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R e v i e w E s s ay
M e x i c a n Ph o t o g r a p h y : F r o m t h e
Daguerreotype t o D igital Images
Rubén Gallo
Princeton University

g ab ar a, es th er . Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico

and Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008. xii ⴐ 260 pp.

m ra z, jo hn . Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Iden-

tity. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009. xiv ⴐ 343 pp.

t e j a d a , r o b e r t o . National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image

Environment. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. 214 pp.

The last year has seen an explosion of interest in Mexican photography. In

addition to the three books reviewed in this article, Leonard Folgarait published
the excellent study Seeing Mexico Photographed: The Work of Horne, Casasola,
Modotti, and Álvarez Bravo (Yale, 2008). These scholarly contributions have turned
this once marginal research subject into a rapidly growing field.
Gabara, Mraz, and Tejada choose different timeframes and methodologies to
study nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican photography (Mraz also dis-

Hispanic Review (winter 2011) j 135

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136 i h is pa ni c r ev ie w : winter 2011

cusses film, and Gabara examines literary texts and other documents in her book).
Mraz focuses exclusively on Mexico, Tejada highlights images that reveal the com-
plex relationship between Mexico and the United States, and Gabara offers a com-
parative study of Mexico and Brazil as sites for the production of modern images
and texts.
Tejada’s book is the result of extensive research in photography archives based
in Mexico and the United States. His study opens with a discussion of a series of
little-known photographs from the Casasola archive documenting the 1909 meet-
ing between Porfirio Dı́az, the president overthrown by the 1911 Revolution, and
William H. Taft, his American counterpart. This historical summit took place in
the border town of Ciudad Juárez, and Tejada reads the photographs as cultural
products straddling other symbolic borders: ‘‘The political contour between Mex-
ico and the United States can be measured in part by the meetings that take place
in the time zone of relation I call the ‘shared image environment’ ’’ (8). Tejada’s
study spans the twentieth century and goes from photographs of the Porfiriato to
photoconceptual experiments produced in the late 1990s.
Of the three books, Tejada’s includes the most illustrations: 71, compared to
Gabara’s 67 and Mraz’s 53 photos. To read this vast archive, Tejada deploys a
theoretical approach informed by British cultural studies—especially the work of
Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams—and feminism. He has also been inspired by
Eduardo Cadava’s Words of Light, one of the classic studies of photography and
history.
Tejada’s approach is ambitious; in fact, at times it seems overly ambitious. In
the best of cases, his theoretical framework generates novel interpretations of well-
known images. His discussion of gender dynamics at play in the work of Tina
Modotti and Edward Weston, for instance, offers an insightful reading of Modotti’s
Hands Resting on Tool (1927) that highlights the gender ambiguity of the repre-
sented subject: do these hands belong to a man or a woman? What elements allow
us to mark these hands as male or female, masculine or feminine? Building on the
work of Andrea Noble, Tejada suggests that Modotti was consciously creating some
gender trouble for her viewers. This section also includes an original and compel-
ling reading of Weston’s photographs of chilies (Pepper, 1929) as images of dis-
placed eroticism: ‘‘What are we to make,’’ Tejada asks, ‘‘of . . . the vaguely
autoerotic, possibly homoerotic, polymorphous pairings of his 1929 Peppers?’’ He
suggests that ‘‘one need only refer to Weston’s Daybooks where on July 13, 1929 he
wrote, ‘I have been working so enthusiastically with the two peppers—stimulated
as I have not been for months,’ to find evidence of his sexual investment in these
photographs’’ (73).
Tejada’s application of theories and concepts developed by Hall and Williams
are, on the whole, less successful than his use of feminist criticism, as they tend to
obscure the historical specificity and cultural context of the Mexican photographs.

