Photographic Propaganda under Peronism, 1946–55

This article analyses a representative selection of photographs from the Archivo General de la Nación Argentina produced by an army of photographers who assiduously chronicled Eva and Juan Domingo Perón’s public engagements. These images were shrewdly informed by an array of popular forms (tango lyrics, the storylines of photo–romances, movies, and radio serials), and by a set of visual models borrowed from the nineteenth-century photography tradition, commercial photography studios of celebrities, Hollywood fashion codes, Soviet-related paradigms anchored in the legacy of the socialist and anarchist movements of early twentieth-century Argentina, and from royal and religious iconography. Through their careful staging before the camera, Perón and Eva amalgamated these visual traditions with their political content in order to reach and unify the multiple socio-political constituencies of Argentina at the time. The conventional aesthetic – in terms of view angles, lighting, and composition – of such images granted their movement a patina of legitimacy and the sense of an enduring legacy

Art · Art history · Hollywood · Iconography · Legitimacy · Literature · Lyrics · Photography · Political science · Politics · Studio · Visual arts · Cinema History and Criticism · Law · Memory, violence, and history · Photographic and Visual Arts

• Playing across the Andes

  Open Access•Pedro Acuña•Journal of Latin American Studies•2019

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