Review of Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Testimonies, Icons, by John. Mraz. History of Photography 38 no. 4 (2014), 445-447.

This art icle was downloaded by: [ Universit y of Texas Libraries] On: 01 Decem ber 2014, At : 13: 49 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK History of Photography Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions f or aut hors and subscript ion inf ormat ion: ht t p: / / www. t andf online. com/ loi/ t hph20 Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Testimonies, Icons George F. Flahert y Published online: 27 Nov 2014. To cite this article: George F. Flahert y (2014) Phot ographing t he Mexican Revolut ion: Commit ment s, Test imonies, Icons, Hist ory of Phot ography, 38: 4, 445-447, DOI: 10. 1080/ 03087298. 2014. 949105 To link to this article: ht t p: / / dx. doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 03087298. 2014. 949105 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . Any opinions and views expressed in t his publicat ion are t he opinions and views of t he aut hors, and are not t he views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of t he Cont ent should not be relied upon and should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources of inform at ion. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem ands, cost s, expenses, dam ages, and ot her liabilit ies what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h, in relat ion t o or arising out of t he use of t he Cont ent . This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden. Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- and- condit ions Downloaded by [University of Texas Libraries] at 13:49 01 December 2014 Reviews Eastman House’s 2002 Picturing What Matters, marking the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, showed what a democracy of images might look like. Created from an open call for submissions, and refusing no comers, the installation of 1,300 photographs ‘engaged the true character of vernacular photography: a genre that is at once deeply moving and intensely banal’. For Zuromskis, this is revolutionary, although the form is hardly unprecedented. The posting of snapshots on surfaces close to the sites of the attacks was plainly the inspiration, and these unregulated exhibitions can be traced to twentiethcentury searching and mourning practices, wherever natural or man-made violence has occurred. They are indeed democratic, but their genesis is quite the opposite: a catastrophic loss of agency is marked and channelled through photographic culture. These are the exhibitions that count toward a history of vernacular photography, and might have provided a basis for more profound critical comparison. But Snapshot Photography is not reaching out to the lost or unknown. The last two chapters are dedicated to two American idols, Andy Warhol and Nan Goldin. In Warhol’s case, the definition of the snapshot is deftly expanded to include photo-booth portraits as well as pictures taken and received. Zuromskis clarifies the connections between deskilled photography and iconicity – tackiness and fame – but her sighting of ‘subversive power’ in the relationship between the ‘traditional content of the snapshot genre’ and the countercultural Factory community is somewhat murkier. Inarguably, there were surprising elements to Warhol’s practice: for all men, gay or straight, to be asked to present their genitals to his Polaroid camera was not the making of a conventional family album, but it was the imagining of a community within a cultural context that frequently included both happenings (regulated spontaneity) and serialisation (repetition with a difference). Surprisingly, Zuromskis compares Warhol’s appropriation of the snapshot to the main protagonist’s obsessions in One Hour Photo: ‘Warhol at once embraces snapshot photography and turns it on its head, challenging normative conventions and dominant social histories’. Commandeering both Warhol and the snapshot for postmodern radicalism, Zuromskis claims that this famously manipulative character was introducing his subjects ‘to the liberating power of their own banality’. If this seems something of a stretch, it is nevertheless the line we must pursue to grasp Zuromskis’s intentions. The author sees Warhol as a political artist: ‘the political was inseparable from the personal’; his photography was in that sense ‘activist. […] Warhol was able to reconfigure his social world around his own particular queer and communal desires’. The identification of Warhol with queer politics has been part of the discourse since the 1990s, as Zuromskis freely acknowledges, so what matters to readers of this book is the artist’s impact on ‘snapshot culture’. Warhol’s instinct for fame made all of his interventions in popular culture infamous; a political agenda was, and remains, in the eye of the beholder. The opposite position will be staked for Nan Goldin, despite her avowed interest in Warhol and his community. Goldin rejects her model’s passivity. Her enterprise is run on love, not only in the devoted portrayal of her ‘tribe’ but also in the circulation of her work, which aims to expand her affective community. For Zuromskis, the lack of politics and ‘rhetoric of universalism’ in Goldin’s approach – her ‘anachronistically modernist position’ – puts her in league with Steichen. She enlists the help of Abigail Solomon-Godeau to condemn Goldin’s picture of her friends dressing to do glamour. Why? Because its context of ‘domestic normalcy […] will not necessarily be conveyed to the viewer, who may not have the same positive attitudes toward drag and transgender identity’. A photograph poised to become an ‘iconic image trope’ – a poster for the democratic possibilities of the vernacular – is slammed because some people (those worrisome others) may not understand. Snapshot Photography is rife with such internal contradictions and failures to connect. This melting pot of ideas certainly befits American snapshot culture, but falls far short of a theory for vernacular photography. As for democracy, of this, following Wittgenstein, we shall not speak. Martha Langford # 2014, Martha Langford http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2014.949108 Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Testimonies, Icons John Mraz. University of Texas Press, Austin, 2012. The William & Bettye Nowlin Series in Art, History, and Culture of the Western Hemisphere. 