created images grounded in her gendered experience as photographer and photographed subject, apprentice, and nude model. As we shall see later in photographers who pondered the question of race in modernity, the doubled and errant vision offered by photography was fundamental to Latin American avant‐garde theories and practices.
5.3 Picturing Other, Picturing Self
As noted earlier, photography can denigrate as much as laud its subjects. Mainstream photographic theory has dealt with this contradiction by pretending that there is always a clear and evident separation between subject and object, between photographer and the pictured. That is, the power of photography to laud or disparage was in the hands of certain (European male) photographers, and their point of view – racist, sexist, or not – seemed (and I emphasize seemed) embedded in the very technology that separated subject from object. Yet as we saw previously, women were not just represented by cameras but were able to coax the photographic mechanism into strange (if temporary) alliances that disrupted such divisions. These errant uses of the camera also were produced by tense collusions between European‐born (and descendent) photographers and writers with Afro‐Latin American and indigenous artists. Again, the photographs circulated between illustrated journals and art exhibits, and the camera was handed off between artists of both Euro‐American and indigenous descent.
Brazilian modernist Mário de Andrade took photographs that revealed the medium to be both the tool and the enemy of the modernist artist. The camera offered a means to research, document, and integrate both Afro‐Brazilian and Indian cultures into modern artistic practice, yet the Brazilian modernist who held it struggled to assert his or her authority.12 Although de Andrade's images of rural populations avoid a folkloric idealization of a foundational, and therefore necessarily past, native race, all of his work from poetry to music to photography made images of “the popular” central to the Brazilian modernist project. He named both indigenous and Afro‐Brazilian popular cultures as the source of regional and national identity and composed a photographic modernism that pictured a nuanced and tense vision of this act of representation in the midst of an ethnically diverse society. In literary, theoretical, and visual experiments with photography, de Andrade's photographs and resulting theory of modernism examine how race is lived without confirming its self‐evidence. De Andrade emphasized the doubled position of the modernist poet between center and periphery, between the interior of Brazil and Europe. Like Modotti, his photography and writing set forth a new definition of the aesthetic sublime from the perspective of the object of the gaze – he called it a sublime of “staring so stared‐at” – which proves crucial to Latin American modernism more broadly (de Andrade 1978, p. 55).
In Cuba, Carpentier participated in the emerging mass media discussed above, even as the culture and art of Afro‐Cuban populations inspired his first avant‐garde novel, ¡Écue‐Yamba‐Ó! (2012 [1933]). Not accidentally, this novel – unique in his oeuvre – included photographs of Cuban santería altars and religious figures (Figure 5.1). Never satisfactorily addressed in the literature on Carpentier, these photographs were not simple illustrations but part and parcel of an avant‐garde experiment that fused fiction with ethnography and journalism. They have been variously attributed to Carpentier himself (which is doubtful), to Juan Luis Martín, author of Ecué, Changó y Yemayá (1930) (Rodríguez Beltrán, in Carpentier, 2012 [1933], p. 31), and compared to the illustrations in Fernando Ortiz's Los negros brujos and Archivos del folklore cubano (Park 2012, pp. 58–59). Yet ¡Écue‐Yamba‐Ó!, unlike these other works, was emphatically an avant‐garde work, as accentuated by the exclamation points framing its title. Written while he was imprisoned for political resistance to the Machado regime, the book's images and text elaborate the elite writer's conflicted relationship with people he sees as both essentially Cuban and yet foreign to him. Carpentier's close quarters with Afro‐Cuban fellow prisoners and the arrival of the First Pan American Conference on Eugenics in Havana that same year distanced him from both the abstraction of race in European primitivism and the biological basis of race promoted by US scientists (Park 2012, p. 47).
Figure 5.1 “El Diablito se adelantó, saltando de lado … ” (The Little Devil got a move on, jumping sideways … ) In: Alejo Carpentier, ¡Écue‐Yamba‐Ó!: Novela afrocubana. Madrid: Editorial España, 1933.
It is important to note that the photographs Carpentier included were not of Afro‐Cuban people but rather portraits of altars and of religious objects, objects with special powers. Taken at eye level with no background that provides scale, the dolls and icons seem almost alive; they appear to move and breathe within the photographic space. The novel's protagonist states that the members of his community were “deceived by appearances … [by] the visible,” whereas in reality, “an object may be imbued with life” (Carpentier 1933, pp. 66–67). The caption underneath the Diablito objectively describes that enlivened object – “The Little Devil got a move on, jumping sideways” – and thus contributes to the presentation of the religious doll as alive as a real person within the stillness of a photograph. The photographs in ¡Écue‐Yamba‐Ó! are not visual evidence of some truth but themselves are powerful objects like the altars they present. In the combination of image and text, Carpentier wrestled with the risks of visuality and modernity in Cuba and contributed to an avant‐garde aesthetic that erred between truth and invention. Indeed, as much as Carpentier struggles against racist pseudoscience from the United States, ¡Écue‐Yamba‐Ó! is plagued by racist stereotypes common in Cuba, which had played a major role in the trans‐Atlantic slave trade and did not abolish slavery until 1886. The tension is never resolved in the avant‐garde novel; instead, the give and take between enlivened photographs and fictional text inserts readers into the uncomfortable and violent passages of modernity.
The dilemma of representing non‐European cultures and peoples in Latin America becomes yet more dramatic in the oeuvre of Martín Chambi, the Quechua photographer whose work made the criollo (Euro‐descendent) vanguardists of his time distinctly uncomfortable. If essayist José Carlos Mariátegui and painter José Sabogal led an indigenista avant‐garde movement that proposed that modern Peruvian identity and aesthetics emerged from the recapture of indigenous cultures, they themselves came from urban, Spanish‐speaking families.13 Despite their criticism of Chambi at the time, his images have since become icons of the country's period of modernist investigation and celebration of its indigenous population.14 Chambi's photographs nonetheless do not offer an “authentic” image of indigenous peoples untouched by time. Like his fellow vanguardists from the region, he converts a tense relationship with the camera into errant images. The process of self‐reflection is more fraught for Chambi than for his criollo counterparts, and he offers no single or undifferentiated indigenous view or image. Although some critics fantasize about achieving direct access to “lo indio” – an authentic, unchanging indigenous identity – through his images, Chambi's vision is varied and sophisticated. The range of photographs that Chambi produced cannot be confined to the figurative or allegorical representation of indigeneity: his images of Indians on motorcycles and in women's basketball teams do not stage surprise at the “primitive” handling new technology, nor do his images of them in other contexts transform them into ethnographic “types.”15 The abstract Piedra de 12 ángulos (Stone of 12 Angles, 1930) is perhaps the epitome of errant modernism: the photograph accurately, mimetically represents an abstract image of a stone that forms part of a wall in Cuzco. It engages centuries‐old Incan practices of abstraction in rock carving and in textiles, presents them as constitutive