Family Portraits and Representation Strategies in Gran Santiago’s Working Class, 1950-1959

• In Event: 1283 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 14. Families, Culture, and Media

Abstract

Departing from what has come to be an unattended episode in the sociological writing of Chilean families, the present paper analyses the photographic representation of working class subjects, focusing on the symbolic interactions and negotiations that explain key underlying ideologies in the social hierarchy of the 1950s. Visual discourses of class identities and kinship offer an interesting set of questions this work seeks to organize in other to provide a typological basis of interpretation. Considering the absence of scholarly literature on this matter, the Photography Collection of the Chilean Museum of National History constitutes a fruitful set of evidence to question the extent to which photography operates as a channel of resistance and negotiation among societal structures.

Author

• Roberto Velazquez