Seeing the Nakba from Mexico

• In Event: Visuality, Truth, and Memory: Seeing and Affect in and from Twentieth-Century Latin America

Abstract

In 1948, a Colombian-born photographer who had worked for Mexico’s top weekly magazines was commissioned to document the forced relocation of Palestinians as the United Nations carved out the territory for the new nation-state of Israel. Leo Matiz, a photojournalist whose images were regularly published in Reader’s Digest, Así, and Life, was also a fine art photographer who made iconic images of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and David Alfaro Siquieros. Taking up Ricardo Salvatore’s insight that Latin American cultural studies has worked to develop an analytics “en y desde un lugar particular” (in and from a particular place), this paper looks at a contested world-historical event in the Middle East from a Mexican perspective. Was Matiz a lensman in solidarity with the Palestinians? Or was he just another Orientalist on an adventure to artistically render the dispossession of a people? The Red Cross, Life magazine, and countless others documented the Nakba. Is it possible to detect in Matiz’s photographs a distinctively Latin American perspective on this internationally sanctioned violence? And what difference does that make?

Author

• Kevin P Coleman, University of Toronto