Abstract

Insofar as the camera is a powerful tool for structuring history, this dissertation explores the relation between visual documents and local identities to show how Mexican and U.S. cultures have been reflected and transformed through photographic images. From the Mexican Revolution of 1910--1920 to the US-Mexico borderlands of today, photography raises questions of history, territory, and representation, asking us to look "otherwise" at the built environment, social relations, and the different cultural roles of men and women. Travels in the Image Environment: Camera Culture in Greater Mexico, 1900 and After is a reflection on twentieth-century visual links between Mexico, the United States, and beyond. These contacts produced a compelling visual culture---a series of "shared image environments" that arbitrate between the spheres of rhetoric and representation. The study first inspects the collection known as the Casasola Archive, the philosophy of Antonio Caso, the criticism of Marius de Zayas, and the relevance of Henri Bergson to theories of the image in light of the Mexican Revolution. The study also traces photographic works produced in the early 1920s by Tina Modotti, and Edward Weston, who explored cultural and sexual difference as a limit not unlike those related to the medium of photography itself. This is followed by a discussion of the photographic frame and Mexico City's metropolitan area as mutual sites of contested space as staged in the work of Manuel Alvarez Bravo, whose photographs historically participated---through the figure of U.S. art dealer Julien Levy---in the coupling of photography and surrealism. The book concludes by examining an archive of "souvenir" photographs made in 1974--1975 at a complex of brothels on the Mexico-Texas border town of Nuevo Laredo. The content and provenance of this image environment are rife with complexities and contradictions at the level of ethics and aesthetics, and as set against the work of contemporary Latina photo-based artists. The methodology is compelled by a desire to make meaningful links between the disciplines of art history, comparative literature, Latin American and Latino studies, continental philosophy, and visual culture studies