Call For Papers Call For Papers for the number 22-2021:The History of Photography in Latin America (19th and 20th Centuries)

In 1978, the First Latin American Colloquium of Photography and the photographic exhibition “Hecho en Latinoamerica”, both held in Mexico and attended by photographers, researchers and critics from all across the continent, first established the idea of a “Latin American photography”. Organized by the Mexican Photography Council -an institution created in 1976 to promote research on this medium and exchange knowledge about its history and its production in the region- these meetings not only contributed to place Latin American photography in the world map but they were also fundamental to create a regional photographic identity that was based on the idea of a shared political, social and cultural history.

Under the echoes of these two events, in the 1980s, the first stories of photography emerged in Latin America, proposing the initial periodizations on the subject and gathering dispersed or unknown images and primary sources. Conceived according to the European or North American historiography model, these pioneering studies tended to adopt methodological approaches that came from the history of art and in which photography was studied from a nationalistic approach, either as a chronicle of genres and styles or as a sum of techniques and established authors.

This panorama began to change towards the end of the last century due to two factors that dynamized and deeply stimulated the development of the field in the region: the accelerated evolution and transformation of photographic archives and the entry of photography as a field of study in universities . The increasing valuation and rescue of photography in the archival field generated an impressive development of the photographic book in the 1990s, which contributed to disseminate and create interest in an ascending corpus of historical images hitherto unknown or difficult to access . Also, from the beginning of the 21st century, the academia began to show a progressive attraction to this area of knowledge that, in many cases, was channeled into the creation of undergraduate degrees or graduate programs focused on the subject. In this context, the field was renewed through novel perspectives that, putting aside the traditional chronological approaches, began studying photography from its uses and social meanings and in relation to the broadest visual culture of its time. There were also new comparative and transnational approaches that highlighted some of the limitations of studying Latin American photography exclusively from a nationalist or localist point of view. Regional research also emerged strongly, challenging the marked centralism of traditional historiography that tended to concentrate its study in the capital cities for years. Neglected photographic genres such as scientific, educational, criminal, ethnographic or erotic photography, among others were addressed with interest. Photography was studied in relation to other media and the sphere of reception and critique, areas highly relegated by most previous studies on this period, received novel attention

This dossier seeks to reflect the diversity, vitality and renewal of historiographic studies on Latin American photography. We hope, therefore, to receive proposals with historical methodology addressing the trajectories of different authors, different uses and social functions of photography and methodological reflections arisen from the work with specific collections or archives.