1900–1990

The turn of the century did not substantially alter the practice of portrait photography. Studios like those of Alejandro Witcomb (Argentina), Eugene Courret (Peru), and Melitón Rodríguez (Colombia), which had opened in the second half of the 1800s, continued to serve their clientele well into the 1900s. The new century did bring the expectation that an era of progress and material welfare was in the offing. Illustrated periodicals like Caras y Caretas (Argentina), El Cojo Ilustrado (Venezuela), Variedades (Peru), El Gráfico (Colombia), and El Universal Ilustrado (Mexico) made generous use of photographs of local events taken by photographers who also owned studios. In addition, lucrative government commissions to do visual inventories of the landscape, cities, infrastructure, and culture served as official recognition of their status as accomplished photographers. Some of these photographic surveys were published as luxurious books—Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's Argentina y susgrandezas (1910), L'état de Rio Grande du Sud (1916); El Perú en el primer centenario de su independencia (1922)—and were given by governments to influential dignitaries or potential investors. Similar books were produced by foreigners following in the romantic steps of earlier travelers. Indeed, the iconography of these three encyclopedic endeavors is strikingly similar even though in the first two it is in printed photographs and in the latter in drawings.

The influence of pictorialism in Latin America must be taken with a grain of salt because its converts are usually camouflaged and its aesthetics mediated by local concerns. Pictorialist literature from all over the world circulated widely in the continent. The magazines Foto (Barcelona) and Foto Magazine (Buenos Aires) may have been favored because they were in Spanish. These magazines contained critical articles about artistic photography, and information about new techniques and products and about international photo competitions. The pictorialist disregard for themes like technology and industry did not impress local photographers who were imbued by the spirit of modernity. Carlos and Miguel Vargas of Peru, for example, produced bromoils of romantic nocturnes in which the automobile was featured prominently. Other pictorialists include Hiram Calógero (Argentina), Pedro Ignacio Manrique (Venezuela), and Servio Tulio Barat (Venezuela).

Analogously, the post-World War I pessimism and nihilism of the European artistic avant-garde was never strong in Latin America—perhaps because the latter never experienced the devastation of that conflict but, rather, a period of relative prosperity due to increased exports to the warring nations. The iconoclasm of its own avant-garde came by way of intellectual expectations and social upheaval; most notable was the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the movement for university reform that spread across the continent during the same decade. By the 1920s, Mexican artists understood that they could not continue to do art pleasing to the taste of the regime cast away by the revolution. Agustín Víctor Casasola and his team of photographers exhaustively recorded the unraveling of the Mexican Revolution for over a decade. The epic documentalism characteristic of this work reappeared decades later in the photographic records of the Cuban Revolution, the Chilean denunciation of Augusto Pinochet's repression, the Salvadoran civil war.

Mexico holds a unique place in Latin American photography because its rich image-making tradition has been copiously enhanced by the visit of photographers like Hugo Brehme, Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Paul Strand, Sergei Eisenstein, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. In the work of Manuel Álvarez Bravo the impact of their influence is as strong as that of his own personality and the cultural idiosyncrasies that molded it. He gained international acclaim in 1938 when André Breton asked Álvarez Bravo for an image (La buena fama durmiendo) to illustrate the cover of the catalog for the International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City. As an imagemaker and instructor, Álvarez Bravo is partly responsible for the unusual number of first-rate photographers in Mexico today. Immigrant photographers have played important roles in other countries as well. The Bauhaus-trained German photographer Grete Stern and the Frenchman Anatole Sadermann had a considerable influence on the avant-garde photography of Argentina during the 1930s. The Italian Paolo Gasparini has been the most decisive force in Venezuelan photography since the 1950s.

Important features of the early Latin American avant-garde were Pan-Americanism and indigenismo. The latter was a movement aimed at reevaluating autochthonous culture—especially Indian—at a time when extremists were proposing a "final solution" for the "Indian problem." The creed of indigenismo was expressed in radical 1920s periodicals like Amauta and Kosko (Peru), and the epicenter of the movement was Cuzco. The photographic corpus now referred to as the Cuzco school had Martín Chambi as its best-known member; less known are Miguel Chani, Juan Manuel Figueroa Aznar, José Gabriel González, and Crisanto Cabrera. The work of these photographers is modern, socially mordant, and ethnographic. Although Chambi and Álvarez Bravo are considered to be the founding fathers of modern Latin American photography, Chambi's work was unearthed only in the late 1970s—after a quarter- century of oblivion.

The 1978 Primer Coloquio Latinoamericano de Fotografía, held in Mexico City, changed the course of the medium in the Americas. Although its organizers tended to promote a documentary and politically denunciatory type of image, they unified Latin American photography by bringing together people from all over the continent. By touring the exhibit Hecho en Latinoamérica, they internationalized Latin American photography, and by opening new venues of research, publication, and conservation, they cemented it. After 1978 two more colloquia took place, and among subsequent exhibitions were Fotografie Lateinamerika (curated by Erika Billeter in 1981) and FotoFest 92 (curated by Fred Baldwin and Wendy Watriss).

See alsoAlvarez Bravo, Manuel; Art: The Nineteenth Century; Art: The Twentieth Century; Chambi, Martín; Photography: The Nineteenth Century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hecho en Latinoamérica (1978).

Erika Billeter, ed., Fotografie Lateinamerika von 1860 bis heute (1981), also in Spanish, Fotografía latinoamericana: 1860 hasta nuestros días (1982).

Eduardo Serrano, Historia de la fotografía en Colombia (1983), Colección Río de Luz, 15 vols. (1984–1987); Revelaciones: The Art of Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1990).

María Teresa Boulton, Anotaciones sobre la fotografía venezolana (1990) and Martín Chambi: Fotografía del Perú, 1920–1950 (1990).

                                        Fernando Castro