to 2000, relied upon the Casasolas' archive of images of the war's battles and protagonists in their effort to transform the historical representation of chaotic civil war into the celebrated Mexican Revolution. Out of a photographic archive filled with images of death and displacement, the PRI composed a triumphant narrative of modernization that would govern narratives of Mexican history until today.
Photography, therefore, has the potential to create hegemonic images as much as to resist them. We see these divergent possibilities especially clearly in images of indigenous, black, and female bodies in the 1920s and 1930s. During a period marked by the centralization of state power and strong nationalist discourse, photography moved errantly from its role as an instrument to categorize hierarchies of racial types to experiments that challenged both the possibility of distinguishing “races” and the privilege enjoyed by those declared to be “white.” Similarly, as much as photography continued an art historical tradition that treated women as objects of desire, the accessibility of the camera led to fantasies, fears, and the reality of women photographers who could present other images of women, and of modern society more broadly. In what follows, we see how these errant pictures offer a mode of critically passing through modernity.
5.2 The Gender of Modernity9
Throughout the avant‐garde decades across the continent, the connection between photography and women was cemented in illustrated journals, in which she is photographer and editor as well as the photographic subject. As I have shown in depth elsewhere, although examples of “art photography” began to appear in Mexican exhibitions of the now well‐known work of Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, theories of modernist photographic aesthetics were still profoundly tied to other uses of the medium. The fluid boundaries between types of photographic practice appear in the constant crossover between press and art photography. Despite early exhibitions of “art” photography – or fotografía de autor – in the 1920s, it was common to see the same photographs shown in these exhibitions reproduced in illustrated journals. In Mexico, Salvador Novo, a member of the avant‐garde group known as the Contemporáneos, declared photography to be the “prodigal daughter of art” implicitly connecting its popular reproduction with femininity (Novo 1931, p. 169). The other leading avant‐garde group in Mexico, the Estridentistas, combined photograph and literary experimentation in the popular weekly supplement, El Universal Ilustrado, which explicitly addressed its large readership of women. The photography journal Imagen defined itself as a hybrid space, in which the editors make photography central but the photographs range from works by the icon of Mexican modernist photography, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, to Hollywood studio photographs.
Mexico was not at all alone in the importance of photographically illustrated women's journals and the importance of femininity in the theory and practice of avant‐garde photography and literature. In countries as diverse as Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, the rapid growth of a national mass media opened up an important new cultural space whose character was largely defined by the inclusion of experiments with photography and graphic design. These publications combined avant‐garde and popular, texts and images, with an appeal to modern women as both citizens and consumers. Jorge Luis Borges, perhaps the most‐read Latin American writer inside and outside the region, began publishing during the period of the modernist avant‐garde and also contributed for many years to the popular illustrated magazine El Hogar. Although several anthologies containing these texts have been published, they tend to downplay his investment in them and do not analyze them as serious sites for artistic experimentation.10 El Hogar included style tips for middle‐class women, tourist sections, and a view on a kind of cosmopolitan life to which the emerging middle class aspired in many countries. It also included reviews of avant‐garde literature, music, and art. In Brazil, Mário de Andrade declared in an essay on modernist aesthetics: “Through the journal we are omnipresent” (A Escrava que Não é Isaura 1980 [1925], p. 265). The pages of illustrated journals for women, where photography and text coexisted, were fundamentally important in the history of modernism in the region.
Alejo Carpentier, famed Cuban author of the theory of an American literary real maravilloso (marvelous real), began his literary career publishing in popular media including women's journals such as Chic. He was the editorial director and a regular contributor to Carteles. In addition to articles about new art and music from around the world published under his own name in Social, from 1925 to 1927 he initiated a section dedicated to women's fashion written under the pseudonym “Jacqueline.” He did this popular work simultaneously with his initiation into the Cuban avant‐garde. During the same year, he published in the journal Revista de Avance, signed the manifesto “Declaración del Grupo Minorista,” and wrote the first draft of the radical novel ¡Écue‐Yamba‐Ó! while he was imprisoned for having signed a Communist workers' manifesto. What Carpentier and the others make so fascinating and clear, then, is that Latin American avant‐garde and modernity are figured in the pages of these different publications through the shapes of photographed women.
It is crucial to note that women were not only and easily the subjects featured in modern photography. Familiar expectations of femininity were troubled in these pages, and women artists held the camera in their hands and played very active roles in the creation of the illustrated journals directed at women readers. In Argentina, the editorial director of the illustrated journal Sur was Victoria Ocampo, who from the second issue in 1931 emphasized the number of “láminas de fotografías documentales y artísticas” (artistic and documentary photographic plates) by landmark photographers Horacio Coppola, Víctor Delhez, and a Mexican called only Agustín, who may have been the famed Agustín Jiménez. In Mexico, the director of publication of El Universal Ilustrado in its early years, immediately preceding Carlos Noriega Hope, was María Luisa Ross. Through photography, women took unprecedented control over the printed page.
Tina Modotti's work is exemplary of an errant and “feminine” photographic avant‐garde. Born in Italy and raised in California, she rightly has entered the canon of Mexican art photography as well as that of the politically engaged avant‐garde artists in Latin America. Her entire photographic career took place in Mexico, and it is quite clear that the country's postrevolutionary debates over the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of modernity indelibly marked her artistic production. Modotti arrived in Mexico in 1923, initially as the apprentice and lover of famed US photographer Edward Weston, but she ultimately parted ways with him over questions of sexual liberation as well as of art and politics. Her oeuvre includes intimate portraits of leading figures in avant‐garde art and letters and of Tehuana indigenous women living in matriarchal societies, as well as self‐portraits posing in their embroidered clothing. Modotti captured technological innovations such as telegraph wires and typewriters, as well as artisanry including puppets and baskets. Large sports stadiums that gathered the masses of people who contributed to the idea of a modern state were paired with images of the oppression of indigenous people who suffered its violence.
As a photographer and a model, Modotti played as much as captured the New Woman, the figure of a radical and liberated femininity that spanned the globe. She was declaredly interested in sexual experimentation, independent from traditional social and economic structures (she made a living from her photography), and active in communist politics in Mexico and internationally. Modotti's work as a nude model for Weston has been interpreted as evidence of her submission to her older mentor and lover. Yet when considered in the context of her broader experimentation with photography, sexuality, and modern femininity, her activity as a model reveals an active participation in the photographic process, just from the position of the subject pictured rather than that of the photographer or viewer.11 Her composition of an active subject of the photographic image more broadly orients her eventual break from Weston. No reductive understanding of her “political” images versus his formalist ones works here: Modotti took monumental, highly aestheticized photographs of icons of the Communist Party. Sarah Lowe observes that Weston's Mexico was “monumental” whereas