photographic process, just from the position of the subject pictured rather than that of the photographer or viewer.11 Her composition of an active subject of the photographic image more broadly orients her eventual break from Weston. No reductive understanding of her “political” images versus his formalist ones works here: Modotti took monumental, highly aestheticized photographs of icons of the Communist Party. Sarah Lowe observes that Weston's Mexico was “monumental” whereas Modotti saw there the “struggle for social and economic equality” (Lowe 2004, p. 9). This was in large part because Modotti, like so many other Latin American photographers, created images grounded in her gendered experience as photographer and photographed subject, apprentice, and nude model. As we shall see later in photographers who pondered the question of race in modernity, the doubled and errant vision offered by photography was fundamental to Latin American avant‐garde theories and practices.
5.3 Picturing Other, Picturing Self
As noted earlier, photography can denigrate as much as laud its subjects. Mainstream photographic theory has dealt with this contradiction by pretending that there is always a clear and evident separation between subject and object, between photographer and the pictured. That is, the power of photography to laud or disparage was in the hands of certain (European male) photographers, and their point of view – racist, sexist, or not – seemed (and I emphasize seemed) embedded in the very technology that separated subject from object. Yet as we saw previously, women were not just represented by cameras but were able to coax the photographic mechanism into strange (if temporary) alliances that disrupted such divisions. These errant uses of the camera also were produced by tense collusions between European‐born (and descendent) photographers and writers with Afro‐Latin American and indigenous artists. Again, the photographs circulated between illustrated journals and art exhibits, and the camera was handed off between artists of both Euro‐American and indigenous descent.
Brazilian modernist Mário de Andrade took photographs that revealed the medium to be both the tool and the enemy of the modernist artist. The camera offered a means to research, document, and integrate both Afro‐Brazilian and Indian cultures into modern artistic practice, yet the Brazilian modernist who held it struggled to assert his or her authority.12 Although de Andrade's images of rural populations avoid a folkloric idealization of a foundational, and therefore necessarily past, native race, all of his work from poetry to music to photography made images of “the popular” central to the Brazilian modernist project. He named both indigenous and Afro‐Brazilian popular cultures as the source of regional and national identity and composed a photographic modernism that pictured a nuanced and tense vision of this act of representation in the midst of an ethnically diverse society. In literary, theoretical, and visual experiments with photography, de Andrade's photographs and resulting theory of modernism examine how race is lived without confirming its self‐evidence. De Andrade emphasized the doubled position of the modernist poet between center and periphery, between the interior of Brazil and Europe. Like Modotti, his photography and writing set forth a new definition of the aesthetic
