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Gabara, Esther. Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. 376 pp. 67 b&w photos, with 7 color plates. ISBN 978-0-8223-4323-3.
It is not entirely correct to say - as Esther Gabara puts it modestly on her acknowledgments page - that the heart of Errant Modernism lies in archival material housed in Mexico City, Sao Paulo and New York. It is much more appropriate to approach her project as a daring if not defiant study in dialectical relationships. The book pushes forward by circling around these complex relationships, simultaneously opposing and reconciling the subject and the object of the photographic encounter, the image and the word, the foreigner and the native and ultimately even aesthetics and ethics. Modernists of the 1920s and 1930s in both Mexico and Brazil, she argues, "retook photography's naturalized function as a privileged medium of modem representation and used it to alter the very image of modernity" (1). From this concise premise follow five captivating chapters ("1 Landscape," "2 Portraiture," "3 Mediation," "4 Essay," "5 Fiction") that are as concerned with cultural products themselves as they are with exploding the reification to which these products are so often subjected. The result is a book that succeeds in reproducing the 'errant' character of the modernist ethos it describes in the form of its own decentering contribution to understanding the moment of photographic capture.
In "Landscape," Gabara is just as concerned with close-readings of Mario de Andrade's images as she is with his poetry, novels, travel writings and cultural criticism. The first chapter foregrounds the way that Mario "made photographs look wrong" (42) - producing photographs that were neither figurative nor abstract; views at skewed angles and out of...