PHOTOGRAPHY IN MEXICO
Photography arrived in Mexico during 1839, a few
months after its invention in Europe. During the
nineteenth century, it was largely the province of
portraits, which were usually of society’s poles. On
the one hand, the wealthy had represented them-
selves so as to appear modern and successful; on
the other, the lower classes were portrayed as ‘‘pop-
ular types’’: Indians or similarly exotic people
engaged in picturesque occupations, often hawkers
of strange merchandise. There was little of the
landscape and cityscape photography seen in Eur-
ope, but the different governments in power soon
found the medium useful for making visual records
of prisoners and prostitutes. In what would later be
called photojournalism, daguerrotypes were made
of the U.S. troops occupying Saltillo during 1847,
the first photographs ever taken in a war zone.
Portraiture reached new heights in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, with the work
of Romualdo Garcı ́a and Natalia Baquedano, the
latter a pioneer woman photographer in Mexico.
Commercial-documentary photography was large-
ly the domain of foreigners such as Americans Wil-
liam Henry Jackson and Charles B. Waite, and the
French-born Abel Briquet, who were contracted by
railroad and steamship lines to document the coun-
try’s modernization under Porfirio Dı ́az (1876–
1910), and thus further stimulate foreign invest-
ment. Guillermo Kahlo (father of the painter,
Frida) was employed by the Porfirian government
to document the colonial buildings, and he traveled
the country for four years, producing exquisite
large-format images which constitute the biggest
and most systematic inventory of the cultural patri-
mony under Spanish rule. However, the real mile-
stone of this period was the photojournalist debut
of the Casasola brothers, Agustı ́nVı ́ctor and
Miguel, who took their first press pictures in 1902.
The Casasola Archive contains the best-known
photographs in Mexico, for they have been dis-
seminated repeatedly in illustrated histories which
have played a role in state building and party dic-
tatorship. Images of Porfirian progress and its
antithesis, the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917),
are indelibly imprinted in Mexican minds, thanks
to the collection Agustı ́nVı ́ctor began to form
when he founded the first Mexican photojournalist
agency in 1912, spurred by the sudden arrival of
photographers and filmmakers who flooded the
country to cover the first great social conflagration
of the twentieth century. Agustı ́nVı ́ctor was an
entrepreneur, as well as a photographer, and the
pictures of more than 480 individuals can be found
in the Casasola Archive, making it difficult to iso-
late and analyze the work of the different image
makers, something further complicated by the fact
that little research has been done on the publica-
tions in which photographs from the Casasola
Archive appear.
During the Porfiriato, it appears that Casasola
photographs inEl Mundo Ilustrado(weekly supple-
ment of the newspaper,El Imparcial) represented
the social classes of that society in radically differ-
ent, though complimentary, ways. ‘‘Political news’’
was dedicated to the order and progress wrought
under President Porfirio Dı ́az, focusing on his cere-
monies, state appointments, and diplomatic recep-
tions, as well as his official visits and ‘‘informal’’
trips. However, the activities of dissenting groups,
strikes, and the resistance of Indian communities
were considered antisocial conduct; they were por-
trayed as a military, not a political problem. The
populace was divided along the same lines. Society
people appeared in the social chronicles, while the
lower strata were represented as picturesque types
or criminals, if they were unfortunate enough to
end up in the police columns.
There is no evidence in the Casasola Archive of
the photography that denounces social and political
inequalities as can be seen in the pictures of Jacob
Riis or Lewis Hine in the United States, and it
appears that no such imagery developed in the rest
of Latin America. The reform movements to which
Riis and Hine were related had no counterparts in
Mexico, but the Casasolas did take photographs
during the Porfiriato with some implicit criticism
of social conditions, and they documented the pro-
test movement against Dı ́az’s reelection in 1910.
Further, it appears that the Casasolas developed a
distinctly modern style of graphic journalism, cap-
turing Dı ́az in unposed photos, as well as working
with a view to creating photo-essays.
The Revolution presented photojournalists, for
the first time, with the visual manifestations of con-MEXICO, PHOTOGRAPHY IN