Speculative Lights, Camera, Action: Studio Practice in Latin American Photography

• In Event: The Expansion of the Arts III: Mediums and Materials

Abstract

The medium of photography in Brazil and Latin America has served multiple purposes that include the documentary or ethnographic depiction of historical events, social realities, and regional differences. Often overlooked, however, is the use of the medium—especially when discussed or displayed outside the region—as a tool for social and cultural self-fashioning to counter the understanding of the historical process seen as an inevitability and not, rather, as a stage and a struggle always in the making. In direct reference to the histories of studio photography, as well as the image archive related to the theater and film, I look at contemporary camera works that integrate developments in art, technology, and culture in the pursuit of speculative enactments of sense through gestural variation. The unspecified space of the photographer’s studio in the expanded field can become the test site for visual systems bound to institutions, be it the power relations driving ordinary acts in the larger state of affairs; or the idealisms and realisms shaped by means of human form. Enlivened thereby are unambiguous emotional climates of constraint, autonomy, alliance, and separation, especially in terms that connect these domains with an attunement to art.

Author

• Roberto J Tejada, University of Houston