A (TENTATIVE) TALE OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN CHILE

A (TENTATIVE) TALE OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN CHILE

SAMUEL SALGADO TELLO DIRECTOR OF CENFOTO-UNIVERSIDAD DIEGO PORTALES

The first reference to photography reaching Chile coincides with the arrival of the Belgian frigate L’Oriental in the Port of Valparaiso in June 1840. It was a training and commercial ship whose crew consisted mainly of French and Belgian professors and young men and women. Among them was Abbot Louis Comte, connoisseur and operator of a daguerreotype camera, who had had the opportunity to attend presentations given by Daguerre and Niépce about the invention in France. The most prominent Chilean newspaper described Comte as the person “in charge of a Daguerreotype, which produces the most striking views of the cities and places they visit.” There is no record of the results of the first daguerreotypes made in the country as L’Oriental, upon leaving the Port of Valparaiso on June 23, sank off its shores.

The second known attempt is also not exempt from curiosities, mishaps and errors. This time the initiative came from a Chilean diplomat, Francisco Javier Rosales. Undoubtedly an admirer of the technical ability of photography to create exact representations of reality, he bought a “camera lucida” from Daguerre himself. His hope was that the professors at the Instituto Nacional de Santiago, the most important educational institution in the country, would familiarise themselves with the invention. The daguerreotype camera crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the Port of Valparaiso in the summer of 1841, where it arrived without incident. But at the port, or on its way to Santiago, it was damaged and neither the professors at the Instituto Nacional nor the scientists at the Universidad de Chile were able to repair it. Thus, another opportunity to introduce photography to Chile was lost.

Another two years went by before, in 1843, the daguerreotype finally made its debut in Chile. This came about when French traveller Philogone Daviette spent two months taking portraits of people living in Valparaiso until he returned to Peru, from where he had come. But his images have never been found. Then another Frenchman, Hulliel, arrived in the summer of 1844. His biggest contribution – although his photos have also never been identified – was to pass on his knowledge of the camera to José Dolores Fuenzalida, a 34-year-old citizen of Santiago, who became Chile’s first daguerreotypist.

Between 1843 and 1850, close to 25 daguerreotypists travelled to Chile and traversed it from north to south. This high number was due, in some measure, to the profound change that was taking place in the mentality and physiology of a republic in the throes of an emergency. Photography was a new technology very coveted by the Utopian proponents of the day.

In the period from 1850 to 1860, the number of daguerreotypists doubled. It was during this time that the debate over the two technological variants of the new invention began: the daguerreotype and the paper photograph. Sometimes a daguerreotypist was also a photographer; but in other instances, there were veritable duels between the followers of one method or the other. Regardless of this, established photographers multiplied in number, both in Valparaiso and Santiago. This generated an active market that increased competition for the best prices and technical solutions. But perhaps the most significant development of the time is what we could call “photographic education,” in that photographers began to communicate publicly how they practiced their profession.

One of the most important authors of the time was William Helsby. Between 1846 and 1859, he became widely known for his photographic studio which had branches in Valparaiso and Santiago. He was a faithful fan of the daguerreotype, which he applied to a variety of formats and themes. He documented landscapes, fires and night scenes, made miniatures for rings and brooches and larger-thanlife portraits. He also made lithographic images to be published in newspapers and framed in salons. He created a brand associated with his name that became inseparable from a traditional building in the city of Valparaiso.

In contrast to Helsby, German-born Adolfo Alexander arrived in 1851 and offered to take portraits with a new invention: the daguerreotype on paper. Another notable figure was Frenchman Víctor Deroche, who arrived in 1852 and worked as a painter, a daguerreotypist on metal and glass and a photographer on paper. He was the first to propose an album of views, an idea several other photographers would streamline a few years later.

THE PORTRAIT: A SOCIAL LETTER OF INTRODUCTION

By the second half of the 19th century and through the beginning of the 20th century, photography was dominated by the individual or group studio portrait: it was a technology at the service of the social image that the citizens of Chile’s young republic wanted to expand and promote. One of the central characteristics of this veritable “ideology of the portrait” is the possibility of interpreting a system of “shared values” through which those captured by the portrait – as well as the photographers – tried to situate themselves within a favourable social status.

