Abstract:

The point of departure of Vistas de fin de siglo: ficciones nacionales, paisajes y multitudes is a corpus of images and texts produced mainly in Argentina and Mexico between 1840 and 1910. It studies the changes that took place in the conceptions of the subject and landscape from the very beginnings of photography and examines how the constellation of motifs and themes provided by photography allows for a rethinking of the cultural and public spheres in Latin America.

The first chapter traces the introduction of the camera in Latin America, taking into account, newspaper articles, advertisements by the first photographers, and essays on painting written by Sarmiento between 1839 and 1852. It also considers texts by Daguerre and The Pencil of Nature by Fox Talbot in order to compare the way in which the discovery was understood and publicized in both continents.

The second chapter focuses on the daguerreotypes of the Mexican and Argentine elite, the Registro de Mujeres P?blicas created by the Emperor Maximiliano of Mexico (1965), the photographs of brujos included by Cuban intellectual Fernando Ortiz in his book Los negros brujos (1904), and similar constructions of "criminals" in texts by Federico Gamboa and Eduardo Holmberg. By comparing the ways in which these various figures (the elite, criminals, prostitutes, and brujos ) are created and classified through images--by analyzing, that is, the discursive and visual strategies at work in the representation of subjectivity--it traces the displacement of the self from its romantic description as a distinctive "I" to its incarnation in the threatening figure of the man hidden in the crowd.

The final chapter discusses the relation between photographic landscape and the consolidation of nation-states in Latin America through a study of the photographic album on the Argentine Campa?a al Desierto (1889), images of Buenos Aires and the chronicles about urban life by Manuel Guti?rrez N?jera and Jos? Mart?.

This dissertation argues that photography provides a lens through which we can understand the relationships between subjectivity and technology, memory and visibility, and landscape and national identities in Modernity.