Argentine, Mexican, and Guatemalan Photography: Feminist, Queer, and Post-masculinist Perspectives by David William Foster (review)

David William Foster’s latest collection of essays on photography in Spanish-American context admirably satisfies a pressing need for cogent and eloquent scholarship on this frequently neglected aspect of Hispanic culture. While certain Hispanic cultural products—literature, film, music, painting, and so forth—have long been examined in scholarly analysis, fine-art photography has less often been explored to reveal how its powerful images—its texts—“speak” to the cultural and aesthetic contexts in which they are created. Consequently, by publishing Argentine, Mexican, and Guatemalan Photography: Feminist, Queer, and Post-masculinist Perspectives, the author proposes “to demonstrate not only the imperative to take Latin American photography seriously in the academy, but also to model seriously ways to talk about photographic texts” (xiii). In thirteen concise chapters, Foster certainly realizes his goal: he applies his considerable critical and interpretive skills to the photography of several of the most acclaimed artists of Mexico, Argentina, and one from Guatemala, focusing his expert critical eye on how their works confirm, interrogate, or subvert traditional cultural norms related to gender and sexuality.

Foster begins with a short preface in which he briefly explains his approach to the analysis of the photographic works in the subsequent chapters, how this analysis is directly related to the four main areas of his monumental bibliography of published scholarship (urban cultural production, gender and sexuality studies, cultural creation by Jewish artists, and the exploration of ideological principles in the elaboration and reception of creative works), and a quick overview of the content and ordering of the chapters. The photography under analysis includes works that span the approximately hundred years from early twentieth-century anonymous stereographic photographs of Mexican prostitutes, to twenty-first-century works that comment on the monstrous realities of political violence and social inequality in Mexico, Argentina and Guatemala.

The collection, as the author notes, is comprised, in large part, of previously published material, much of which has been revised and expanded for this handsome volume. In this category are essays devoted to the work of the Argentine Grete Stern, Annemarie Heinrich, Silvina Frydlewsky, Marcos Zimmermann, and Marcos López; Mexican photographers Daniela Rossell, Pedro Meyer, and Graciela Iturbide; and the Guatemalan Daniel Hernández-Salazar. New essays, published for the first time in this volume, focus on Alessandra Sanguinetti, Helen Zout (Argentina), and Stefan Ruiz (Mexico). In spite of the differences in time period, location, and thematic content, the studies form a well-integrated whole that gives the reader a good sense of the wide variety and exceptional quality of these Spanish-American photographers and their work. But, as Foster makes explicit in his preface, the reader should not expect a comprehensive history of the photography of the three countries in the title; instead, this is a series of essays that specifically explore “feminist, queer, and post-masculinist perspectives” in the work of a selected group of photographers. The three perspectives he lists correspond to the classic triumvirate that are viewed as generating coherent human identities and stabilizing the privilege of masculine, heterosexual males in western societies: biological sex (body), desire (sexual orientation), and gender (performance).

Certainly one of the most appealing features of this collection lies in the fact that each essay illuminates the photographic texts with detailed, subtle, and insightful readings, written in a clear, elegant, and succinct style. And while all of the essays are noteworthy in their precise study of the aesthetic, generic, sexual, and cultural aspects of the images, particularly admirable are Foster’s analysis of Stern’s magnificent photomontages, Heinrich’s surprisingly complex portraits of women, Frydlewsky’s documentary images of the cartoneros and the economically distressed in Buenos Aires, Meyer’s critical inquiry into masculine authority figures in Mexican society, López’s playful photos that illustrate issues of homosocialism and homoeroticism in Argentine culture, Zout’s tragic and disturbing images that bear witness to the aftermath of...