Making a vital contribution to the understanding of Latin American
modernism, Esther Gabara rethinks the role of photography in the
Brazilian and Mexican avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s.
During these decades, intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil were
deeply engaged with photography. Authors who are now canonical
figures in the two countries' literary traditions looked at modern
life through the camera in a variety of ways. Mario de Andrade,
known as the "pope" of Brazilian modernism, took and collected
hundreds of photographs. Salvador Novo, a major Mexican writer,
meditated on the medium's aesthetic potential as "the prodigal
daughter of the fine arts." Intellectuals acted as tourists and
ethnographers, and their images and texts circulated in popular
mass media, sharing the page with photographs of the New Woman. In
this richly illustrated study, Gabara introduces the concept of a
modernist "ethos" to illuminate the intertwining of aesthetic
innovation and ethical concerns in the work of leading Brazilian
and Mexican literary figures, who were also photographers, art
critics, and contributors to illustrated magazines during the 1920s
and 1930s.
Gabara argues that Brazilian and Mexican modernists deliberately
made photography err: they made this privileged medium of modern
representation simultaneously wander and work against its apparent
perfection. They flouted the conventions of mainstream modernism so
that their aesthetics registered an ethical dimension. Their
photographic modernism strayed, dragging along the baggage of
modernity lived in a postcolonial site. Through their "errant
modernism," avant-garde writers and photographers critiqued the
colonial history of Latin America and its twentieth-century
formations.
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