The Dark Side of Photography: Techno-Aesthetics, Bodies, and the Residues of Coloniality in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

And perhaps it would have been better to say: a visual object that shows the loss, the destruction, the disappearance of objects or bodies. . . . That is to say, volumes endowed with emptinesses. To further specify this question: What, then, would be a volume that shows—in an almost Wittgensteinian sense of the term—the loss of a body? What is a conveyor volume, one that shows emptiness? How is an emptiness shown? And how does one make of this act a form—a form that gazes at us?

—Georges Didi-Huberman

What interests me about “Casa negra (1904),” a story by Puerto Rican writer Marta Aponte Alsina, is the moment when the Hartman family—recently arrived in San Juan shortly after the war of 1898—prepares for an excursion into the island’s interior. Susan, one of the daughters, has a Kodak camera with which she plans to fill her album with photos of the landscapes and “exotic” inhabits of a region still unknown to its new colonists. One purpose of the trip is to pass through the town of Utuado, where a donation will be made to a school attended by white children and one of whose teachers—rather to the dismay of the tour group—is black. As a memoir of this event, Susan photographs the school’s pupils and assistants together with the mayor and Governor Hunt, but the teacher is shown cloaked by a dark blanket. In the end, as the story’s narrator observes, Susan’s photos would constitute “una sombra borrosa del verdadero suceso” (a blurry shadow of the actual event).¹ I would stress the double sense of Aponte Alsina’s use of the word “borrosa” (blurry), which signifies both a distortive act of selection and an elimination, an erasure.

The veiled form of the black teacher is a curious detail within a story plot that does not decide on its own final meaning. However, when read against the light and within a broader and more complex archive, this detail, this image, assumes a density that merits interrogation, precisely because it constitutes a “volume” that attests to what Georges Didi-Huberman would refer to as an emptying-out, a concave hollow, that gazes at us without face or eyes.²

This contemporary story by Aponte Alsina serves to anchor the problematic that will occupy us in the following pages, particularly because whenever we explore ineffable and unclassifiable traces from the past we confront the theoretical question of phantasms as nonsubjects that in some way return, although to different scenarios.³ For the moment, let us examine three cartes de visite, or calling cards, dating from about the same period, between 1865 and 1870. Their images come from three very different archives: the first two are portraits of infants, Figure 1 from Venezuela and Figure 2 from England, the latter pertaining to a collection titled “Hidden Mothers”; Figure 3 is a portrait of a ganho slave woman⁴ from Brazil by the well-known photographer José Christiano Júnior. We will focus primarily on the Venezuelan context in this essay, reserving for the end some brief comparative comments on the Brazilian and English archives.⁵

In his article “Foucault: Art of Seeing,” John Rajchman summarizes Michel Foucault’s basic hypothesis regarding the grammar of the gaze being permeated by a field of forces that naturalize the act of seeing. According to Michel Foucault, there is a kind of “positive unconscious” of vision that determines what can and what cannot be seen. Not all historical forms of visualization are possible at the same time, and we see much less than we suppose. It is probable that we liberate ourselves from certain ways of seeing in order

Figure 1.

Anonymous girl, ca. 1868. Courtesy of the Fundación Boulton.

Figure 2.

Children with “hidden mother.” Hidden Mothers collection. Sara Malm, “Pretend Your Mother Is NOT Disguised as a Chair...