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Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity

2010; Duke University Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2009-153

1527-1900

Juan Javier Pescador,

Photographic and Visual Arts

Looking for Mexico provides a narrative of the most important developments in the formation and makeover of Mexican culture through the visual arts, Mexican photography in particular and Mexican film to a lesser extent. Unveiling the connections between visual culture and the construction of Mexican identities at different moments in Mexican history, the author provides an insightful and at times provocative analysis of some of the most remarkable photographers of Mexican people and landscapes. From the author’s perspective, the formation of Mexican national identity has been “carried out largely through the modern visual cultures of photography, cinema and picture stories” (p. 2); consequently a dialogue with the history of images of Mexico enriches the analysis of the foundations of mexicanidad in modern times.Chapter 1 looks at the origins of photography in Mexico, from the mid-nineteenth century to the consolidation of the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship and the flourishing of commercial photography. Chapter 2 discusses visual culture in the revolutionary period (1910–40), featuring in detail the Casasola family’s entrepreneurial activities in those turbulent times as well as the emergence of artistic photography in the country with Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, and Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Chapter 3 deals with actors and directors of Mexican cinema and their contributions as icons of postrevolutionary Mexican nationalism in the 1940s and 1950s. Here the author also describes the first steps toward an independent and critical photographic practice made by Hector Garcia and the Mayo brothers, pioneers of critical photojournalism in Mexico. Chapter 5 offers a vivid narrative of contemporary developments in visual culture in accordance with the developments of new Latin American cinema and the new photojournalism. This chapter generously stretches to the first decade of the twenty-first century to discuss present-day trends.Looking for Mexico presents the reader with a meticulous overview of the most prominent photographers in the country and their connections with contemporary social and political events. It is informative, written in an engaging style, and presented following clear and distinctive periods in Mexican cultural history. Unfortunately, the theoretical framework needed to analyze both visual arts and the processes of national identity formation seems to be somewhat missing from the picture. While the biographical information on photographers, filmmakers, and even movie stars and showbiz celebrities is abundant, the actual artwork and its analysis are not thoroughly represented. The manuscript reads at times as a collection of biographic/epic notes on different prominent figures of Mexican cinema and other artists, taking the reader on a guided tour of Mexican celebrities in cinema and photography. A similar problem affects the discussion of Mexi-can national identity in the book. While the connections between films, photography, ideologies, and identities are definitely an unexplored and intriguing area in Mexican culture, the process of identity formation through the visual arts is not addressed in the book. The author seems to be satisfied instead with the identification of different authors and their work in simple binary oppositions such as picturesque and antipicturesque, nationalist and nonnationalist, and folkloric and authentic. Issues of gender, ethnicity, class, and immigration are certainly missing in the discussion of different versions of mexicanidad, while the ideological/cultural lenses and filters of American photographers and filmmakers working in Mexico are rarely addressed. The photographic practices of women artists in Mexico — for instance, Mariana Yampolsky, Graciela Iturbide, or Flor Garduño — are either not analyzed or are easily dismissed as “exotic” or “driven for foreign audiences.”Moreover, the criteria for including some artists and media and excluding others seem to follow no particular consistency when it comes down to the connections with Mexican identity. If the book’s purpose is to unveil the foundations of Mexican national identity in visual culture, why are television and popular magazines not included, while photographers with little appeal for the general public are studied in detail? Who could argue that Televisa’s soap operas and sitcoms, and the Alarma or the Santo movies did not have a much more significant role in the construction of particular Mexican identities than for instance Edward Weston, Julie Taymor, or Paul Strand? It seems that the latter group has been pivotal in the creation of identities for those looking into Mexico, but not necessarily in the forging of Mexican identities for people of Mexican descent. A distinction between Mexicanists and Mexicans is never addressed in the manuscript.Nonetheless, John Mraz’s book constitutes a significant step in our understanding of Mexican photography in the twentieth-century Mexican landscape. The sections on contemporary photographers, from Hector Garcia to Pedro Meyer and from Manuel Alvarez Bravo to the rise of photojournalism in Mexico, are particularly noteworthy.