Mexico

This is a coffee-table book. It will be disappointing to anybody who really wants to know about the Casasolas and their famous photographic archive, although the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores found it useful as a Christmas present for diplomats and bureaucrats under the more appropriate title, Mirada y memoria: Archivo fotográfico Casasola. It is a Mexican custom for secretariats, banks, and large corporations to bestow picture books as gifts for their patrons, despite the fact that they are often not worth the expensive paper on which they are printed. (One notable exception is El ojo de vidrio: Cien años de fotografía del México indio, coordinated by Jaime Vélez Storey and published by Bancomex in 1993.)Mexico: The Revolution and Beyond is particularly unsatisfactory, and the book’s many shortcomings begin with the opening essay by Pete Hamill, an undistinguished journalist who knows little of Mexican history and nothing whatsoever about photography. Why this individual was chosen to write the text is unfathomable. Photographic investigation in Mexico is undergoing a boom, and several researchers could have provided an intelligent introduction, including Ignacio Gutiérrez, Rebeca Monroy, Patricia Massé, or Ariel Arnal. The Fototeca’s director, Rosa Casanova, is a first-rate scholar, and her note at the book’s end (written with Sergio Raúl Arroyo) makes one wish that she had more input into this project. Hamill’s incompetence is evidenced in his citing of famous photographers as if they constituted a genealogy of influences for Agustín Víctor Casasola. He believes that Casasola was “surely aware” of Eugène Atget, the French photographer who was almost completely unknown until years after Casasola’s death (p. 16). Hamill insists that Casasola “must have seen the photographs of Jacob Riis,” ignorant of the fact that not even Lewis Hine was cognizant of Riis’s work (p. 16). Though Hamill understands that the Casasolas were photojournalists, he fails to then recognize the irrelevance of traditional art history methods for the study of this medium, and he is incapable of contextualizing their images. When Hamill attempts to venture into the even more difficult terrain of photohistory (as opposed to the history of photography), the results are laughable: he asserts that the celebration of Francisco Madero’s triumph was “certainly not unanimous” and bases this observation on a tiny figure at the edge of one photo who was “clearly unhappy” (p. 17). The man’s face is undiscernable, and, even if it were, his opinion of Madero could hardly be determined from a photograph.The book’s editor, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, is a pillar of photographic culture in Mexico, but he is neither a historian nor a researcher. Hence, those who know the publications where Casasola photos have appeared will find little new imagery here. Moreover, the photohistory Ortiz Monasterio constructs is a continuation of the positivist chronicles that constitute the Casasolas’s famous historias gráficas. The descriptive cutlines that accompany the pictures are better than nothing, but not by much. And, Ortiz Monasterio’s attempt to connect A. V. Casasola to a cultural sphere he did not inhabit—opening the book with a photograph of him with the poet Amado Nervo—is an obfuscation of Casasola’s subsistence as a photojournalist.The Aperture publication reproduces all the faults of the Mexican book while contributing new errors. The subtitle alleges that the photographs are by Agustín Víctor Casasola, in spite of the fact that it is now common knowledge that the Casasola Archive is composed of imagery made by some 480 different photographers. This is in keeping with the Aperture emphasis on authorship—even where inapplicable—as well as its tradition of producing “light” picture books with superficial texts. The fact that A. V. Casasola died in 1937 makes the chronology of the title ridiculous.The Casasola Archive is extraordinarily important to Mexican photohistory and the study of photojournalism. Nonetheless, it has been difficult to carry out research on this collection, which is housed in Pachuca and is carefully protected. In recent years, much of the archive has been digitalized, facilitating consultation. However, images are only half the story of photojournalism; in order to study this medium, the pictures must be returned to the contexts for which they were made and within which their meanings are created. Unfortunately, many of the periodicals that published Casasola photos have disappeared, and scholars are reluctant to invest the time required to “enroot” the pictures. The Casasola Archive deserves better than this picture book; hopefully it will someday get its due

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