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Hispanic American Historical Review 84.1 (2004) 83-111



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Can the Subaltern Be Seen?
Photography and the Affects of Nationalism

Greg Grandin


Day of the Dead, 1900: a day to venerate the past by honoring the deceased, a year to herald the excitements and fears of a new century, and a fitting date for K'iche' Mayans from the Guatemalan highland city of Quetzaltenango to begin a half-century professional relationship with portrait photographer Tomás Zanotti. Born in Mexico to a Mexican mother and an Italian father, Zanotti made his way to Quetzaltenango, roughly two day's journey from Guatemala's northern border. 1 Shortly after he arrived in 1898, Zanotti apprenticed with the Englishman James Piggot, who operated the city's first portrait studio, and then took over the trade. At the time, K'iche's comprised an overwhelming majority of Quetzaltenango's population. Yet during those early years only a handful showed up to have their pictures taken. The low prices charged in the few anonymous account book entries—"dos indios," "grupo indios"—suggest that bureaucratic compulsion drove them into the studio to obtain passport-sized images for official documents. From 1897 to 1900, the majority of Piggot's [End Page 83] clients were wealthy ladinos (non-Maya) or foreigners, their names recorded in mixed Spanish and English.

On the Day of the Dead, things changed. Between October 30and November 2, 1900, Piggot shot 23 portraits. Of these, 17 had K'iche' surnames: Sac, Racancoj, Xicará, Coyoy, and so on. Only 6, however, according to surviving records, returned to pay their balance and claim their mementos. Following this cautious beginning, K'iche's increasingly sought out the services of Zanotti, as well as other Quetzalteco photographers. Throughout 1901, picking up during the Easter and Christmas seasons, more K'iche's arrived to commission portraits, a practice that steadily increased throughout the first half of the century, until tapering off with the advent of personal cameras. Perhaps anticipating growing indigenous interest, Tomás Zanotti actively cultivated a K'iche' clientele. He charged less than his competitors and set up shop on the top floor of a two-story house located just off the city's main plaza, on the street leading to the public cemetery. As K'iche' funeral processions left the cathedral and made their way to the cemetery, they passed under Zanotti's window. It was a prime location that linked new practices surrounding the staging of portraits to established rituals governing death and mourning.

Over the last 20 years, scholars have afforded photography, as both art and technique, considerable power to structure the subjectivities, hierarchies, and experiences of modern life. 2 Its spectral and quicksilver, yet durable, nature is often taken as both the instrument and mirror of hegemonic power, capable of classifying, disciplining, fixing, and coding. The stilling of radiant energy—like the minting of coins or the printing of bills—abstracted, congealed, and affirmed an array of social relations. It produced a benchmark of homogenized, if continually bartered, value, making possible the impersonal transactions, methods of social control, and affective identifications central to the growth of a bureaucratic state, the expansion of capitalist relations, and the elaboration of nationalism. Photography filed and tracked criminals and cataloged citizens. Photogrammetry—the use of cameras for surveying—defined property boundaries and publicized the contours of national territories. Similar to money, the [End Page 84] circulation of customized portraits in the form of postcards through a state bureaucracy (post offices) not only helped individuals dislocated by capitalism, urbanization, and migration to maintain increasingly distant family relations but also created an assumed correspondence between those sentimental ties and the administrative functioning of the nation-state (figure 1). Portraits—particularly those of individuals set in seeming suspension—helped produce the fiction of personal sovereignty and contributed to the construction of liberal, rights-bearing national subjects. Photography's close association with travel writing, naturalism, medicine, and anthropology coincided with the extension of nineteenth-century European imperialism, providing visual confirmation of ascendant pseudoscientific and rationalized discourses of...

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