Andrea Noble

Visual Culture and Latin American Studies

In a nutshell, this essay seeks to problematize the relatively recent ascendance of visual culture as an object of study and mode of scholarship by confronting it with that which it ostensibly erases: its conceptual anchor in theories and practices of colonialism and Eurocentrism.

Recognizing Historical Injustice through Photography: Mexico 1968:

This article explores the role of photography in the global work of justice by way of a case study. It focuses on the publication, in December 2001, of a set of photographs by the Mexican newsweekly Proceso, depicting events that occurred in Mexico City on 2 October 1968. Taken at the culmination of a summer of student activism, when the military opened fire on student demonstrators and bystanders, the published photographs showed previously hidden scenes of detention and torture. Locating the publication of these photographs in relation to the historical processes of democratic reform in Mexico, the article aims to contribute to debates regarding the agency of photographic images in the visual politics of humanitarianism, shifting the emphasis away from questions of whether photographs work, to explore instead how they work. In particular, it focuses on the circumstances that authorized the simultaneous entry of the photographs of 1968 into the Mexican and international media spheres, and seeks to illuminate broader questions regarding their specifically photographic mode of address and the intersection between the national settings in which human rights abuses take place and testimonial appeals addressed to a global imagined community.

Cold War visual alliances

Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hoskins, A. 2004. Televising War: From Vietnam to Iraq.

Introduction: Visual Culture and Violence in Contemporary Mexico

The essays on visual culture and violence gathered in this dossier are introduced through an examination of an event that postdates them, namely the disappearance of 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa in the small hours of 26 and 27 September 2014. Homing in on the visual evidence deployed at a government press conference on 7 November 2014, this introduction analyses the way in which Mexico’s Attorney General sought to lay claims both to transparency and to national shared feeling; and at the same time, to present the case of the 43 students paradoxically as an ongoing, but closed case. Viewing the questions of visual culture, violence and (contested) historical truths explored in the essays in this dossier through the lens of the Ayotzinapa case (and vice versa), is to undercut the exceptionality of any single instantiation of violence, and instead brings into focus the very violence through which the modern social order has been structured. Finally, the introduction underlines the importance of taking political emotions seriously.

Seeing through ¡Que viva México!: Eisenstein's Travels in Mexico

Of the many illustrious foreign travellers who flocked to Mexico, allured by the cultural renaissance taking place in the aftermath of the 1910 revolution—Andre Breton, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, amongst others—few have bequeathed as controversial a legacy as that left by Sergei Eisenstein. The Soviet filmmaker’s arrival in Mexico on 9 December 1930 and his travels through the Republic over the course of a year, during which he filmed some 40 hours of material for his famously unfinished film iQue viva Mexico!, have become part of Mexican film-lore. Indeed Eisenstein is frequently invoked as an enduring influence—for better or for worse—on Mexican visual culture more generally. In 1931, as Eisenstein was compiling his footage, in one of a series of articles published in the prestigious cultural magazine El universal ilustrado, playwright Adolfo Fernandez Bustamante evaluated Eisenstein’s impact on Mexican culture in the following terms:

History, Modernity and Atrocity in Mexican Visual Culture

This article takes as its starting point the striking juxtaposition of the commemorative activities of 2010 surrounding the celebrations of the bicentenary of the struggle for Independence and the centenary of the outbreak of revolution and the circulation of atrocity images charting the so-called ‘War on drugs’ within the pages of Mexicos respected news weekly Proceso. It asks: how are we to understand the cultural moment that finds the proliferation of visual artefacts associated with the Bi/Centenary involved in the making palpable and present the intangible—namely the modernity of the nation—that sit alongside the severed heads and body parts in Mexicos current violent conflict? Whilst acknowledging the global flows of contemporary visual cultures, it argues that it is essential to locate the circulation of atrocity images within the context of the specificities of the Mexican media environment in which such images bear powerful forensic testimony. It is equally important explore how such images form part of a longer visual genealogy related to the meanings attached to iconoclasm in the colonial baroque imaginary.

Travelling theories of family photography and the material culture of human rights in Latin America

From the display by relatives of individual and individuated images, or the erection of vast photo walls composed of portraits of the disappeared, to the creation of objects such as ‘photo-pendants’, photographic images have wide currency in the political arena of human rights struggles. As a mode of photographic performance and endlessly repeated gesture staged precisely for the camera, such images have achieved iconic status. And yet, despite the charged, emotive freight of these photographs, there is a tendency to overlook them, to view them as the mere props for human actions, rather than integral to human rights activism and the struggles for justice, truth and memory. Focusing on the deployment of photography in struggles for human rights in Latin America, this article aims (i) to raise questions regarding the political and emotional agency of this mode of photographic display and (ii) to reflect upon the theoretical paradigms available for approaching such image-events.