The photograph in Mexico in the years 1839 to 1970
In December 1839, the corvette Flore landed at the port of Veracruz, the French businessman Louis preliminary. Among the objects that brings to sell in his shop in Mexico City highlights some daguerreotype apparatus. Following the example of Jacques Louis Daguerre Mandé, performed immediately exhibits in public a little over an hour recorded sites that marked the horizon and the pace of life in the harbor. In January 1840, repeats this operation in Mexico City. Playing in luck with the dealer and engraver run the first preliminary view of the country. In the not too lucky shots but full details of the footprint is preserved, almost physically, of the space, one of the fascinating features of these images are unique in copper foil. Opens, then the path for the development of photography in Mexico.
With this testimony open the 285-page book imagery and photography in Mexico 1839-1970 (Lunwerg Publishers), coordinated by Emma Cecilia Garcia Krinski, with the support of collections, such as the National INAH Photo Library, the Archives of General Nation and the Center for Studies University (CESU) of the UNAM, as well as private archives, artists and photographers, who ceded the rights to reproduce the images in this volume.
In this work, the art historian Rosa Casanova wrote the chapter "light and portraits: the construction of a photographic portfolio in Mexico 1839-1890". Commented to El Financiero that years before they reached the daguerreotypes to Mexico and was known to be conducting experiments, because it had published letters in newspapers. It was not until one of the many French traders residence in Mexico traveled to France to bring just the first daguerreotype. Louis preliminary arrived at the port of Veracruz with its cargo before the end of 1839, the year's official discovery of the photograph.
Casanova said that in the first 50 years of the arrival of the daguerreotype is possible to establish three major stages: 1) the beginning, marked by a single image, which rests with the concepts that will be used photography, 2) the appearance of photographic trade thanks to the possibilities of the glass plate collodion that will lead to the spread of the portrait and 3) the first collections of view, with different aesthetic results. The market expansion is given since 1870, in which grows the demand for pictures of events and the physical and social environment: "This is going cuajando within society says Casanova, and through the arrival of all these photographers accompanying not formally to the U.S. army in 1846 when they invaded the north of the country, we know that is when there is the wide circulation of the photograph in Mexico. They become popular portraits, photography studios are set for Mexicans and foreigners, and starts a high circulation. Then come the technological changes that mark the opening of the production to other sectors of society. "
Another of the chapters is "The History of Photography in Mexico 1890-1920: the diversity of uses of the image," Alberto del Castillo, who explains that the book seeks to go together with social and cultural history. That is, overcome a history of the photo view from art history to give aesthetic viewpoints. Here the historian sets out how it breaks with the private realm of photography. In the 1890s there is the possibility of posting photos directly in order for the press, as was done earlier by lithography: "It was important to dwell in the nineties of the nineteenth century, says Del Castillo, where we give the great leap of photography that, so far, the privileged private sphere, such as the family album or business cards. Then a picture emerges that responds to very large runs of newspapers and illustrated magazines and in an atmosphere of the public, of political propaganda, the great handling of the press in general. "
Del Castillo said that this implies a shift in visual learning of photography, as well as talk of a reading from different social sectors much broader than the elites. For example, the universe of the Mexican Revolution was a political event will upset the habits and customs of conventional and traditional Mexican photography, giving him a greater scope. New social actors broke into the Mexican photo. From this stems that look modern documentary that continues throughout the twentieth century.
Another theme is "From the half-tone contrast to the Mexican photography from 1920 to 1940". Here historian Rebeca Monroy locates the problems that emerged in the post-revolutionary Mexico, and especially how we start the construction of an address different from visual Porfirista. At this stage lays the groundwork to begin to build a Mexican photography, from the field of photojournalism, photography and artistic copyright, including a photograph of cabinet and portrait. But Monroy says that between 1920 and 1940 the main news, as at present, are the red note: the assassinations of presidents, fighting, headless, beatings and so forth. The note policy bloody, terrible and stressful era that was on the front page.
To the historian it is interesting to note how deambula showed the red, as in the case of autoviudas: "That was a process of moral-social-Monroy said in which women were to prevent abuse. The way to resolve it was through bullets. Then killed the husbands, for the batterers, the infidels. They were imprisoned, but in the popular trials were leaving exonerated. There is a case of a woman who was Miss Mexico 1928 and that a year later, killed her husband: a general bigamist. This case is significant because it would end the popular trials in place by Carranza in 1919. It is important to analyze, through images, how the country is working and how it will restructure since the twenties and thirties to, in the forties, build the revolutionary nationalism. "
Al museographers and researcher Alfonso Morales accounted for writing the essay "The Venus went jamboree: fields of the 1940-1970 Mexican photography." Here examines a period in which it generates a kind of explosion of uses and tactics of the photograph. A period in which the picture is not only in galleries or in the press saying. The uses and the techniques for the Photographs multiply, spread, mix the languages. The relationship between cinema and photography are tightened. The picture builds its own exhibition spaces and defined the craft of the photographer in its most important.
Morales raises in an interview that the process of economic and industrial development that occurred in Mexico after the Second World War was not only in factories, construction of roads, the emergence of social organization or a political system but also Through the images. In that sense, a defining element of photographic imagery of this period is related to the axis of leading Mexican political system. A corporatist system where the president is the central pivot. The images were used to build an post-revolutionary idea of peace, a political hegemony, an almost religious vision of the president of the republic. But also through the images began to desacralizar since the fifties, especially since 1968, the figure of the president. It is alleged that the happiness of the Mexican Miracle was not shared by the entire society, or it came at all. Thus, this confrontation between visual discourse legitimizing and visual critics languages was found in the photograph showing the collapse of that miracle. "
Via El Financiero
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