336 pages, with 197 duotone illustrations. Hardcover $45.00, ISBN 978-0-292-73580-4. The Mexican Revolution mobilised Mexican society as a whole. Many actively participated, fighting displaced others, and an estimated two million did not witness its resolution. What began in 1910 as an insurgent movement to oust the nearly three-decades-long dictatorship of Porfirio Dı́az had morphed by 1911 into a multi-front civil war that stormed until 1920 445 Downloaded by [University of Texas Libraries] at 13:49 01 December 2014 Reviews and was followed by a decade of political instability and sporadic violence, leaving a country that had never been highly integrated to begin with in shambles. Few went unmoved, whether geographically or affectively. That the revolution was the first great socio-political upheaval of the twentieth century ensured that it also captured the imaginations (and stoked the fears) of foreign audiences, who followed the events through widely circulated photographs and films. With the Mexican Revolution we begin to recognise the role of mass media in shaping the representation of warfare. These images constitute an unprecedented archive that is an embarrassment of riches for scholars of Mexican history – hundreds of thousands of negatives preserved, including the vast Casasola Agency Archive – although they are also characterised by a series of seeming impasses when it comes to their authorship, conditions of production and manifold cultural meanings. In the last two decades, photography historians and other scholars of visual culture have laboured to fill in these lacunae, parsing fact from mythos, while at the same time offering an array of compelling interpretations, especially from cultural studies perspectives. Mraz’s book focuses on what he calls ‘revolutionary photographs’ from the armed combat phase between 1910 and 1920, the bleeding and sometimes manipulated heart of the conflict. The image selected for the cover sets the tone. Seven men kneel, squat and stand over a corpse. Three cameras (including the one used to take this photograph) also stand in observance, alerting viewers to the revolution’s sizeable media apparatus. The image appears again inside the book, although in this instance an identifying sticker attached by one of its owners is not cropped out, alerting us to yet another and still active apparatus. The photograph is held by Universidad Panamericana, part of its Roque González Garza collection, donated by the daughter of the insurgent general and acting president (January–June 1915) in 1989. At the same time as Photographing the Mexican Revolution critiques this apparatus, it emerges from its inheritors, originating as an exhibition for Mexico’s National History and Anthropology Institute on the occasion of official celebrations of the revolution’s 2010 centennial (an earlier, Spanish-language version of the text appeared the same year). Cognisant of these complicated afterlives and politics, Photographing the Mexican Revolution’s field of inquiry and critical terms are carefully mapped. For Mraz, ‘revolutionary photography’ refers to images produced in the context of ‘genuine popular mobilizations’ rather than vanguardist experimentation, although he does not rule out that they do overlap. He is interested in the political ‘commitments’ of these photographers and the publications where their work first appeared. Mraz’s landscape is hardly romantic; he tells the stories of insurgents and loyalists but also opportunists and just plain elusive figures. What is clear is that major political and military figures recognised the power of imagemaking and hired photographers to fashion an image and intervene in public debate. General Pancho Villa, who infamously signed a contract with Hollywood’s Mutual Film Company to film battles, was not the only media-savvy caudillo. In setting his boundary lines, Mraz comes up against a question that still stirs debate among scholars. What made the Mexican Revolution revolutionary? Mraz’s conclusions are largely in line with recent findings by scholars from a variety of disciplines: many of the social changes previously thought revolutionary were already in progress during the Porfirian regime, which valued civic–capitalistic progress and order. At the same time, Mraz shows that photography, whether wielded by the status quo or those who contested it, was an important tool for producing images of Mexicans as a mass society rather than the domain of mestizo elites. This is not to say that photography fully incorporated long disenfranchised citizens, such as indigenous communities, but it certainly intervened in – although did not resolve – the social fragmentation and inequity that characterised Mexico before the revolution and after. Photographing the Mexican Revolution is organised thematically although with a more or less chronological arc. The first three chapters, which are relatively short and driven by tight arguments, establish facts on the ground. While the revolution transformed photography, it did not invent it: handheld Reflex (and in limited cases Graflex) cameras made covering the events easier than ever before, but this was by no means a snapshot revolution. Professionals, many from outside Mexico City, took most of the photographs we know today. Photographic conventions were well established in portrait studios and illustrated magazines by the turn of the century, although shooting outside a controlled environment certainly presented challenges, technical but also logistical and ethical. We also see glimmers of photojournalism in the unposed pictures. The publishers of these images were either more conservative than the photographers or shifted their allegiances strategically. In Chapter Three, Mraz redoubles the effort of photography historians, himself included, to explode the myth of the Casasola Agency, which was run by Agustı́n Vı́ctor, his brother Miguel and their heirs, and which produced compilation albums over the decades. The Casasola Agency Archive was the black box of Mexican revolutionary photography. Photographs entered and were stripped of their identifying information and/or signed by the