A Overview of Negative Originals. Race and Early Photography in Colombia

Negative Originals. Race and Early Photography in Colombia by Juanita Solano Roa (Durham: Duke University Press, 2025, 307 pages)

Negative Originals: Race and Early Photography in Colombia is Juanita Solano Roa’s first e book as sole creator. An assistant professor at Bogotá’s Universidad de los Andes, she has been a number one determine within the establishment’s just lately based Art History division. In 2022, she co-edited along with her colleagues Olga Isabel Acosta and Natalia Lozada the progressive Historias del arte en Colombia, an formidable and long-overdue reassessment of the nation’s heterogeneous artwork “histories,” within the plural.

Following within the footsteps of current pioneering works, comparable to Colombian curator Halim Badawi’s Historia urgente del arte en Colombia (2019), the collaborative quantity was not afraid to interrupt new grounds in a subject hitherto circumscribed by unquestioned overseas views, oft-repeated chronologies, geographically restricted views and some consecrated names. Some of Solano Roa’s private contributions to the mission, comparable to her examine of Benjamín de la Calle’s 1897 photographic portrait of María Anselma Restrepo, popularly referred to as the “Black guerrillera,” already pointed to her ongoing curiosity in how visible mediums and persistently “othered” subjectivities intertwine—or, put otherwise, in how artwork capabilities as the fabric vessel and conveyor of ideology.

Negative Originals constitutes the culminating outgrowth of a chronic preoccupation. In its luxurious pages, suitably endowed with high-quality illustrations, Solano Roa seamlessly incorporates particular person circumstances comparable to that of the Black guerrillera right into a wider examination of how race and pictures intersected, formed and bolstered one another within the Colombian area of Antioquia on the flip of the Twentieth century.

In order to take action, she delves into the archival repositories of Medellín’s Biblioteca Pública Piloto, extra particularly the extant collections of Benjamín de la Calle and Fotografía Rodríguez, two of town’s foremost photographic studios. Her methodological method to the archive, nonetheless, is way from customary. In lieu of proscribing herself to “positive prints,” or the pictures sensu stricto, she focuses on the latter’s “negative originals,” in whose very floor she discovers the occluded traces of picture manipulation, from whitening interventions to pictorial additions and contrived mise-en-scènes. In these inverted doppelgangers of the photographic print, she acknowledges the “retouching” gestures of an all-too-human impulse, nonetheless current in Instagram’s filters and Photoshop’s modifying instruments, to artificially improve the circulating photos of ourselves. In brief, she “reveals” —in Spanish, curiously sufficient, “revelar fotos” means to develop them— what these negatives maintain hidden from view.

Yet the fabric is only one side of the “negative,” as Solano Roa understands it. From the outset, she elevates the phrase to productive conceptual heights, enriching it with each metaphoric and spatial which means. The damaging, in her view, is just not solely the suppressed bodily double of the photographic print. It recollects, concurrently, the scarcely observed backdrops and situations that, serving as marginal framing areas, encircle and maintain the topic portrayed. The damaging is conceived, as well as, as “a metaphor for those categorized as ‘Other,’” be it “the poor, Black, Indigenous, or any other nonnormative bodies.” By bringing collectively these distinct aspects of the damaging —the fabric, spatial and metaphoric connotations—, Solano Roa calls consideration to the sleek dovetailing between materiality and beliefs, no matter whether or not the latter is consciously assumed or not. It is within the unequal “duplicity of the photographic image,” she tells us, that one can establish a society’s inverted picture of itself. More usually than not, such inherent duality turns into an index of our regrettable tendency to outline ourselves in opposition to a complete solid of stereotyped, excluded, and invisibilized “others.” And it might additionally function a springboard for questioning the dualistic considering nonetheless sustaining our social realities.

All of the above reaches historic concreteness within the e book’s 5 chapters, every dedicated to a selected instantiation of the “methodology of the negative.” In the primary chapter, Solano Roa focuses on the connection between the studio portraiture practiced by each Benjamín de la Calle and the Rodríguez brothers and the pervasive fantasy of the “Antioquian race [raza antioqueña].” As she expounds, the swift financial growth of Medellín on the finish of the nineteenth century, fueled by a considerable inflow of Spanish immigrants within the area and the concomitant progress of its espresso trade —a vigorous historic course of referred to as the “Antioquian colonization”—, gave rise to a brand new and affluent elite looking for a strong narrative whereby its newly acquired standing might attain legitimacy. The outstanding flourishing of Antioquia, it was consequently argued, stemmed from the unquestionable superiority of the so-called raza antioqueña, a pure Spanish casta, distinctive and unmatched in its alleged whiteness, patriarchal values, adherence to unwavering Catholic beliefs and hard-working habits.

