Portraits in the Andes

As scholars continue to question how (or if) the subaltern can speak, Jorge Coronado argues that to hear them we should focus on the medium in which each source is worth a thousand words: photography. Coronado's Portraits in the Andes asserts that photography, and photographic portraits in particular, offers an important source for understanding the agency of everyday people in the Andes to self-fashion their identity and relationship to modernity. Coronado's book is a cultural analysis of photography as well as a broader call to rethink the ways we find agency.The book is divided into six thematic chapters. The first, “Practice: Photography in the Southern Andes, 1900–1950,” sets the historical stage between 1900 and 1950, when advances in technology allowed the proliferation of affordable photo studios across the Andes. The chapter also stakes out the book's central claim: many Andean people of mestizo and indigenous descent posed for portraits to actively use the medium to assert agency by affirming their cultural identity and their place in a modernizing world. Chapter 2, “Photographs and Lettered Culture: Visual and Literary Practices in Latin America and the Andes,” argues that photography offered everyday Andeans an opportunity to express themselves outside what Coronado calls “Latin America's letter-centric heritage” (p. 34). Coronado argues that indigenismo's reliance on writing and formal art continued the exclusionary tradition of the lettered city but that photography could circumvent these restrictions. People's poses, choice of dress, and disposition as captured in the camera offered them a direct way to convey identity. These are key exercises of agency through photography, according to Coronado. Chapter 3, “Portrait,” analyzes 25 photographs depicting a wide range of social, geographic, and cultural settings and subjects who employed portraiture to exercise cultural agency.Chapter 4, “Consumption,” argues that commissioning and purchasing photographic portraits was imbued with agency because it “put consumers in the place of producing their own images, that is, of circulating in a cultural context meanings coded in a visual discourse that they had a hand in creating” (p. 148). Chapter 5, “Agency,” reaffirms this argument by first questioning how we can interpret portraits of anonymous people from the past but ultimately argues that the decision to be photographed (or to set up a business based on photography) is sufficient proof of expressing agency. In the final chapter, “The Archive Dispersed,” Coronado narrates his own experience of sharing old photographs with relatives to pose an intriguing paradox: the migration of photographs into archives preserves them for us but simultaneously erases their memory as these once-personal photographs are separated from the people who granted them meaning.This is a dense book that takes its duty to engage with a wide range of cultural theory seriously. There is little doubt that Coronado's detailed analysis will provoke much debate. One such point that might provoke argument is Coronado's dialectical positioning of the subaltern agency found in portraits against what he categorizes as the elitist lettered tradition of indigenismo. I agree that portraits allowed nonelite Andeans to directly communicate their own ideas of identity and cultural belonging without the interventions of often-elite indigenista interpreters. However, I don't know if everyday Andeans were as excluded from participating in indigenismo as Coronado appears to suggest. Work by Zoila Mendoza and many others has traced how popular classes and groups (albeit mostly urban) adopted and employed the language of indigenismo as their own popular folklore. The fact that many of the photographers analyzed by Coronado lent their photographic skills to indigenista publications and exhibitions when they weren't taking portraits suggests that the division between the two was not as stark.Similarly, I sometimes questioned Coronado's interpretation of agency as exercised mainly in opposition to elite culture. While the nonelite majority in the Andes were linked by a common subaltern status, there were significant divisions among them. While Coronado does address this in some of his analyses, I would have liked to have learned more about how portraits exposed these divisions. The fact that Coronado shows evidence in several portraits that their subjects (especially women—another intriguing question) had their faces whitened suggests that cultural agency could be employed independent of elites while still upholding larger systems of structural racism. Coronado's broad granting of agency to all those sitting for portraits sometimes obscures these divisions within popular society. Additionally, I would have liked for Coronado to analyze how photography also was employed to constrain agency. Coronado briefly includes mug shots and identification photos that were also created by the many small-town photographers for local governments and employers, which he calls an “antiportrait effect” (p. 78). I hope that in the future Coronado will apply his analysis to the ways in which the same photographic lens of agency could be turned against its subjects. I'm sure these questions will join others in new debates on culture and agency engendered by Coronado's probing book

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy) · Art · Art history · Identity (music) · Indigenous · Modernity · Photography · Political science · Portrait · Social science · Sociology · Studio · Visual arts · History · Latin American history and culture · Law

• Retratos de província

  Open Access•Beatriz Jaguaribe, Daniela Gutiérrez López•Galáxia (São Paulo•2022

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• Instances of Agency

  Open Access•Jorge Coronado•Bolivian Studies Journal/Revista…•2018

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• Introduction. Portraits choisis, portraits subis

  Open Access•Alexandra De Heering, Anne Roekens•Photographica•2022

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