Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (review)

In recent years a new generation of scholars has been publishing on Mexican photography. While there has been scholarly interest in the work of Tina Modotti and Manuel Álvarez Bravo for several decades, in the past year or two new books have looked at other aspects of Mexican photography in the twentieth century: the Casasola archive, which includes the most celebrated images of the Mexican revolution (discussed by John Mraz in his Looking for Mexico [Duke, 2009] and by Leonard Folgarait in his Seeing Mexico Photographed [Yale, 2008]), as well as other lesser-known photographers and even the significance of illustrated weeklies for Mexican photographic culture.

Esther Gabara's Errant Modernism, a three-hundred-page volume analyzing the modern era and its relation to visual culture in both Brazil and Mexico, is the most recent contribution to this growing list of books on photography. Gabara includes a treasure trove of unknown and little-known materials, including a series of travel photographs taken by Mário de Andrade in the 1920s, numerous photo essays from El Universal Ilustrado, as well as documents and photographs discovered in various Mexican and Brazilian archives. Errant Modernism is an impressive feat of archival research, and it brings to light much photographic material that will alter our vision of twentieth-century Mexican cultural history.

Overall, Gabara's Errant Modernism might strike the reader as overly ambitious in its scope: it includes a chapter on Mário de Andrade's photographic landscapes, another on Andrade's portraiture, and a third on Brazilian advertising and popular culture in the 1930s; there are also three chapters on Mexico: one on photo essays, one on modernist experimental novels, and an epilogue devoted, for the most part, to the fascinating episode of Don Carlos Balmori (more on this later).

In order to analyze this vast compilation of materials—textual and photographic—Gabara coins a series of theoretical concepts: "the ethos of modernity," "errant modernism," and "las bellas artes públicas." Her metaphor of "errant modernism"—a modernism that wanders, strays, and errs, arriving in places like Mexico and Brazil, and producing works that could be considered "erred" when confronted with their mainstream counterparts—is especially useful for thinking through the relation between European and Latin American movements. Other concepts—including "las bellas artes públicas," a pun on the contrast between the Spanish expressions "hombres públicos," which translates as "statesmen," and "mujeres públicas," a euphemism for prostitutes—are less successful and feel rather forced (Gabara notes that "the bizarre sound of the phrase [las bellas artes públicas] in Spanish is proper to the collapse of the assumed contradiction between fine art and popular culture… and to the gender of the public sphere" [145]).

The book's most compelling chapter is titled "Essay: Las bellas artes públicas, Photography, and Gender in Mexico" and contains a wealth of photographic material culled from El Universal Ilustrado, Rotográfico, and other weeklies published in the 1920s and 1930s. Her most original contribution is bringing to light these forgotten pieces, which unite photography and text in an era of modernist experimentation with the association between word and image. The "photo essay" is a distinct genre in postrevolutionary Mexican culture, one that reveals much about literary and artistic debates. In recent years a number of young scholars have successfully mined El Universal Ilustrado—Viviane Mahieux has recently published a study of Cube Bonifant, one of the few women who published chronicles of daily life in this weekly—and have shown that its articles were crucial to understanding the cultural context in which figures as diverse as Diego Rivera, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, the Contemporáneos and Estridentistas lived and worked.

One of the weak points of Gabara's study is the absence of close readings: her book presents too much material and spends too little time analyzing it. Often the analysis is clouded by the use of concepts like...