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In most cases, there is too little attention paid to the image itself—not enough close
readings of the photographs included in the book—which is often treated as an
illustration of a theoretical point. In his reading of Álvarez Bravo’s Two Pairs of Legs
(1928–1929), for instance, Tejada links this photograph of a billboard featuring two
pairs of legs to the ‘‘public signage and commercial endorsements in Mexico City
[that] contributed to forging what Raymond Williams describes as ‘the new rela-
tionships of the metropolis, and the inescapable new uses in newspapers and adver-
tising attuned to it, [which] forced certain productive kinds of strangeness and
distance’ ’’ (106). But wouldn’t it have been more productive to analyze the numer-
ous oppositions at play in the photograph—between high and low, modern and
traditional, original and imitation, male and female, top and bottom—in light of the
contradictions produced by the postrevolutionary modernization of Mexico City?
Out of the four chapters in Tejada’s book, the first three are the most successful.
The first is devoted to the Casasola archive and the Mexican Revolution; the sec-
ond, to Weston and Modotti; and the third to Álvarez Bravo’s Mexico City. The
fourth examines Boystown: La Zona de Tolerancia, a collection of recent photo-
graphs of border-town cantinas and cabarets, and seems out of place in a book
chiefly devoted to the first half of the twentieth century. But Tejada’s book does
manage to expand the existing archive of Mexican photography and to propose a
series of conceptual and theoretical tools to interpret these images.
Even more ambitious is Gabara’s Errant Modernism, a three-hundred-page vol-
ume analyzing the modern era and its relation to visual culture in both Brazil and
Mexico. Gabara includes a treasure trove of unknown and little-known materials,
including a series of travel photographs taken by Mário de Andrade in the 1920s,
numerous photo essays from El Universal Ilustrado, as well as documents and pho-
tographs discovered in various Mexican and Brazilian archives. Errant Modernism
is an impressive feat of archival research, and it brings to light much photographic
material that will alter our vision of twentieth-century Mexican cultural history.
Like Tejada’s National Camera, Gabara’s Errant Modernism might seem overly
ambitious in its scope: it includes a chapter on Mário de Andrade’s photographic
landscapes, another on Andrade’s portraiture, and a third on Brazilian advertising
and popular culture in the 1930s; there are also three chapters on Mexico: one on
photo essays, one on modernist experimental novels, and an epilogue devoted, for
the most part, to the fascinating episode of Don Carlos Balmori (more on this
later).
To analyze this vast compilation of materials—textual and photographic—
Gabara introduces a series of theoretical concepts: ‘‘the ethos of modernity,’’
‘‘errant modernism,’’ and ‘‘las bellas artes públicas.’’ The metaphor of ‘‘errant
modernism’’—a modernism that wanders, strays, and errs, arriving in places like
Mexico and Brazil, and producing works that could be considered ‘‘erred’’ when

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138 i h is pa ni c r ev ie w : winter 2011

confronted with their mainstream counterparts—is especially useful for thinking

through the relation between European and Latin American movements. Other
concepts—including ‘‘las bellas artes públicas,’’ a pun on the contrast between
the Spanish expressions ‘‘hombres públicos,’’ which translates as ‘‘statesmen,’’ and
‘‘mujeres públicas,’’ a euphemism for prostitutes—are less successful and feel
rather forced (‘‘the bizarre sound of the phrase [las bellas artes públicas] in Spanish
is proper to the collapse of the assumed contradiction between fine art and popular
culture . . . and to the gender of the public sphere’’ [145], Gabara notes).
Gabara’s most compelling chapter is titled ‘‘Essay: Las bellas artes públicas, Pho-
tography, and Gender in Mexico’’ and contains a wealth of photographic material
culled from El Universal Ilustrado, Rotográfico, and other weeklies published in the
1920s and 1930s. Her most original contribution is bringing to light these forgotten
pieces that unite photography and text in an era of modernist experimentation
with the association between word and image. The ‘‘photo essay’’ is a distinct
genre in postrevolutionary Mexican culture, one that reveals much about literary
and artistic debates. In recent years a number of young scholars have successfully
mined El Universal Ilustrado—Viviane Mahieux has recently published a study of
Cube Bonifant, one of the few women who published chronicles of daily life in
this weekly—and have shown that its articles were crucial to understanding the
cultural context in which figures as diverse as Diego Rivera, Tina Modotti, Edward
Weston, the Contemporáneos and Estridentistas lived and worked.
One of the weak points of Gabara’s study is the lack of close readings: her book
presents too much material and spends too little time analyzing it. And often the
analysis is clouded by the use of concepts like ‘‘las bellas artes públicas’’ in lieu of
a careful reading situating the pieces within a literary, artistic, and historical con-
text. A discussion of three articles published in El Universal Ilustrado by Xavier
Villaurrutia and others, all devoted to masks, leads to the observation that
‘‘[m]asks and photographs create faces that are not faces, portraits that gesture . . .
to another sublime: a strangely functional modernist aesthetics. The bellas artes
públicas, like the mujer pública, are defined by their work rather than by their
pure form or beauty’’ (185). Such a reading misses an important point: masks were
a constant reference in the art and literature of the postrevolutionary period; they
were represented by photographers, painted by muralists, and led to Octavio Paz’s
famous analysis of ‘‘máscaras mexicanas’’ in El laberinto de la soledad.
On the other hand, Gabara has an excellent eye and a talent for finding and
reconstructing lost episodes of cultural history. One of the most successful
moments in the book comes in the epilogue, where she discusses the character of
Don Carlos Balmori. Though the name evokes the Porfirian aristocracy, Balmori
was actually a pseudonym used by Conchita Jurado, a cross-dressing performance
artist avant la lettre who organized subversive parties, known as balmoreadas, dur-
ing the course of which an unsuspecting victim from the establishment was duped

