Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (review)

Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World. By Deborah Poole. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xi, 263 pp. Cloth, $69.50. Paper, $19.95.

Scholars of Latin America whose work is concerned with visual subjects often search in vain for substantive treatments of Andean themes. Once we finish admiring the photographs of Martín Chambi, we don't know where to turn. I am happy to report that Vision, Race, and Modernity is just what we needed. Deborah Poole's carefully argued and finely crafted book spotlights visual concerns and places them within the political, social, cultural, and historical context of their production and exchange. Not only does it serve as the benchmark against which studies of visual matters in the Andes will be measured, but it offers fresh insights into relationships between Europe and the Americas, anthropology and history, and art and science that scholars in all disciplines will find stimulating, provocative, and wholly original.

Poole has organized her book chronologically, beginning in the eighteenth century and ending in the 1940s, but her purpose is not to write a definitive history of visual representation in the Andes. Rather, because both vision and representation are material and social, she makes the "image world" her subject, a term which "captures the complexity and multiplicity of this realm of images . . . circulating among Europe, North America, and Andean South America" (p. 7), connecting places, people, cultures, and classes, but never in a simple way.

During the three centuries Poole examines, images of astonishing diversity were made with different media and technologies. Many images were produced by Europeans, some working in South America, others staying in Europe and imagining distant scenes; other images were produced by Andean artists incorporating European styles and media. The relationship between producers and consumers of images shapes Poole's discussion throughout. Although the images were produced with specific audiences and aims in mind, the producers seldom controlled who ultimately saw the images. Poole raises questions about subaltern regimes of vision and the extent to which the value of an object, and the images contained therein, vary with the specific historical and social location of its viewer. Assessing the diverse political uses of the varied images, Poole moves beyond narrow theoretical discourses about "the gaze" and toward an analysis of visual culture that fully considers the relationship between images and power.

Poole relentlessly pursues a large question: How were modernity and race associated? Over time, via technologies of reproduction and representation, the media used to produce the images changed, and the means and extent of their circulation expanded geometrically. Photography, the paramount example, circled the globe as studio portraits, stereographs, cartes de visite, postcards, etc. Poole's concern is never primarily with technology, although she provides technical information. Rather, she presents ways in which technological change served to spread the image and thus to generalize ideas about race in the modern age.

Amidst myriad studies of the changing meanings of race, the strength of Poole's contribution lies in her dissection of the visual realm because, through the period under consideration, race claimed an increasingly larger role within the visual economy of modernity. She does not aim to pinpoint when the idea of race or racism originated. Poole focuses on ways "the particular visual qualities that modern racial discourse has assigned to 'race' have come to seem so natural" (p. 22). She argues, building on Foucault, that the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century was the period when a different understanding of race emerged in Europe, coinciding with a break from classical regimes of knowledge. It is not that the modern idea of race was new, for to some extent it repackaged and revitalized old ideas. But the many ways it worked were different: "changes in the idea of 'race' could be read as part of a...