Mexican Photography: From the Daguerreotype to Digital Images

The last year has seen an explosion of interest in Mexican photography. In addition to the three books reviewed in this article, Leonard Folgarait published the excellent study Seeing Mexico Photographed: The Work of Horne, Casasola, Modotti, and Álvarez Bravo (Yale, 2008). These scholarly contributions have turned this once marginal research subject into a rapidly growing field.

Gabara, Mraz, and Tejada choose different timeframes and methodologies to study nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican photography (Mraz also discusses film, and Gabara examines literary texts and other documents in her book). Mraz focuses exclusively on Mexico, Tejada highlights images that reveal the complex relationship between Mexico and the United States, and Gabara offers a comparative study of Mexico and Brazil as sites for the production of modern images and texts.

Tejada's book is the result of extensive research in photography archives based in Mexico and the United States. His study opens with a discussion of a series of little-known photographs from the Casasola archive documenting the 1909 meeting between Porfirio Díaz, the president overthrown by the 1911 Revolution, and William H. Taft, his American counterpart. This historical summit took place in the border town of Ciudad Juárez, and Tejada reads the photographs as cultural products straddling other symbolic borders: "The political contour between Mexico and the United States can be measured in part by the meetings that take place in the time zone of relation I call the 'shared image environment' " (8). Tejada's study spans the twentieth century and goes from photographs of the Porfiriato to photoconceptual experiments produced in the late 1990s.

Of the three books, Tejada's includes the most illustrations: 71, compared to Gabara's 67 and Mraz's 53 photos. To read this vast archive, Tejada deploys a theoretical approach informed by British cultural studies—especially the work of Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams—and feminism. He has also been inspired by Eduardo Cadava's Words of Light, one of the classic studies of photography and history.

Tejada's approach is ambitious; in fact, at times it seems overly ambitious. In the best of cases, his theoretical framework generates novel interpretations of well-known images. His discussion of gender dynamics at play in the work of Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, for instance, offers an insightful reading of Modotti's Hands Resting on Tool (1927) that highlights the gender ambiguity of the represented subject: do these hands belong to a man or a woman? What elements allow us to mark these hands as male or female, masculine or feminine? Building on the work of Andrea Noble, Tejada suggests that Modotti was consciously creating some gender trouble for her viewers. This section also includes an original and compelling reading of Weston's photographs of chilies (Pepper, 1929) as images of displaced eroticism: "What are we to make," Tejada asks, "of . . . the vaguely autoerotic, possibly homoerotic, polymorphous pairings of his 1929 Peppers?" He suggests that "one need only refer to Weston's Daybooks where on July 13, 1929 he wrote, 'I have been working so enthusiastically with the two peppers—stimulated as I have not been for months,' to find evidence of his sexual investment in these photographs" (73).

Tejada's application of theories and concepts developed by Hall and Williams are, on the whole, less successful than his use of feminist criticism, as they tend to obscure the historical specificity and cultural context of the Mexican photographs. In most cases, there is too little attention paid to the image itself—not enough close readings of the photographs included in the book—which is often treated as an illustration of a theoretical point. In his...