LITMIR.BIZ

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– we could not take a picture of a typewriter before it existed – this logic is not reversible. The invention of a new technology does not guarantee its conversion into an icon of modernity or its contribution to the aesthetic language of modernism.¹ Certain tropes, those rhetorical figures that stand for the modern at large, have become so familiar as to be almost invisible today, whereas others never entered those lexicons. In what follows, I show how, despite its status as the proclaimed peripheries of modernity, Latin America makes the contours of these figures of modernity visible once more, reveals hidden tensions and contradictions within, and so makes possible a critical reexamination of the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of global modernity.

Neither copies of European avant‐gardes of the 1920s and 1930s nor isolated and authentic reservoirs of racial difference, the Latin American avant‐gardes reveal the logic behind global modernity and demand that we expand the horizon of possibility for modernist aesthetics. Photography embodied key tropes of modernity in the Latin American movements as well as in canonical European essays by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Roland Barthes. The camera pictures and is pictured as tropical and savage, as feminine and mass‐produced. Although scholars have identified the deep uncertainties these tropes reveal in mainstream avant‐garde theory, they have not explained why or how such a fraught medium came to play such an important role in the historical and more contemporary avant‐gardes. Ultimately, what seem at first to be peripheral exceptions to the dominant rules governing modernism, modernity, and the avant‐garde offer not a better definition of the three, but a mode of thinking through them. The varied uses of photography and the position of Latin American avant‐gardes make visible another theory of modernity articulated from the other side of the modern‐colonial divide that separates Europe from its former colonies.² They teach us not to think about avant‐garde and modernism “in the context” of modernity but as what I have introduced elsewhere as “errant” interventions in its discursive formation.³ The paths by which modernity “expands,” as it is typically told from the West, were not paved only by Europeans and North Americans but were precisely the themes and practices of Latin American avant‐gardes. In this map, modernity is not the destruction of difference as a result of a global homogenization, nor a phenomenon that occurs only in economic centers, but rather must be defined as the tension that produces a series of critical interventions, histories, and aesthetics. That is to say, Latin America disorients the hegemonic histories and theories of photography that still overwhelmingly privilege European and US artists, and in doing so, offers a view onto the power, promise, and dangers of the global phenomena of modernism, avant‐garde, and modernity.

5.1 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

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