A Tale of Two Postcards: An American Photographer and the Mislabeling of Mexican Revolution Images

The Mexican revolutionary generals Álvaro Obregón and Francisco (Pancho) Villa did not meet with General John J. Pershing in Nogales, Arizona, on August 26, 1914. The historic event was not photographed for posterity by Albert W. Lohn, a local Nogales photographer. Lohn, who moved to Nogales by the summer of 1913 after living in the Mexican state of Sinaloa for many years, was not an African American from Mississippi who fought as a guerrilla in the Mexican Revolution. Yet, in recent years, statements to the contrary have emerged in both local lore and, perhaps more disconcerting, in print. Both of these legends—that Lohn was an African American who fought in the Mexican Revolution and that he photographed Obregón, Villa, and Pershing in Nogales—emerged because of the mislabeling and misidentification of two postcards that were produced during Mexico's revolutionary years.

This article focuses on these two photo postcards produced during the Mexican Revolution and examines how the acceptance of information provided on the recto (front) sides at face value has led to historical misunderstandings. Much of the recent research on the photography of the conflict addresses questions concerning collective memory and mythmaking fostered by the "state-sanctioned version of history."¹ This article instead examines the development of local myths, which sometimes originated from the misidentification of images. It is not unusual for such misidentified photographs to find their way into popular and academic histories, archives, newspapers and magazines, and websites, which leads to the misrepresentation of local and regional histories.

As historian Gary Osmond has noted, "photographs are underexploited as sources by historians."² In contrast to other disciplines that have embraced visuality, such as visual studies and art history, photographs are frequently relegated to an illustrative role in historical publications, with little or no connection to texts.³ Because their meaning "is rarely self-evident," readers, therefore, necessarily rely on captions to determine the subject matter.⁴ The brief captions that accompany them in print, however, often exclude relevant details, including the photographer's name, when and where they were taken, the identity of individuals portrayed (except for well-known figures), the original presentation format, and other pertinent information.⁵ As photographs are sometimes viewed as little more than "a visual gift to the reader," researchers often rely on the photographic descriptions provided by archives, which are frequently incomplete and not always accurate.⁶

Photographs are also open to multiple interpretations and, consequently, can be easily misunderstood. This is particularly true of real photo postcards, which were actual photographs "produced from a negative chemically on photographic paper with postcard backs." They reached their height of popularity between 1907 and the onset of World War I and, until the 1920s, were primarily produced by little-known or anonymous local photographers. Like all photographs, however, they could be manipulated, embellished, staged, or appropriated by other photographers who attached their own names to them. While the recto sides of postcards often contain valuable information, including the name of the photographer, a caption, and, more rarely, the date they were taken, the data they furnish must therefore be viewed with skepticism to prevent the introduction of erroneous information into the captions that accompany them in publications. Such errors can have a number of adverse consequences as many readers first browse through the photos and captions in books and articles and, in many instances, "may never read the main text." The inclusion of inaccurate information can distort history and lead to the development of historical myths from the national to the local scale.⁷

This research is based on questions that emerged from a study of the life and work of the little-known commercial photographer Albert W. Lohn. During the first half of the twentieth century, he owned commercial photography studios in Culiacán, Mexico, and Nogales, Arizona, where he produced photo postcards as a supplement to his photography business. Neither photograph in question was taken by Lohn but he was given attribution for both and mistakenly identified in one of the images...