Edward Weston (1886–1958) was one of the most celebrated photographers of the twentieth century. Jean Charlot (1898–1979), a classically trained French artist best known for his murals, woodcuts, and paintings celebrating Mexican culture, played a key role as a participant and chronicler of the Mexican Renaissance. This book, based on letters that Weston and Charlot exchanged from the early 1920s until Weston’s death in 1958, documents a friendship that says as much about art—about photography and fresco, practice, criticism, and history—as it does about the intersection of a number of fascinating characters, the ups and downs of the correspondents’ daily lives, the pursuit of their dreams and aspirations, and the support and encouragement they gave each other. Lew Andrews crafts a multivalent narrative that reconfigures our understanding of Weston, Charlot, and their era, shedding new light on specific events and artwork. While giving us rare insight into the everyday life of these artists, this work also supplies an important chapter in the history of twentieth-century art and photography, seen close up and from the inside.

Spanning the globe and the centuries, Frances Karttunen tells the stories of sixteen men and women who served as interpreters and guides to conquerors, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, and anthropologists. These interpreters acted as uncomfortable bridges between two worlds; their own marginality, the fact that they belonged to neither world, suggests the complexity and tension between cultures meeting for the first time. Some of the guides were literally dragged into their roles; others volunteered. The most famous ones were especially skilled at living in two worlds and surviving to recount their experiences. Among outsiders, the interpreters found protection. sustenance, recognition, intellectual companionship, and employment, yet most of the interpreters ultimately suffered tragic fates. Between Worlds addresses the broadest issues of cross-cultural encounters, imperialism, and capitalism and gives them a human face.

There has always been an important visual element to the construction and questioning of national identity in post-Independence Mexico, though one that has not always been given its due, outside of the celebrated and much-studied muralists. Ranging from the early nineteenth century to the present - from the vogue for the picturesque, illustrated periodicals and the influential writings of Altamirano to a wealth of twentieth-century graphic artists, filmmakers and photographers - this book re-examines the complex variety of ways in which that visual element has operated. In particular, it looks at the ways in which discourses concerning ethnicity and cultural hybridity have been echoed and transformed in Mexican visual culture, resulting in fields of visual discourse which are eclectic and increasingly self-reflexive.