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"To collect photographs is to collect the world" (Susan Sontag, On Photography 3)
"A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to refurnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race and sex" (178)
Introduction: A Case Study of Mario Algaze
In privileging the moment of photographic capture over the moment of photographic interpretation, the critical analysis of photographs has left seemingly invisible discourses of power undeveloped.1 A case study of Mario Algaze will permit a preliminary exploration of the idea: the booklet is a modest collection of 22 photographs titled The Spirit of Place all taken from an exhibition in the Gallery at Miami-Dade Community College North Oct 7-Nov 7, 1983. Shoerepair, Cordoba, Mexico, 1981. Cotton Candy, Mexico, 1981. Brooms, Orizaba, Mexico, 1981. Paco: help me with the tacos, Guanajuato, Mexico, 1974. The subjects of the lens are often, but not exclusively, working class. They are often, but not exclusively, Latin American. To introduce the works, Ricardo Pau-Llosa writes that:
The kind of photograph which Algaze pursues is more than a frozen image, the souvenir of flux, a stay of mutability. These photographs reveal the spirit of a moment in human space (the "subjects are usually human beings, cities, streets, walls, plazas, rooms, shops, artifacts) as much as the workings of consciousness that graps [sic] this spirit. [...] His is not a tourist's eye giddy with compassion for fallen places. What comes through in his photographs is not simply the arduous predicament of life in Latin America, but the unique scenarios in which life reveals itslef [sic] in this part of the world. (Pau-Llosa no pag., my italics)
If one takes these as merely the words of introduction for an obscure exhibit by a Cuban-exile photographer, they are inconsequential. Yet they are indeed more.
To begin, these words effectively encapsulate the problematic hermeneutics of photography. An image captured on film is thought to reveal, yet I argue that what the photograph "reveals" is always a constructed meaning negotiated by the viewer and a web of cultural approaches shaped by what urban geographer David Harvey describes as five loci of consciousness formation: the individual, the family, institutions, the state, and class (232-36). Applying cultural...