Esther Gabara, Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Durham, Duke University Press, 2008).

In Errant Modernism, art historian Esther Gabara examines the varied functions of photography in the major modernist movements in Mexico and Brazil in the twenties and thirties. Through a close analysis of texts, diaries, and photographs, she seeks to decenter the histories and theories of modernism that emerged from the spaces of economic modernization: the West. Based on extensive archival research, she shows how Latin American artists challenged the meanings, assumptions, and functions of photography. The book then explores how photography pervaded the experimental and popular literature of the period, and how captions, graphic design and other texts altered the meaning of photographs. Looking at the photographs and reading the texts of Mário de Andrade from Brazil and Salvador Novo, Manuel Álvarez Bravo from Mexico, she argues that to err entails a particular style and ethos that challenged the standards of the time. Deliberate “mistakes” in the artistic creation, such as defocused subjects, asymmetrical portraits, fictionalized documents, blurred backgrounds, deceptive captions, or altered images evoke alternative aesthetics and an underlying political commitment.

Gabara meticulously sketches a map of artists, writers, and photographers that disrupted and transformed the flow of ideas from Europe and North America to create an entirely different modernism. Describing the photographic work of Mário de Andrade, author of the complex and famous novel Macunaíma: O héroi sem nenhum caráter, Gabara argues that:

Rather than make photography present abstract concepts of light and object, he made it err. Photography’s special relationship to mimetic representation in fact reveals the intentional formal and conceptual errors that Mário made in his Brazilian landscapes. Due to the medium’s ease of figurative representation, intentional errors are more obvious in photographs than in painting; while an error in a painting may simply be taken as the sign of a bad painter, a “bad photograph” is rarely judged as such because it tried to reproduce a scene and failed. 

Thus, Mário de Andrade deliberately made photographs look distorted, filled with errors, precisely as a response to the presumed realism of the medium—and these errors imply an ethical standpoint against western ways of seeing and knowing. Although the book offers two uneven sections—a broad analysis of the diverse, multifaceted Mexican cultural landscape against a one-man case study for Brazil—it nevertheless makes an intriguing, well-documented argument. After studying its pages, the reader will see the photographs in the book through a quite different lens.