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The effort to build an ethical model for Latin American photography has a precedent that is not quoted that often, yet it is much more meaningful, in the work of Edmundo Desnoes. Mainly in a truly ambitious essay published in the book Para verte mejor Latinoamérica (To see you better Latin America), which featured photos by Paolo Gasparini (México, Siglo XXI Editores, 1st edition 1972, 2nd edition 1983). This essay (which has all the characteristics of a manifesto and a “vaguely apocalyptic tone” as Berman would say) and also La imagen fotográfica del subdesarrollo (The photographic image of underdevelopment) criticize the uses of the image in Latin American societies (with the exception of the Cuban society, which was, at the time, deemed a viable social and cultural model). These discourses present photography as embedded in a mechanism of collective alienation. A mechanism for creating a mass of consumers, placed outside reality. To be outside reality in this case, would mean several things, to be outside the image (since the image ratifies reality as being real) means to be outside representation; to have access to representation only as consumers and not as proprietors (in this level, terms such as “creator” or even “maker” would not suffice). To be outside reality also implies to have access to reality only in an indirect, illusory and ultimately misleading manner. But chiefly, to be outside reality must be understood as being outside History.
Neither Raquel Tibol nor Edmundo Desnoes discussed the possibility of subverting the persuasive qualities of photography, of taking its credibility away or of playing with the boundaries between credibility and fiction. This would have taken the discussion into the field of aesthetics (which Desnoes refers to as the “ridicule mansion of art”), when as a matter of fact -as I’ve mentioned- they were interested to keep the discussion within the field of ethics. Any sufficiently unbiased analysis of contemporary Latin American photography would demonstrate that, through non-realistic photography, alternative doorways are being opened for a new relationship between subjects and History. As I’ve suggested before, these alternative relationships basically come into being through the construction of alternative histories, but also though legitimating alternative subjects, which are not necessarily collective and are defined (or rather undefined) as weak subjects.
The panorama of contemporary photography in Latin America is a very good example of the behavior of this system of dialects in the artistic space. It’s an expansion of the linguistics field; skepticism and irreverence towards History; acceptance –and sometimes an almost festive multiplication- of plurality and the briefness of reality; an amplification of all things local that has an effect of de-localization; a precarious construction of identities that go between self affirmation and self negation; but mainly, a renunciation to be exhibited as a homogeneous, solid and stable body. In those conditions, if photography could open doors for the participation in history, it would do so by renouncing to the messianic vocation appointed to the image in the past. There is no longer the feeling of a need to redeem the subject from a historicity that surpasses him (like Lefevre’s sea), but rather a need to take this historicity to a scale that equals the subject’s, even if this effort means to be working with fragments, residues or even waste. At any rate, this could be another way o brush history against the hair. In fact, all this reversal of History brought about by postmodernism, responds to that essentially modern claim, a claim inherited by photography from its very beginning. Perhaps if a new possibility can be attributed to photography, it is not about reflecting with fidelity (which is suspicious) the external reality, but to evidence in a critical manner, the hidden structures of reality, its weak, unstable, discontinuous spots. The contemporary photographer can make Lefebvre’s doubt his own: Am I in a dream, in the imagination or in the harshest part of reality? I no longer know.
Juan
Antonio Molina
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