politically conservative Agustı́n Vı́ctor – including his brother’s – seeking to create a brand. This black box, in spite of its unscrupulous and until recently unknown inner workings, reserved an aura of comprehensiveness and intelligibility for those who employed the images as (mere) illustration. The aura was further burnished for some when the federal 446 Downloaded by [University of Texas Libraries] at 13:49 01 December 2014 Reviews government purchased the archive in 1976, integrating it into its post-revolutionary apparatus of textbooks, museums and research institutes that has conflated historical coherence with social integration. One of Mraz’s major contributions here is the attribution of authorship to multiple photographs previously identified as anonymous or misattributed to Agustı́n Vı́ctor. Readers are introduced to ‘new’ photographers like Manuel Ramos, Heliodoro J. Gutiérrez, Ignacio Medrano Chávez, Amando Salmerón, Cruz Sánchez, Jesús H. Abitia and Sara Castrejón, the latter one of the few female photographers identified. Liberated of Casasola, Mraz is ready to offer a much freer, flowing tour of the Mexican Revolution, concentrating on its charismatic figures and their photographic apparatuses: Francisco I. Madero, the wealthy northern landowner who penned the insurgency’s manifesto and served as its first president (Chapter Four); a much more media-savvy Emiliano Zapata than previously known (Chapter Five); a moderated understanding of Villa’s savvy, the only general to be photographed with a camera in his hand (Chapter Seven); and Venustiano Carranza and his Constitutionalists who were finally able to pacify the nation more or less (Chapter Eight). Chapter Seven looks at the residents of Mexico City, who were subjected to the Ten Tragic Days in February 1913 when Madero was assassinated in a coup d’état led by Victoriano Huerta. Based at the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mraz is a leading historian of photography in Mexico. In 1996 he edited a special issue of History of Photography on the subject, bringing together Mexican and non-Mexican scholars to comment on major themes, many still under consideration. Since then the English-language literature has grown significantly, including the field-expanding scholarship of Leonard Folgarait, Esther Gabara, Andrea Noble, Erica Segre and Roberto Tejada, among others. Recognising the bilingual basis of the field, Mraz publishes extensively in both Spanish and English. In Photographing the Mexican Revolution, he introduces English-language readers to Mexico-based scholars such as Ariel Arenal, Gabriela Cano and Daniel Escorza Rodrı́guez. Compared with Mraz’s previous works, all distinguished by their depth-seeking rigour, Photographing the Mexican Revolution takes more risks. As he readily acknowledges, the gaps in our knowledge about lesser-known and anonymous photographers prefix his observations with qualifiers (perhaps, likely, etc.) just as often as he is able to certify authorship or political commitment. Mraz also leaves room, often at the end of chapters, to concede the ‘polysemic’ quality of photographs, or their ‘semantic debility’, hospitable gestures toward the cultural turn in photographic historiography. He remains wary, however, of positing bolder interpretations. Mraz rightly warns of armchair psychologising based on readings of facial expression or gesticulation but, given his expertise, more informed leaps of interpretation are welcome. For example, in discussing urban photography from the Porfiriato, Mraz argues that ‘there appears to have been no critical photography produced in Mexico (and perhaps nowhere in Latin America) of the sort that was being produced in the United States during this period by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine’. But even as he notes, subaltern figures peek through and interrupt scenes of an ideal Mexico City. The criticality of photographs need not be pre-authorised by the aims of the documentary photographer. One revolutionary aspect of revolutionary photography, as Mraz documents, is that a much wider spectrum of Mexican society appeared before the camera, especially the poor and rural. He writes that these ‘underdogs projected a force that overflowed the construction of the “popular type” model within which they had been shoehorned’. In the book’s epilogue, where Mraz finally addresses the afterlives of some of the revolutionary photographs, he is reluctant to offer a more robust theory of icons based on his important findings. Along these lines, Mraz’s notion of political ‘commitment’ is useful only up to a point. Mraz writes: ‘in a revolutionary situation, few have the luxury of remaining on the margins; the insistent question is: Which side are you on?’ As carefully as Mraz attempts to document the photographers’ and editors’ mercurial political allegiances, and to allow space for registering these fluctuations, the answer to this hostile question is more probably situational and possibly not even transparent to the respondent. Photographing the Mexican Revolution is impressively illustrated. It includes almost two hundred duotone photographs, many not previously published, although their resolution is not uniformly ideal. The Mexican Revolution is incredibly complex, with many confusing under-currents and cross-currents even for experts. While Mraz is generous in his references to foreign photographers, especially Americans, and to global events such as the Soviet Revolution and the World Wars to steady readers less familiar with the literature, it should probably be paired with a narrative history in a classroom context. As Mraz shows, there is still much basic work to be done on the visual culture of the revolution. In this vein, Mraz gestures to the twin narratives of film and photography during the revolution and to photographer-cineastes such as Jesús Abitia, Eutasio Montoya, Ignacio Medrano Chávez, and Adriana and Dolores Ehlers, but chooses not to pursue this avenue; these are breadcrumbs, perhaps, for future scholars to follow. Photographing the Mexican Revolution will undoubtedly continue to stimulate and serve as a foundation for the field’s continued growth. George F. Flaherty # 2014, George F. Flaherty http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2014.949105 447