with the disruptive and repressive functions of photography Sekula observed: he is tempted by the photographic disarray of natural reality but frightened into the need for an ordering archive. Rather than conclude with the unbreachable “Great Divide” that Huyssen finds between mass culture and modernism, we can imagine that errancy offers an alternative to the unbridled consumerism of the industrialized image (the “demonic diva”) and the hegemonic selection of the archive. Errant modernism pictures a movement, tense and troubled and inextricably associated with these modern women, which Latin American photography offers Kracauer.
Benjamin shared these concerns about the industrialized image, and responded to Kracauer with proposals of his own in “A Short History of Photography” (1972 [1931]). In this later essay, though, the disarray of photography is figured not as feminine but as primitive. Benjamin seeks to recapture an early moment of photography in order to envision the true, nonindustrialized, potential of the medium. Once again Kafka is the point of departure, but in this case, Benjamin ponders a portrait of the writer as a child:
It was the time when those studios appeared with draperies and palm‐trees, tapestries and easels, looking like a cross between an execution and a representation, between a torture chamber and a throne room, and of which a shattering testimony is provided by an early photograph of Kafka. A boy of about six, dressed in a tight‐fitting, almost deliberately humiliating child's suit, overladen with lace is seen standing in a kind of winter garden landscape. The background teems with palm fronds. And as if to make these upholstered tropics still stickier and sultrier, the subject holds in his left hand an immoderately large hat with a broad brim of the type worn by Spaniards… This picture in its infinite sadness forms a pendant to the early photography where the people did not, as yet, look at the world in so excluded and godforsaken a manner as this boy. They had an aura about them, a medium which mingled with their manner of looking and gave them a plenitude and security.
(Benjamin 1972 [1931], p. 18, emphasis added)
Despite its canonical status, Benjamin's reflection on the connection between photography and colonial representation in this passage has been entirely avoided. Because Benjamin did not reproduce this Winter Garden image with the others that appeared in his essay, one assumes that the image demanded the tropical excess in the description. Yet when Liliane Weissberg (1997) revealed the image that was Benjamin's source, the small palm plants in the background hardly seem to justify the rhetorical anguish of this passage. So what is it about this early moment of photography, about Kafka's tropical torture chamber? Benjamin's melancholy about what he calls “aura” – the special power of the original work of art that he simultaneously criticizes as elitist and for which he feels nostalgia – penetrates his history of photography.16 He searches the medium's tropical haunts for a way to have it disobey, to err, as the essay goes on to search for photographs of people that are not proper portraits, photographs of reality that are not real. For Benjamin even more than for Kracauer, then, Latin American errancy would offer the kind of photography he sought.
The nucleus of nostalgia, desire, and exoticism at the center of Benjamin's theory of photography becomes, however, something quite different in the European critical tradition. It becomes the ideal of the “pure photograph.” In Roland Barthes' influential Camera Lucida (1981), a Winter Garden photograph like Benjamin's is again the spark that ignites reflections on the medium. Looking at his mother in a Winter Garden, Barthes writes: “I wanted to be a primitive, without culture” (1981, p. 7). If only he were able to access that “pure” place outside of culture, he would be able to see what Photography is “in itself.” Barthes locates the access to this primitive truth in the punctum: a particular photographic detail that strikes the eye directly, like a blow of meaning. He distances the punctum from the studium, which he characterizes as less profound, basically descriptive, metaphoric rather than metonymic, and based in the study of “ethnographic detail.” If both aspects of photographic meaning reveal a debt to ethnography, Barthes privileges the punctum for providing the “aorist” tense of the Photograph, a complete and perfect past that has no effect on the future.
This exile of the “primitive” from both culture and historical time has long been a tool used to assert the West's dominance in its encounters with non‐Western cultures. Indeed, despite Barthes' proclaimed love of the primitive photographic punctum, he writes that his best access to the punctum emerges when he closes his eyes (1981, p. 55). What better control can one impose over the face of the primitive, in the face of what he calls the madness of the visual, than to close one's eyes? This contemporary theory of photography asserts that although the medium itself is defined by the West's encounter with the primitive, the European viewer maintains ultimate control over that image and over the very essence of photography.
We must be clear: Latin American photography and avant‐gardes articulated their own discourses of racialized and gendered otherness. Those prejudices, seen so clearly in Carpentier's avant‐garde novel, do not differentiate them from Barthes and other European theorists of the medium. What is more, both sides of the colonial divide equally positioned themselves as oppositional, as critical, even of modernity itself. However, mainstream modernism and modernity criticized the erasure of difference through the global modernist project, whereas errant modernism offers a comprehension of photographic practices that intervened in global modernity by revealing its construction of difference. They both reflected on the violence of modernity, but the European critique concluded that it ultimately erased difference whereas Latin American theorists revealed that it exacerbated inequality. Huyssen saw the Great Divide that European avant‐gardists established between popular and elite culture, whereas Latin American artists follow over and again an errant movement between the two. Whereas Barthes closed himself off, closed his eyes to the madness of the visual world offered by photography, Benjamin remained open, searching, uncertain; perhaps in search of the errancy he suspected the medium could offer. Errant modernism from Latin America therefore continues its travels, and can help to redefine the history and theory of photography.
Notes
1 1 The words modernism and modernist avant‐garde refer to artistic and literary movements associated with (much debated) aesthetic experimentation, whereas modernity describes a historical condition with (much debated) characteristics including urbanization, secularization, “progress,” and mechanization of labor. Modernism, modernity, and avant‐garde do not translate easily between English, Spanish, and Portuguese. In Spanish America, the word used to designate experimental artistic and literary movements is vanguardia (avant‐garde), whereas the parallel and contemporaneous movement in Brazil is called modernismo (modernism). Spanish modernismo refers to late‐nineteenth‐century poetry movements – the very generation against which the vanguardia proclaimed its rebellion – that are known for an “art for art's sake” aesthetic philosophy.
2 2 For more on the modern‐colonial system, see Quijano, A. (1991). Colonialidad, modernidad/racionalidad. Perú Indígena 13 (29): 11–29; Quijano, A. and Wallerstein, I. (1992). Americanity as a concept, or the Americas in the modern world‐system. International Journal of Social Sciences 134: 549–557.
3 3 For a full discussion of errancy, upon which this essay builds to look beyond the original cases of Mexico and Brazil, see my Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Gabara 2008).
4 4 Renaissance perspective is the sixteenth‐century technique of representation that creates the illusion of depth in a two‐dimensional frame.
5 5 “Aesthetic
