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  • Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil
  • Carlos Daniel Preciado
Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil. Duke University Press, 2008. By Esther Gabara.

The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed . . . This insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in [Plato’s] cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. (Sontag, On Photography 3. New York: Dell Publishing, 1977) [End Page 216]

Meditating on the oftentimes vexed relationship between the ethics and aesthetics of the photographic image amid a backdrop of economic industrialization and its concomitant social changes like burgeoning mass-communication, so began one of Susan Sontag’s seminal works. It is along these lines that we can begin to situate Esther Gabara’s ambitious study of the ways modernity and modernism in Mexico and Brazil have been both embodied and questioned within this quintessentially modern art form. She filters the concepts of “modernity” and “modernism” through postmodernism with the aim of decentering the received meanings they have acquired in centers of economic modernization—the U.S. and Europe—to widen them so as to include contributions of Latin American artists and thinkers. As to why these two culturally and linguistically disparate countries should be coupled in a study, the author contends that it is their very resistance to being lumped into a tidy concept of “Latin America” that unites them. With Brazil as a “Portuguese-speaking land mass” and Mexico’s location in North America, the author “propose[s] to imagine” them “as the receding point of the idea of Latin America, dominating any definition of the region yet productively, errantly never quite fitting into it” (19).

The two overarching ideas of this investigation are “ethos” and “erring.” She draws on the polysemy of the former and its meanings related to community, place, sentiments and aesthetics and fine-tunes it to mean “a tactics of survival as a practice of everyday life with an aesthetic mode” (7). With “erring” the author conjoins the denotations “to err” and “to wander” to examine how several exponents of the avant-garde used chiefly photography, among other arts forms, as a means to consciously mis-take: that is, to both assimilate and question (inter)national modernist artistic precepts while actively participating and quarrelling with their respective countries’ nation building projects. With “ethos” and “erring” as a lens, Gabara analyzes photography, mass and popular culture, as well as literature and literary journals.

Following a carefully thought-out and extensive theoretical introduction, the first chapters are principally on Mário de Andrade’s landscape and portrait photography where questions of self-reflexivity, class, and race within the context of mass and popular culture come to the fore. Chapter three serves a segue into Mexico where the author investigates constructions of gender, mainly femininity and to a lesser extent queer sexuality, in the photography of the mass-media as well as in the photo-essay. The artists treated here are those aligned with the Contemporáneos (Salvador Novo, Xavier Villaurrutia, Jaime Torres Bodet), the Estridentistas (Arqueles Vela, Germán List Arzubide), as well as the famed photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. In chapter five Gabara turns her attention to questions of “ficitionality” embedded and sometimes exploited in the photograph and the literary work. It is a welcome change that the narrative of some of these modernists should receive critical attention. These unfortunately now under-read texts, especially those of Vela, with their juxtapositions of lavish photography and illustration alongside art and prose were to become precursors to the following generation of the Boom.

Gabara closes her ambitious treatise with an epilogue that charts how these Brazilian and Mexican innovators who wrestled with the ethics and aesthetics of their time are far from being entombed at the dawn of the 20th century—specimens to be approached as historical set pieces or with quaint nostalgia. These artists, she contends, are in fact exemplars for late twentieth...

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