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

This publication aims to straighten our account of the crooked lines linking Latin America's ambivalent modernity, the avant-garde of Mexico and Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s and their adoption of photography, literally as image-making practice and figuratively as a set of techniques and concerns in literary texts. These crooked lines run parallel to what Gabara terms the 'errancy' of the photographic in the sociocultural space under discussion, its tendency to conflate the ethic and the aesthetic, displacement and catachresis, practice and conceptualization. Gabara shows how the photographic presents a formidable critical lens through which to picture the way key modernists inhabited contact zones of centre and periphery, high culture and the mass media, the legacy of colonialism and the pressures of economic imperialism, the indigenous and the incoming, the documentary and the fictive, the engaged and the evasionary, desire and defiance.

Gabara's book is divided into two halves and four main sections. The first half deals with Brazil and almost exclusively with Mário de Andrade. The first section looks at Andrade's landscape photography and his manuscript O turista aprendiz, an investigation of national and personal space conflating and contesting ideas of the ethnographic and the touristic. Andrade's activity as a photographer might at first appear to be an incidental part of his wider body of work, but Gabara makes a convincing argument for its consideration not just as a proving ground for Andrade's ideas but also as an important achievement in its own right. The author's treatment of the 'errant' horizon in these images as the disruption and conjoining of ideas of the near and far, the local and the international, the abstract and the representational, is especially engaging. The next section evaluates Andrade's portraiture, reading his portrait photography as a re-calibration of the racial and the primitive and juxtaposing it with his depiction of the protagonist of Macunaíma. Andrade was in the process of revising this novel at the time he undertook the journeys described in O turista aprendiz. Gabara's observation that the novel's plot inverts the trajectory the writer took in his travelogue is a forceful spur to revisit both works in parallel. Particularly interesting in Gabara's discussion of the portrait is the idea that the sharpness of representation can reside in the conceptual or technical blurriness of the image itself. In the second half of the book, Mexico is the focus. The third section scrutinizes the photo-essay, making an acute and provocative case for the way in which its use by the Estridentistas and the Contemporáneos smudges distinctions between elite and popular cultures, and provides 'a rowdy and active femininity in circulation through the city' (34), a countervail to the static, 'masculinist' discourses of the mural tradition. The fourth section deals with Mexican avant-garde literature, photographic in that it is 'simultaneously indexical and illusionary, embodied and abstract, hermetic and ethical' (10), though if indeed indexical, it is not in a manner C. S. Peirce would recognize. Gabara argues that these texts must be read as a conscious divergence both from the straight social realism of the post-revolutionary novel and the high-art purity of mainstream modernism. This equidistance from these two positions is made apparent in the author's cogent analysis of the figure of the New Woman, as she flits through the pages of this writing like an animation in a flick book. Errant Modernism concludes its wanderings with a fifth section that looks at the contemporary visual art in Brazil (Tunga and Arthur Omar) and Mexico (Gerardo Suter, Silvia Gruner and Maris Bustamante) that engages with the modernist legacy.

Gabara's work is richly researched and mercurial in its argumentation. Issues arise, nonetheless. While Mexico and Brazil demand comparison and Gabara's proposal to 'imagine Mexico and Brazil as the receding point of the idea of Latin America...