This work examines the cultural impact of photography in Argentina following the end of the country's military dictatorship in the early 1980s. The interpretive study surveys nine modern photographers in Argentina--Marcelo Brodsky, Gabriel Valansi, Eduardo Gil, Gaby Messina, Adriana Lestido, Gabriel Diaz, Marcos Lopez, Silivio Fabrykant and Gabriela Liffschitz--and covers the major themes in each of their works. The author details each photographer's cultural and artistic contributions and provides a listing of the websites where their works can be viewed.

One of the important cultural responses to political and sociohistorical events in Latin America is a resurgence of urban photography, which typically blends high art and social documentary. But unlike other forms of cultural production in Latin America, photography has received relatively little sustained critical analysis. This pioneering book offers one of the first in-depth investigations of the complex and extensive history of gendered perspectives in Latin American photography through studies of works from Argentina, Mexico, and Guatemala. David William Foster examines the work of photographers ranging from the internationally acclaimed artists Graciela Iturbide, Pedro Meyer, and Marcos López to significant photographers whose work is largely unknown to English-speaking audiences. He grounds his essays in four interlocking areas of research: the experience of human life in urban environments, the feminist matrix and gendered cultural production, Jewish cultural production, and the ideological principles of cultural works and the connections between the works and the sociopolitical and historical contexts in which they were created. Foster reveals how gender-marked photography has contributed to the discourse surrounding the project of redemocratization in Argentina and Guatemala, as well as how it has illuminated human rights abuses in both countries. He also traces photography’s contributions to the evolution away from the masculinist-dominated post–1910 Revolution ideology in Mexico. This research convincingly demonstrates that Latin American photography merits the high level of respect that is routinely accorded to more canonical forms of cultural production.

From its independence in 1810 until the economic crisis of 2001, Argentina has been seen, in the national and international collective imaginary, as a modern country with a powerful economic system, a massive European immigrant population, an especially strong middle class, and an almost nonexistent indigenous culture. In some ways, the early history of Argentina strongly resembles that of the United States, with its march to the prairies and frontier ideology, the image of the cowboy as a national symbol (equivalent to the Argentine gaucho), the importance of the immigrant population, and the advanced and liberal ideas of the founding fathers. But did Argentine history truly follow a linear path toward modernization? How did photography help shape or deconstruct notions associated with Argentina? Photography in Argentina examines the complexities of this country’s history, stressing the heterogeneity of its realities, and especially the power of constructed pho-tographic images—that is, the practice of altering reality for artistic expression, an important vein in Argentine photography. Influential specialists from Argentina have contributed essays on various topics, such as the shaping of national myths, the adaptation of gesture as related to the “disappeared” during the dictatorship period, the role of contemporary photography in the context of recent sociopolitical events, and the reinterpreting of traditional notions of documentary photography in Argentina and the rest of Latin America.

The City as Photographic Text offers the first comprehensive presentation of photography on São Paulo. But more than just a study of one city’s photographic legacy, this book is a manual for how to understand and talk about Latin American photography in general. Focusing on major figures and referencing widely available books of their work, David William Foster offers a unique analysis of how photographers have contributed to our understanding of the megalopolis São Paulo has become. Eschewing a conventional historical approach, Foster explores how best to interpret visual urban life. In turn, by focusing interest on the photographic text and the ways in which it creates an interpretive meaning for the city, rather than rehearsing the circumstances under which the photographs were taken, this study provides a model for productive comment on urban photography as a project of visual meaning with important artistic attributes. As a unique entry in the inventory of scholarly writing on São Paulo, The City as Photographic Text adds to our understanding of the enormous cultural significance this city holds as a world-class urban center.

The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of the city symphony, an experimental film form that presented the city as protagonist instead of mere decor. Combining experimental, documentary, and narrative practices, these films were marked by a high level of abstraction reminiscent of high-modernist experiments in painting and photography. Moreover, interwar city symphonies presented a highly fragmented, oftentimes kaleidoscopic sense of modern life, and they organized their urban-industrial images through rhythmic and associative montage that evoke musical structures. In this comprehensive volume, contributors consider the full 80 film corpus, from Manhatta and Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt to lesser-known cinematic explorations.

Significant places and spaces, from Granada and Catalonia to Buenos Aires and the Chicago Columbian Exposition

This volume examines the unprecedented growth of several cities in Latin America from 1830 to 1930, observing how sociopolitical changes and upheavals created the conditions for the birth of the metropolis. In the century between 1830 and 1930, following independence from Spain and Portugal, major cities in Latin America experienced large-scale growth, with the development of a new urban bourgeois elite interested in projects of modernization and rapid industrialization. At the same time, the lower classes were eradicated from old city districts and deported to the outskirts. The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930 surveys this expansion, focusing on six capital cities—Havana, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, and Lima—as it examines sociopolitical histories, town planning, art and architecture, photography, and film in relation to the metropolis. Drawing from the Getty Research Institute’s vast collection of books, prints, and photographs from this period, largely unpublished until now, this volume reveals the cities’ changes through urban panoramas, plans depicting new neighborhoods, and photographs of novel transportation systems, public amenities, civic spaces, and more. It illustrates the transformation of colonial cities into the monumental modern metropolises that, by the end of the 1920s, provided fertile ground for the emergence of today’s Latin American megalopolis.