When one looks at portraits taken between 1860 and 1880, one is struck by aspects such as the pose, the scenery and the circuit into which these images entered. If we stop to look closely at the pose of the person whose portrait is being taken and the surrounding décor, we get a sense of theatrical staging that attempts to fix the sitter’s social status, coded in notions such as dignity, opulence, good taste, happiness and comfort; all values of the elite, aspirational republican. When we speak of the circuit of the photographic image, we mean the practice of gathering these images into photo albums, which materialised the rules and etiquette of the urban good life.

Towards the 1860s, these portraits were transferred from the daguerreotype to paper photographs, which made it possible to indefinitely reproduce photographs from a negative. This substitution lowered costs and massively increased access to portraits. The public quickly grasped these advantages and embraced the new format. The photographic portrait was established as proof of social mobility since it now allowed wide swathes of the stratified class structure that prevailed – and continues to prevail – in Chile, to acquire a long desired political and social significance.

Photography remained well integrated in Chilean culture and became loaded with a heavy emotional charge now that family ties were strengthened by easily transportable individual and family portraits. Those who could not afford to pay a famous artist to paint a portrait were able to use photography as a way of capturing important shared moments, such as baptisms, first communions, weddings and even deaths. The mortuary photograph, in this period, was one of the most notable practices of memory. THE AMATEURS

Photographic subject matter soon spread beyond the portrait as demand for landscapes increased. Publications such as Álbum: vistas de Valparaíso y costumbres populares (Album: Views of Valparaíso and Popular Customs) by the photographer Félix Leblanc appeared and, along with other books, gave rise to the historical and journalistic document.

Towards the end of the 19th century, the practice of photography developed by professionals had spread throughout the country and there were wellequipped studios providing a number of photographic services. Photographers were also finding a new professional environment in print media, magazines and illustrated newspapers. The profession of press photography also began to emerge and went on to find its place in the next century.

A notable phenomenon of the time was the great increase in amateur photographers who pushed the limits of photography and revealed its artistic possibilities. Because they were not interested in photography for commercial reasons, these amateurs approached it like a hobby, aloof and bound with leisure; but an absorbing hobby, as they dedicated much of their energy during outings and free time to it.

As they were not motivated by commercial interests, amateur photographers were more open to different possibilities and to experimenting with new techniques and themes.

One amateur photographer whose work can still be found is Julio Bertrand. An architect by profession, he preferred to work with a stereoscopic machine with which he took excellent images. He documented social events and customs in Santiago and the south of Chile, reproduced his architectural work, dabbled in portraiture and in the studio – working with light, reflections and chiaroscuro – on intimate family scenes. Other amateurs who left behind valuable, personal bodies of work include Manuel José Domínguez Cerda and León Durandin Abault.

Amateurs started to discuss the artistic possibilities of photography by promoting the subjective interpretation of the photographer – this at a time when photography was still years away from being considered a fine art. As one publication of the period put it, they thought that “photographic art offers a broad field of research and an infinite horizon for aesthetic emotion.” But to achieve this, it was

necessary for interpretive, or pictorial, photography to dominate the camera, the objective and the printing process. “The photographer must bend the equipment and technique to his will; if not, he will continue to be a simple mechanic, slave to a machine and tyrannised by the demands of a rigid formula,” concluded the newspaper article.

THE OTHER’S PERSPECTIVE

At the turning point between two centuries, photography had already established itself as a powerful instrument that could reveal realities that were sometimes invisible. But it was also an ideological tool that could interpret and classify those realities, tinting them with the point of view, biographical situation and cultural context from which the photographer practiced his or her craft.

