Local Histories of Infamy: Photography, Popular Violence, and the Rehearsal of State Power in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Peru

In 1858, a private citizen named Juan Fuentes submitted a petition to the Peruvian government to create a photographic registry of the nation. Following a lengthy bureaucratic debate and several subsequent proposals, the government approved a much more limited project: Fuentes would take pictures of prisoners. This essay offers a close reading of this episode, frequently retold but unanalyzed in histories of early photography. I examine the images and text from a sample register that accompanied one of Fuentes's many petitions, situating it within the debates regarding the representation and participation of popular subjects in public life. In the most immediate sense, this artifact illustrates elites' mounting concerns about criminality, during a time of convulsive modernization brought about by the guano export boom. More broadly, the desire to photograph prisoners constitutes an effort to subvert collective popular identities, precisely as the corporatist social order, a vestige of the colonial era, is ceding rapidly to another based on individual rights and responsibilities. Beyond a merely disciplinary function, photography enacts an emergent form of state power that seeks to disaggregate its own source of legitimacy, the pueblo.