I've taught Latin American literature for many years and in many different ways, but there's one thing that has never changed. I always combine our study of literature with relevant works of visual arts, and particularly with paintings and photographs. Don’t we all move naturally among different media—different forms of expression, different ways of seeing—to understand our world? An interdisciplinary approach allows us to explore the many ways that we imagine and represent reality. Photography is a wide-ranging way to know Latin America. For this reason, I recommend that you pay close attention to the rich traditions of Latin American photography. Mix and match media, and you’ll understand the world in new and different ways.
I wrote
Image and Memory: Photography from Latin America, 1866-1994
Gertrude (Trudi) Blom (1901-1993) was a Swiss journalist, photographer, and environmental activist who went to the rain forest of Chiapas, the Mexican state bordering Guatemala, to work with the Lacandon people, a community of indigenous Mayas.
Blom was there for almost forty years, between 1941 and 1979, documenting the lives and culture of the Lacandons. Her photographs show an intense love for a vanishing culture and landscape—the lush natural environment of the Lacandons as well as their activities: agriculture, hunting, religious customs, and family structures.
Blom’s late photos document the increasing pressure on their ecosystem, and thus their way of life. These photographs inspired me to learn more about the rich cultures of Mexico’s indigenous people, and to do what we can to protect their fragile environments.
Graciela Iturbide (b. 1942) is Mexico’s most important living photographer.
Her photographs document indigenous and mestizo groups on the isthmus of Tehuantepec, including photos of Frida Kahlo dressed in the blouses (huipiles) of the women of Tehuantepec, who are known for their strength. Her work offers insights into the daily lives and customs of the Seri, Juchitán, and Mixtec people: their exuberant fiestas, processions, and most importantly, their daily lives.
She depicts animals, birds, and plants with as much sensitivity as she does people, always callng attention to the relationship of her subjects to natural phenomena. The photographs in this book were exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and there are a number of other books of Iturbide’s photographs if this one isn’t available. Her images will take your breath away.
The first book to focus on Graciela Iturbide's photographs of Mexico, capturing all of its beauties, rituals, challenges, and contradictions.
Graciela Iturbide, best known for iconic photographs of indigenous women of Mexico, has engaged with her homeland as a subject for the past fifty years in images of great variety and depth. The intensely personal, lyrical photographs collected and interpreted in this book show that, for her, photography is a way of life - as well as a way of seeing and understanding Mexico, with all its beauties, rituals, challenges, and contradictions.
The Mexican Revolution was photographed by many photographers, foreigners as well as Mexicans, whose photographs were collected by news agencies and distributed immediately in newspapers, sometimes even as the fighting was going on. Their photos record defining moments in Mexico’s history, and offer portraits of its participants: soldiers and camp followers (women and children), as well as iconic leaders Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, among others.
I love this book because it is written by a woman who lived her whole life in Mexico, experienced events of the Revolution, and knew many of its participants. Her personal account is accompanied by 184 photos that enhance her text and make events and people come alive.
The importance of this Revolution cannot be exaggerated. It engulfed much of Mexico for at least two decades (1910-1930), and claimed between 2 and 3.5 million lives. Troops advanced on horseback and trains, in dusty fields and villages, and the resulting chaos involved almost all Mexicans—men and women, rich and poor, young and old.
The Revolution aimed to install democratic institutions, restrict the power of the Catholic Church, redistribute land from large “hacendados” (haciendo owners) to the people who had worked the land for centuries, and prohibit the “re-election” of presidents so that dictators could not hold on to power beyond their single term of office. Admirable goals, indeed.
Some have been realized, and some are still in process, but what is sure is that the photographs of the Revolution are known and admired by virtually all Mexicans, and also by all who love historical photographs. I am one of them!
The Mexican Revolution began in 1910 with the overthrow of dictator Porfirio Diaz. The Wind That Swept Mexico, originally published in 1943, was the first book to present a broad account of that revolution in its several different phases. In concise but moving words and in memorable photographs, this classic sweeps the reader along from the false peace and plenty of the Diaz era through the doomed administration of Madero, the chaotic years of Villa and Zapata, Carranza and Obregon, to the peaceful social revolution of Cardenas and Mexico's entry into World War II.
Having read The Winds that Swept Mexico and seen the amazing photographs in that book, you’ll want to know more about the photographers who risked their lives to accompany Mexican troops in battle and in haphazard camps waiting for something to happen.
This book includes many photographs, but focusses on the history of the Revolution as shown in those photographs, and the processes of photography itself: how photographers worked in the early twentieth century in the midst of war, and how their photographs were collected and published as the Revolution raged on.
John Mraz is an excellent “visual historian.” I admire the way he explains how photographers got their “shots” of mounted revolutionaries and battles and camp followers—the sweethearts and wives and children who followed the troops, cooked for them, and sometimes tended to their wounds.
Mraz also explains how their photographs became instant propaganda for particular leaders and causes—and how, in this way, photography influenced the outcome of the Revolution. These photos, taken and disseminated in the midst of the fighting, are perhaps the first instance of photography as a political instrument.
You’ll come away from this book with a new sense of the power of photography to change the course of communities and countries.
The Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 is among the world's most visually documented revolutions. Coinciding with the birth of filmmaking and the increased mobility offered by the reflex camera, it received extraordinary coverage by photographers and cineastes-commercial and amateur, national and international. Many images of the Revolution remain iconic to this day-Francisco Villa galloping toward the camera; Villa lolling in the presidential chair next to Emiliano Zapata; and Zapata standing stolidly in charro raiment with a carbine in one hand and the other hand on a sword, to mention only a few. But the identities of those who created the thousands…
Photographs pretend to replicate the real, as do literary fictions, and yet both media also create their own “realities”.
This book explores how photographs, placed in fictional narratives, can distort and deceive characters (and the reader) or, to the contrary, illustrate and illuminate the story. Photographs in the hands of writers can create alternative “realities” within the fictional world or reveal the truth!
A primary example of the use of photography in fiction is the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar’s famous story “Blow up,” which was made into a movie—now a classic—directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. In Dan Russek’s book, we see a number of such “mixed media” fictions.
I love Latin American photography, and I love seeing how Latin American novelists engage this powerful medium for their own literary purposes.
Textual Exposures: Photography in Twentieth Century Spanish American Narrative Fiction examines how twentieth-century Spanish American literature has registered photography's powers and limitations, and the creative ways in which writers of this region of the Americas have elaborated in fictional form the conventions and assumptions of this medium. While the book is essentially a study of literary criticism, it also aims to show how texts critically reflect upon the media environment in which they were created. The writings analyzed enter a dialogic relation with visual technologies such as the x-ray, cinema, illustrated journalism, and television. The study examines how these technologies,…
This beautiful art book includes photographs by fifty-two photographers from ten Latin American countries. The photographs are drawn from the 1992 Fotofest exhibition in Houston, and they range over a century and a half, from the earliest photographs taken of public events in Latin America to recent experimental works: from the disastrous War of the Triple Alliance in Paraguay (1864-1870) to the opening of the Brazilian frontier in the 1880s, from documentary images from El Salvador's civil war in the 1980s to contemporary photographs of Latin American places and people. Accompanying the photographs are excellent essays about the images and the men and women who created them. There is no other collection that overarches the history of photography in Latin America.
I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.
Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…
This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.
One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…
