Image and Memory: Photography from Latin America, 1866–1994

For decades a wide gap has persisted between the ways historians, on one hand, and photographic historians and critics, on the other, “read” images. Historians have discovered that photographs are documents that offer a wealth of information that goes beyond material culture and the perspectives of photographer and client. For their part, photographic historians and critics have shown a greater concern with the “pedigree” of photographer and image: reputation, genre, and such technical details as format, exposure, texture of paper, and printing process. I learned this rudely: at a presentation at FotoFest 1992 in Houston, in which I had been invited to speak on historical photographs as documents for social history, I was literally shouted down by three irate members of the audience when I stated my opinion that for the purposes of social history, the identity of the photographer does not matter and that, in fact, unposed photographs were perhaps the most useful of all.

Image and Memory contains 183 plates, most in black and white but some in color, from the more than 1,000 images displayed at FotoFest 1992. It contains nineteen sections, four of them essays, that present subjects as varied as Uruguayan photographs from the War of the Triple Alliance, 1865–1870, to works by present-day photographers in Ecuador, Argentina, Mexico, El Salvador, Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela. Works from Cuba and Chile are not represented, and the interesting period from 1950 to 1980 is slighted. FotoFest’s organizers, however, did not intend to be comprehensive, and selections, they claim, were not made on the basis of nationality.

The volume minimizes the tendency among photographic specialists to fall for artistic cliché, although there is some of it. “With photography,” writes Jorge Gutiérrez of the Museo de Artes in Caracas, “there is always a mystery, a veil which does not allow us to have the clarity we desire” (p. 3). Perhaps, but photographs are documents and as such are no more inscrutable than any others. The mind perceives and interprets images according to its personal vision of the world, but the same process takes place when researchers pore over written records. Wendy Watriss, the artistic director of FotoFest, agrees, arguing that “the history and practice of Latin American photography raise vital questions about relationships of power between cultures, about representation of culture and its meaning, about connections between intention, expectation, and content” (p. 15).

The great value of Images and Memory is in the magnificent plates. The photographs are marvelous: some documentary and journalistic (but rich in detail and content); others produced as art, often using collage, retouching, hand painting, or manipulation. Figure 148, “Los Fusilados,” by Bernardo Salcedo, brilliantly superimposes bullets on the heads of seated members of what appears to be a graduating class, in a chilling bichromatic panoramic print bordered heavily in black. Mario Cravo Neto’s “voodoo” images suggest the work of Sebastião Salgado but are less preachy. Overall, and throughout Image and Memory, photographs of massacres, religious celebrations, faces, elite posing, and everyday life wonderfully capture the myriad aspects of Latin America.

Less valuable, even if amusing, is some of the language of analysis: “causal interactions between representation (the suspended image) and metarepresentation” (Fernando Castro, p. 83); “mythic wisdom against the brute force of a uniform(ed) line (Lois Parkinson Zamora, p. 301); “mimesis based on the dichotomy of presence and absence” (Alice Jardine, p. 367). However, the greater part of the well-translated bilingual text is clear and informative, and offers very helpful background. Boris Kossoy’s essay on nineteenth-century Latin American photography is the most historical contribution; even though he harps as usual on the role of Hercules Florence as the unheralded inventor of photography, his piece is useful. The book concludes with Marta Sánchez Philippe’s detailed bibliography that focuses on books and major exhibition catalogs about or by Latin American photographers.