Meanwhile, photography became widespread not just in regard to social level, but also in terms of gender. During the 19th century, there were few women who ran photographic studios, among those being Dolores Garcia (1860), Carolina B. de Poirier (1870) and Teresa Carvallo (1888). But by the middle of the 20th century, women photographers had found their place. Notable examples include Elsa Aguayo Fuentes, Billie Aikel, Aída Araya, Cristina Argandoña Parra, Aurora Badilla Padilla, Margit Benko, Elena Briones Fuentes, Gabriela Bussenius Vega, Florisa Castillo Canales, Clara Delpino, Rosa Fuentes, Ana María Parra and Daphne Sauré Vasselon, among others.

Creating a space for themselves in what was considered a traditionally masculine universe required women to implement a number of diverse strategies. Some approached foreign photographers who were more inclined to teach them the trade. Others worked in studios retouching photographs or setting the scene for portraits. Many learned from family members who practiced the profession.

Women’s photography at that time combines feminine artistic stylisation and photographic method as a field of study. The “feminine” appears in their work not as something obvious, but rather as a particular sensitivity in how they looked at things. This is how researcher Andrea Aguad reflects on the work of Aurora Falcón May, also known as Lola Falcón.

In the 1940s, Lola went about the city with her son and photographed everything she saw: statues, trees, mansions, fountains and people who captured her attention. Years later, after moving to New York, she applied to the New School of Arts, where she studied photography. Her perspective as a woman led her to capture explicit themes: children and their inner worlds, the female body, outcasts and their misery.

Not only the perspective “of” the other, but also “over” the other (i.e. that person who belongs to another culture), is a field of study established during this time. It is one that inserts itself into the ideological structure of photography and the need to construct a national imaginary out of it.

An important example of this are the images of Mapuche culture taken in the second half of the 19th century, which illustrate how photography contributes to reinforcing meaning. Many of these photographs are much more than “simple” images: they are illustrations of ideas.

The photographers Christian Enrique Valck, Gustavo Millet and Odber Heffer are those responsible for the creation of “prodigious artifice,” as the researcher Margarita Alvarado describes it, through their delimitation of space, use of paraphernalia that presumes to characterise the Mapuche world, and poses borrowed from another aesthetic and corporality. It is no wonder their final scenes cobble together a displaced fantasy or memory. In other words, they have created an “ethnic scene,” a recreation that displays the photographers’ point of view and the ideology of the time. The Mapuche is transformed from a subject to a cultural object, a representation of an idea of “the wild” and a discursive element to promote the value of characterise.

In the first quarter of the 20th century, the figure of Martín Gusinde, a Polish priest and amateur photographer, came to epitomise the conditioning of this gaze tainted by colonial ideology. From 1919 to 1924, he made a number of trips to the Magallanes region in southern Chile, where he took photographs of members of the Selk’nam, Yámana and Alacalufe native peoples, who were already on their way to becoming extinct.

Under the guise of leaving a testimony of the final representatives of these tribes, Gusinde crystallised his photographic idea and artificially placed the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego in their “original setting,” using a series of elements from their ancestral culture to articulate the “ethnic scene.” Thus, the people of Tierra del Fuego appear forced to act

out exotic characters that match the prejudices of the photographer. These strategies of dressing and covering – similar to the ones used in the portraits of bourgeoisie in the early days of photography in Chile – allow one to identify the distinct meanings attributed to the “other” by the dominant culture.

One important point to consider about this time is the context photographers created at the moment of taking a picture of the landscape, a reality that is perceived from an aesthetic point of view. One of the most important photographers in this field was the Italian-born Alberto María de Agostini, who took pictures of landscapes in the Magallanes region and Tierra del Fuego. His photos offer representations of the landscape whose function is not to reveal a territory, but rather to operate like a backdrop that highlights and gives identity to those whose portrait is being taken.

THE AUTHOR

The 20th century in Chile saw the consolidation of several photographic traditions that had been developing up to that point. For example, studio photography had been established. An emblematic figure in this field was Alfredo Molina La Hitte, a professional photographer and portraitist with a long career, who exhibited in a number of photographic salons in Santiago from 1932 to 1943. He opened a photographic studio that was highly regarded among

intellectuals, artists and members of the theatre of his time. Molina La Hitte interacted with the most well-known photographers of the era, such as Antonio Quintana, with whom he formed a partnership in 1940. He also played an important role in training new photographers, both men and women.

