Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (review)

Although photography began to emerge as an important genre of cultural production in major centers in Latin America before the onset of high modernism, it is Gabara's proposition that it becomes an integral part of high modernism in Brazil and Mexico, where one can begin to identify major artists of the genre. Moreover, photography for the Latin American modernist meant a sort of "correcting the record," particularly in Brazil and Mexico-countries considered by the European to be "exotic" and which, in turn, promoted foreign tourism and, consequently, a foreign interpretation that was often quite notable and quite determinant-where the artist felt constrained to provide a proper autochthonous interpretation. At the same time, this interpretation involved both the photographing of the details of modernity itself, but as well using the camera as part of the way in which modernism was interpreting national cultural phenomena that held a complex relationship to modernity, such as indigenous cultures. Where the latter were mostly ignored by modernism in the United States and Argentina, in both Brazil and Mexico, indigenous societies were viewed as part of the national fabric.

What is important about Gabara's contribution is not just the recovery of the photographic record of modernism in Brazil and Mexico, which would in itself be a significant undertaking, since historical and interpretive work on photography in Latin America is very much in its initial stages, with scant analytical bibliography available on even the most important arts. Rather it lies with integrating photography in the overall primary literary project of the period. Or, to put it differently, Latin American cultural studies has mostly privileged the written word, although the study of modernism in Mexico has also included pictorial and plastic arts. Photography, however-and this despite the way in which the camera is often a recurring motif, especially with reference to tourism-has remained unstudied as both a genre in its own right and as part of the repertory of genres that function in tandem with other more recognized and studied art forms. Elena Poniatowska's Tinísima puts the Italian photographer Tina Modotti at the center for the Mexican Contemporaneous, but aside from catalogue texts, there is little in the way of a sustained analysis of her photographs.

Gabara's study works off of the troping of the verb err and its morphological derivations. She speaks of the use of the camera as a wandering tracking of culture, especially as it moves through complicated geographic spaces, and as a process of error, of getting things wrong, in many senses, but I think the most important one of which was how the photograph can never quite be circumscribed in the way in which a literary texts or a painting can be: there is an inevitable excess in even the most planned photographs, and the photographer is often at a loss as to what to do with the unplanned insertions (and omissions) of the photograph. And too, literature and painting could be experimental in their stance vis-à-vis a long tradition of such artistic genres, but photography did not yet have a tradition toward which to assume a contestational and experimental stance. It was as much trial-and-error as it was conscious artistic creation.

Of particular interest here is the Brazilian dimension of Errant Modernism. Gabara finds a powerful eloquence in Mário de Andrade's photographic projects that took him across Brazil in the late twenties, the journal of which were published under the title of O turista aprendiz in 1927. Andrade tropes specifically the verb errar, in the sense of wandering and in the sense of error, as his photographic project, both its written texts and its visual ones-and the relationship of artistic collage between them-involve "simultaneously reproducing and parodying the genre [of landscape painting] natural to colonizers, naturalist explorers, and even members of the international avant-garde who visited Brazil . . ." (37). Andrade's very use of he word aprendiz...