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into the game. During a typical balmoreada, ‘‘Jurado entered dressed as Balmori
and pretended to be interested in the [victim] for some kind of commercial ven-
ture—an investment, a job, a gift—or commonly, offered himself as the wealthy
husband for a single—or even engaged—woman.’’ In the end, ‘‘Conchita revealed
her identity and thus the greed to which the generally middle-class victim had
surrendered’’ (241).
Gabara discovered a series of photographs of Conchita Jurado at the Biblioteca
Nacional—they were hidden inside a copy of Grand Deception: The World’s Most
Spectacular and Successful Hoaxes, Impostures, Ruses, and Frauds that once
belonged to Rafael Heliodoro Valle—and used them to reconstruct the history of
Don Carlos Balmori, an episode that will certainly alter our understanding of gen-
der dynamics in the Mexican avant-garde.
Out of the three books, the most compelling is John Mraz’s Looking for Mexico.
Mraz is the author of Nacho López, Mexican Photographer (Minnesota, 2003), a
monograph on an important but little-known photographer active in the 1940s,
and has published numerous articles on various episodes of Mexican photographic
history. The number as well as the quality of his publications over the past decade
is impressive, especially given the fact that he has been living in Puebla, Mexico,
where he teaches at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, far away
from major research libraries and photo archives (the main photography archive
in Mexico is the Fototeca Nacional in Pachuca).
Looking for Mexico is an overview of Mexican photography, beginning with the
introduction of the daguerreotype in the nineteenth century and ending with
Pedro Meyer’s digital photographs of the 1990s. The book’s premise is extremely
simple—to present the history of photography as it relates to the passionate
debates about Mexican identity that dominated the cultural landscape from the
1890s to the 1950s—but one that allows the author to concentrate on the images
themselves, providing an erudite analysis that illuminates their relation to Mexican
history, politics, and cultural debates. ‘‘Identity construction in Mexico,’’ Mraz
writes, ‘‘has been carried out largely through the modern visual cultures of photog-
raphy, cinema, and picture histories’’ (2).
The book is divided into five chapters. The first one deals with the photographic
representations of the French Intervention (1864–1867) and the Porfirian regime;
the second focuses on the Revolution and covers the years 1910–1940; the third
explores moving images and Mexican cinema of the golden age; the fourth analyzes
illustrated magazines and ‘‘historias gráficas;’’ and the fifth is devoted to photogra-
phy since 1968. The book is impeccably researched, and the images are discussed
in the context of the artistic, literary, cultural, and political debates framing their
production.
Mraz not only displays an encyclopedic knowledge of Mexican photography; he
also proposes extremely original, insightful, and creative ways of organizing and

