Photography, Avant-Garde, and Modernity

Using the concept of “errant modernism, " this essay traces how avant-garde movements in Latin America developed photographic values. These aesthetic regimes were shaped by a broad variety of photographs that appeared in literature, ethnography, journalism, and art, and embodied key tropes of modernity. By making visible another theory of modernity articulated from the other side of the modern-colonial divide that separates Europe from its former colonies, Latin America disorients the hegemonic histories and theories of photography that still overwhelmingly privilege European and US artists, and in doing so, offers a view onto the power, promise, and dangers of the global phenomena of modernism, avant-garde, and modernity.

Duke Scholars

Author Esther Gabara Romance Studies