Hold That Pose: Visual Culture in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical (review)

In this intelligent new study Lou Charnon-Deutsch analyzes the illustrated periodical press of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain, highlighting one of the most important facets of visual culture at the turn of the century. With a particularly keen eye for visual ideology, Hold That Pose takes readers through a rich selection of beautifully reproduced images in order to underscore the cultural politics of the day, as increasing demand for images and breakthroughs in the technology of image reproduction transformed the Spanish periodical press. The book lucidly analyzes key representational conventions concerning women and non-Europeans; it charts important moments within the industrialization of image production; it analyzes one of the most popular journals of the early twentieth-century (Blanco y Negro); and it scrutinizes the visual propaganda (primarily cartooning) that accompanied Spain's late colonial conflicts. Each of the four chapters comprising this study could easily stand alone as an original, insightful monograph. Together, they represent a wide-ranging, highly suggestive, and theoretically informed inquiry into "the rise of the image" within modern Spanish culture.

The first chapter focuses on idealized representations of northern European women and, more extensively, on Orientalist images of gypsies, odalisques, Eastern European peasants, and other female "exotics." The prominent role of such images within the illustrated press (Ilustración Artística, Ilustración Ibérica, Ilustración Española y Americana, Mundo Ilustrado) prompts Charnon-Deutsch to analyze a selection in order "to show how […] a late Orientalism and a wondrous ethnicity-on-display, shared space and certain pictorial conventions, together forming an essential ingredient in the fetishistic, scopic regime of Spanish magazine graphic art" (11). The analyses are primarily informed by Marxist and Freudian understandings of fetishism. More specifically, the author explores the intriguing intersections that come into play when a commodity happens to be the exoticized image of a woman. Within the logic of presence/absence that underscores fetishism more generally, Charnon-Deutsch teases out a rich range of meanings for the images in question. In her account, these representations of women simultaneously prompt, momentarily satisfy, and also thwart male sexual, economic, and imperial desire. They are images that can be purchased, possessed, and collected, but as images they are also markers of the absence for which they stand in (in psychoanalysis, the phallus; for Marxism, "definite social relations").

In the second chapter Charnon-Deutsch turns to the material production of images within the illustrated press in order to understand "technology and its impact on image content" (46). She organizes the inquiry in terms of the rising protagonism of the photographic image within visual culture, as technological advances in photomechanical reproduction in the 1890s (heliogravure and halftone processes) lowered the costs of mass-producing photographic images. The heart of the analysis, however, takes up the fascinating transitional decades before photomechanical reproduction became the new dominant medium. It is a period in which photography was well established as a new visual medium, but it could not yet be easily transferred onto the pages of the illustrated press. Periodicals were often in fact fascinating hybrids—drawings and engravings based on photographs, or engravings with increasingly "photographic" qualities. As the author makes clear, the photograph and its visual codes initially entered the pages of the illustrated press by artisanal means, and she highlights the aesthetic and ideological effects of the "touch-ups" that accompanied the process. Artists might remove the shadow from a military officer's face or add tropical foliage to an image of troops fighting in Cuba; conversely, sketching and engraving themselves began to incorporate relatively novel "camera" angles, unexpected shadows, or expressive "close-ups," as the authority of "photographic objectivity" reorganized the entire field of image-making. The fact that the new images, and indeed photography more generally, were not as objective as they might initially have seemed is one of the chapter's critical leitmotifs.

The history of Blanco y Negro, one of the most popular and commercially successful weeklies...