Molina La Hitte’s work is a good example of the influence the aesthetic of cinema was having on photography, as seen in his foregrounds, deformations, flou effects (blurring of images), and the stereotypical poses of models interpreting dramatic gestures.

One important step in the development of photography in 20th-century Chile was the formation of the concept of the author, which is characterised by a creative proposal, a point of view and an understanding of photography as a political and social interpretation of reality. Two notable figures who put this concept into practice are Jorge Opazo and Antonio Quintana. Both began their work between 1920 and 1930 and both are known for having developed an aesthetic, subject matter and personal style marked by an interest in expressing and interpreting a local reality.

Jorge Opazo began his professional life as a painter dedicated to historical themes and landscapes. Opazo’s photography career began in 1926 and he exhibited portraits that quickly made him well-known. Opazo’s photographs are recognised for their use of light, smooth backgrounds and experimentation with planes and angles.

Jorge Opazo’s powerful and consolidated visual language drove him to advance different aspects of photography beyond portraiture. Opazo cinematographically recorded the landscape and modern cityscape of Chile. But the style that defined the work of this period came to an end when he became Photographer to the President of Chile in 1938. From that moment on, Opazo’s aesthetic followed the established manner of representing powerful figures. Opazo left the post in 1970: his last portrait was of Salvador Allende.

Antonio Quintana is perhaps the most symbolic example used to advance the creation of a Chilean imaginary based on the author. An active member of the Communist Party, Quintana’s work is strongly marked by the social question which brands and defines his work as a precursor to Chilean social documentary photography. Another important aspect of his practice is how he promoted the teaching of photography in Chile, committing himself to the role of teacher with total dedication.

In 1958, Quintana realised his goal of mounting a large photographic exhibition about the Chilean people that today is considered a visual and historic reference point. The exhibit, entitled Rostro de Chile (Face of Chile), opened in 1960. The main objective of the show was to put together a visual portrait of the Chilean nation that displayed the geographic and social realities of its inhabitants.

Quintana went on to become one of the country’s most important photographers, not only for the quality of his images, but also for his vocation as a teacher and his opening up of new technical and thematic paths in photography.

At the same period, the figure of Sergio Larraín made his appearance. He was a photographer who worked for the Magnum agency and, while in Chile, he created a notable set of images of Valparaiso along with a series of other work. Larraín matured the gaze of the author, carrying photography to new aesthetic heights. His work embodies his philosophical thinking, which substituted the idea of the “decisive moment” of Cartier-Bresson (who was his mentor) for the Eastern notion of “satori,” an attitude which opts for a contemplative approach, concentrating one’s attention on the present moment rather than on “clever images”. Larraín abandoned photography after the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet in 1973 and retired to a town in the mountains of northern Chile. DISSOLUTION AND RECONSTRUCTION

After the coup d’état and the implementation of the dictatorship in 1973, the concept of the author faded as censorship was imposed on free expression and the individual voice. Some photographers continued to work in silence while others offered their services; however, during the first decade of the dictatorship, well-known figures in photography disappeared. Nevertheless, a number of groups that would later surface in the 1980s began to form underground. The most important of these was the Asociación de Fotógrafos Independientes, or the AFI. This association took the lead in reconstructing and fortifying the photographic medium in Chile.

The AFI began with 29 members, but over the years it went on to include more than 191 photographers. The collective, which was active from 1981 to 1993, was a means of support for photographers from the different worlds of art, journalism, advertising, and others, who were united by the need to continue expressing themselves through photography in the prevailing climate of censorship and repression. They all carried out personal works and some worked for print media as graphic reporters. In practice, AFI provided its members with union cards, which helped release them from jail if ever arrested. But it also offered its photographers a sense of belonging and a space for critical and creative dialogue from which they could affect culture.

A number of these photographers are still active today and continue to influence new generations with their political points of view.