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making sense of this vast archive. In chapter two, for instance, he suggests that
during the Revolution of 1910–1920 every caudillo chose a favorite photographer,
who was then granted access to important events and meetings. ‘‘Some of Mexico
City’s more established image makers,’’ he argues, ‘‘appear to have sided with
whoever was in power’’ (64). His discussion of Mexican cinema includes equally
novel insights, such as the fact that Emilio ‘‘el Indio’’ Fernández was influenced by
Eisenstein’s technique through the photographer Luis Márquez; or his association
of film stars with national types, where Cantinflas represented the pelado, Tin Tan
the pachuco, Jorge Negrete the charro, and Dolores del Rı́o the long-suffering
woman (120). Mraz suggests that the beloved popular comic actor Cantinflas began
by making extremely subversive films in which the urban poor used language—the
fast-paced use of language known as ‘‘cantinfleo’’—as an instrument of subversion
against the rich and powerful.
The chapter on illustrated magazines includes a brilliant discussion of the acts
of censorship launched by the PRI governments: the case of the ‘‘coup’’ orches-
trated by the government against the editor of Excélsior, the country’s most
respected newspaper at the time, is well known, but Mraz presents other compel-
ling examples, including the shutdown of journals like Hoy and Presente under the
presidency of Miguel Alemán.
In the same chapter, Mraz presents a fascinating critique of the myths surround-
ing the Casasola archive, a vast repository of hundreds of thousands of negatives
assembled by the Casasola family and now housed in Mexico’s Fototeca Nacional
in Pachuca. The Casasolas owned a successful press agency and sold photos to the
country’s newspapers beginning in the early years of the twentieth century. A selec-
tion of these images has been published under the title Historia gráfica de la Revolu-
ción Mexicana (Trillas, 1960) and has served as the main archive for scholars
interested in the photographic depictions of Mexican history. Gabara and Tejada,
for instance, take many of their images from this archive.
While the Casasolas always presented their work as an impartial, objective, and
balanced photographic representation of Mexican history, Mraz shatters this myth
by uncovering, through careful research, the political and economic interests at
play in most of these images. First, he demonstrates that some of the photos have
been claimed by the Casasolas but were actually taken—and even published else-
where—by other photographers. Second, he reveals that far from presenting an
objective document of the armed struggle, the photographs tend to favor the cau-
dillos or presidents in power at the time. Far from providing a critical view of
history, the archive is tainted by presidencialismo, the age-old custom of courting
the favor of Mexican presidents. Mraz shows how this presidencialista tendency
continued until the 1980s: during the tenure of President Miguel de la Madrid
(who later became editor of the powerful publisher Fondo de Cultura Económica),

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the government spent large sums to print tens of thousands of copies of Historia
gráfica de la Revolución Mexicana. By looking closely at the photographs in the
archive, and questioning the captions published in the Historia gráfica, Mraz is
able to highlight some disturbing instances of outright ideological manipulation.
‘‘Where I see Mexico’s extreme class differences . . . Casasola saw only the ‘abuses’
by the underdogs. He would bring in the same sort of perspective of representing
the 1968 student movement in his next, and final, version of the Historia gráfica de
la Revolución Mexicana, where he inveighs against the ‘aggression’ of the students
against the police and army’’ (200).
Such an exposure of the powerful economic and political interests behind the
Casasola archive will change the way future scholars approach the Fototeca Nacio-
nal and other photographic collections. After reading Mraz’s sharp and informed
critique, one wonders why no one had thought of asking these questions in the
more than three decades since the archive has been mined by scholars, critics, and
historians alike.
Mraz offers the following conclusion to his book: ‘‘Over the past 150 years or
so, modern visual culture has increasingly become the site where Mexican identi-
ties have been constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed. In this process, the
credibility generated by technical images, their massive distribution, and their con-
struction of celebrities has been fundamental’’ (250).
There is one small lacuna in Mraz’s book, also found in Gabara’s and Tejada’s
publications. The three authors spend too little time discussing the work of Manuel
Álvarez Bravo, the most important photographer—at least as far as institutional
recognition is concerned—in Mexico. His photographs are fascinating commen-
taries on modern Mexico, and despite the many exhibitions and publications
devoted to him, they are still waiting for a creative scholar to offer detailed close
readings and careful analyses of what these images tell us about Mexican history,
Mexican modernity, and Mexican politics. John Mraz would be the ideal author
for such a focused analysis.
Looking for Mexico is brilliantly researched, passionately argued, and beautifully
written. It will become the definitive history of Mexican photography. No other
available book is as broad and as informed. (Oliver Debroise’s Mexican Fugue
[Texas, 2001], which also presents itself as a comprehensive history of Mexican
photography, is nowhere near as comprehensive or as well documented).
These three books make an essential reading list for an upper-level course on
Mexican photography. They allow the reader to witness the development of a new
field, and they pave the way for future dissertations and academic publications on
the subject.

r ub én ga ll o
Princeton University

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