1978, p. 55).
In Cuba, Carpentier participated in the emerging mass media discussed above, even as the culture and art of Afro‐Cuban populations inspired his first avant‐garde novel, ¡Écue‐Yamba‐Ó! (2012 [1933]). Not accidentally, this novel – unique in his oeuvre – included photographs of Cuban santería altars and religious figures (Figure 5.1). Never satisfactorily addressed in the literature on Carpentier, these photographs were not simple illustrations but part and parcel of an avant‐garde experiment that fused fiction with ethnography and journalism. They have been variously attributed to Carpentier himself (which is doubtful), to Juan Luis Martín, author of Ecué, Changó y Yemayá (1930) (Rodríguez Beltrán, in Carpentier, 2012 [1933], p. 31), and compared to the illustrations in Fernando Ortiz's Los negros brujos and Archivos del folklore cubano (Park 2012, pp. 58–59). Yet ¡Écue‐Yamba‐Ó!, unlike these other works, was emphatically an avant‐garde work, as accentuated by the exclamation points framing its title. Written while he was imprisoned for political resistance to the Machado regime, the book's images and text elaborate the elite writer's conflicted relationship with people he sees as both essentially Cuban and yet foreign to him. Carpentier's close quarters with Afro‐Cuban fellow prisoners and the arrival of the First Pan American Conference on Eugenics in Havana that same year distanced him from both the abstraction of race in European primitivism and the biological basis of race promoted by US scientists (Park 2012, p. 47).
Figure 5.1 “El Diablito se adelantó, saltando de lado … ” (The Little Devil got a move on, jumping sideways … ) In: Alejo Carpentier, ¡Écue‐Yamba‐Ó!: Novela afrocubana. Madrid: Editorial España, 1933.
It is important to note that the photographs Carpentier included were not of Afro‐Cuban people but rather portraits of altars and of religious objects, objects with special powers. Taken at eye level with no background that provides scale, the dolls and icons seem almost alive; they appear to move and breathe within the photographic space. The novel's protagonist states that the members of his community were “deceived by appearances … [by] the visible,” whereas in reality, “an object may be imbued with life” (Carpentier 1933, pp. 66–67). The caption underneath the Diablito objectively describes that enlivened object – “The Little Devil got a move on, jumping sideways” – and thus contributes to the presentation of the religious doll as alive as a real person within the stillness of a photograph. The photographs in ¡Écue‐Yamba‐Ó! are not visual evidence of some truth but themselves are powerful objects like the altars they present. In the combination of image and text, Carpentier wrestled with the risks of visuality and modernity in Cuba and contributed to an avant‐garde aesthetic that erred between truth and invention. Indeed, as much as Carpentier struggles against racist pseudoscience from the United States, ¡Écue‐Yamba‐Ó! is plagued by racist stereotypes common in Cuba, which had played a major role in the trans‐Atlantic slave trade and did not abolish slavery until 1886. The tension is never resolved in the avant‐garde novel; instead, the give and take between enlivened photographs and fictional text inserts readers into the uncomfortable and violent passages of modernity.
The dilemma of representing non‐European cultures and peoples in Latin America becomes yet more dramatic in the oeuvre of Martín Chambi, the Quechua photographer whose work made the criollo (Euro‐descendent) vanguardists of his time distinctly uncomfortable. If essayist José Carlos Mariátegui and painter José Sabogal led an indigenista avant‐garde movement that proposed that modern Peruvian identity and aesthetics emerged from the recapture of indigenous cultures, they themselves came from urban, Spanish‐speaking families.13 Despite their criticism of Chambi at the time, his images have since become icons of the country's period of modernist investigation and celebration of its indigenous population.14 Chambi's photographs nonetheless do not offer an “authentic” image of indigenous peoples untouched by time. Like his fellow vanguardists from the region, he converts a tense relationship with the camera into errant images. The process of self‐reflection is more fraught for Chambi than for his criollo counterparts, and he offers no single or undifferentiated indigenous view or image. Although some critics fantasize about achieving direct access to “lo indio” – an authentic, unchanging indigenous identity – through his images, Chambi's vision is varied and sophisticated. The range of photographs that Chambi produced cannot be confined to the figurative or allegorical representation of indigeneity: his images of Indians on motorcycles and in women's basketball teams do not stage surprise at the “primitive” handling new technology, nor do his images of them in other contexts transform them into ethnographic “types.”15 The abstract Piedra de 12 ángulos (Stone of 12 Angles, 1930) is perhaps the epitome of errant modernism: the photograph accurately, mimetically represents an abstract image of a stone that forms part of a wall in Cuzco. It engages centuries‐old Incan practices of abstraction in rock carving and in textiles, presents them as constitutive of Peruvian modernism, and inserts them into international debates over vanguardism and representation (see Dean 2010).
5.4 Errant Europe
Latin American photographic errancy by definition did not stay home, as artists and writers and their texts and images traveled in space and time. The racialized tropics and the feminized mass media that shaped errant modernism in Latin America appear again in canonical European texts on photography by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Roland Barthes, but these strange contradictions have been simplified or repressed rather than fulsomely explored. In conclusion then, we must explore the promise of errancy for theorizing photography and modernity globally.
Kracauer's essay titled “Photography” (1993 [1927]) opens with a now familiar description of a photograph of a film star reproduced in the pages of an illustrated magazine: a “demonic diva” who fulfills the stereotype of the New Woman with “bangs, the seductive position of the head, and the twelve lashes right and left,” she is the icon of industrialized photography. Kracauer describes the halftone process, “the millions of little dots that constitute the diva” that we saw as the tool of new US colonial projects, and the overwhelming presence of illustrated journals whose goal is “the complete reproduction of the world accessible to the photographic apparatus” (Kracauer 1993 [1927], pp. 422, 432). His essay investigates the relationship of the medium with technologies of mass reproduction and introduces a shared concern among Marxist thinkers of the time that as much as the photograph's reproducibility contained a liberatory potential, it threatened to allow industrialized photography to become the efficient tool of capitalism. Dramatic prose links the mass reproduction of photographs with a vision of the modern (as) feminine; the demonic diva is “only one twelfth of a dozen Tiller girls,” a troupe of girls who danced in unison in military style like the Rockettes, each one the mirror image of the other (Kracauer 1993 [1927], p. 423). As Andreas Huyssen (1986) has argued, this struggle against the modern woman reveals mass culture to be the “hidden subtext of the modernist project” (p. 47).
Kracauer argues that the “assault” of the photographs in these journals combats memory rather than aids it, and that the “historical process” must struggle against the demonic diva and all she represents in order to achieve a “liberated consciousness.” In concluding, he credits Franz Kafka with achieving this consciousness by “destroying natural reality and jumbling the fragments against each another” (Kracauer 1993, p. 436). Although Kracauer had observed a similar disorder in photographically illustrated magazines, the “disarray” of the demonic divas is too much for him. The essay ends with an unresolved wish for “an organization that would designate how …