Disseminated in genealogical treatises and pseudo-scientific works, this self-serving fantasy permeated the visible arts with comparable pressure. Above all, it left its mark within the quickly evolving photographic medium, the place it was both reproduced or subtly contested by means of “negative retouching,” a painstaking approach utilized to clean and lighten the sitter’s pores and skin. Whereas the Rodríguez’ studio brazenly catered to the native notables’ tastes, altering negatives to strengthen their racial-thinking, Benjamín de la Calle engaged in what Solano Roa calls “dignifying portraiture.” That is to say, he portrayed Medellín’s “erased subjectivities” as full, particular person human beings, not as mere background props or disposable examples of a common, scientifically noticed “type.” Either to satisfy rightful aspirational wishes, seize the essence of persona, or adequately render black pores and skin —the cameras of the period had been technically unfit for doing so—, De la Calle’s praxis countered the Rodríguez’: with defiance, the previous visibilized what the ideology of the raza antioqueña, so expensive to the latter’s privileged shoppers, endeavored to exclude.

Questioning as soon as once more pictures’s presumed transparency, the e book’s second chapter unpacks the Rodríguez’ honing of pictorialism, an in-vogue fashion that sought to lift the brand new medium to creative heights. Fully exploiting the probabilities of the damaging, the Rodríguez experimented with “the allegorical, poetic, and expressive qualities of the photographic image.”  At the identical time, they tailored its options to their clients’ ambivalent wants: the studio’s virginal madonnas, produced alongside portraits loaded with European signifiers, mirror the curiosity of the well-to-do in putting a stability between the native and the worldwide; between religiously-tinged costumbrista scenes and bourgeois cosmopolitan yearnings. In this cosmopolitan regionalism, because it had been, the raza antioqueña seems as the perfect transmitter of what Solano Roa calls “traditional modernization.” Pictorial pictures thereby turned an aestheticized house the place peripheral elites might avail themselves of modernity’s symbols with out ever relinquishing their idiosyncratic roots or succumbing to the civilizational anxieties of the period —that recurrent uncertainty concerning the worldwide standing of the nation in addition to Latin America as a complete.

In the following chapters, the suppleness of Solano Roa’s notion of the damaging seems in full view. It is equated, within the third, with all these “deviant subjects” who, aside from posing for De la Calle’s lenses —himself a homosexual man amid a notoriously machoistic society—, managed to disrupt the entrenched gendered roles of the raza antioqueña: the cross-dressers, as an illustration, non-binary people whose “coming out” resembled, in a means, the method of growing {a photograph} from a damaging print.

Another sort of negativity emerges within the fourth chapter, as Solano Roa inspects the Rodríguez’ and De la Calle’s dabbling in Orientalist pictures, one other trendy style by the use of which the Antioquian higher courses grappled with their equivocal identification. In disguising themselves as Orientals, they not solely engaged in playful appropriation however appeared to embrace a extra horizontal, “Amerasian” continuum as effectively, to make use of world historian Elizabeth Horodowich and artwork historian Alexander Nagel’s time period.

While the adoption of European tropes appeared to distinguish them from the native, “othered” subjectivities, their very own peripheral place as South Americans and Spanish descendants introduced them nearer to the Near East. One wonders, on this regard, how the proponents of the raza antioqueña handled the ever present Orientalization of Spain itself, on the time thought of as barely belonging to “Europe.” Although Solano Roa doesn’t elaborate on the total complexities of the topic, her analysis can actually be put into dialogue with current works on Ibero-American Orientalism comparable to that of  University of Miami Professor Christina Civantos or John Hopkins’ Nadia Altschul.

As it concludes with a radical inspection of photographic backdrops as damaging house, Negative Originals ends, fittingly, within the medium’s very margins. As Solano Roa underlines, it was in these disregarded areas the place the “Traditional Modernity” of the antioqueños surfaced: in what seems to be, at first look, a jarring juxtaposition of native outfits and an anachronistic Mediterranean surroundings, she uncovers a conciliation of peasant origins and Western affiliation evincing the panorama’s pivotal function in Colombian artwork; and within the deliberate utilization of Art Deco stylization, widespread again then in worldwide vogue pictures, she pinpoints a “visual rhetoric predating modern art in Colombia,” habitually dated to the mid-Twentieth century. With this remaining destabilizing of High and Low Culture, Solano Roa concludes her groundbreaking invitation not merely to consider, or suppose with, however quite to “think through” pictures. As a “negative history” of the medium, Negative Originals could function a guiding blueprint for future investigations alongside comparable strains.

Alejandro Quintero Mächler is a Research Scholar and half-time Lecturer within the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.  He is the creator of Perder la cabeza en el siglo XIX: Ensayos sobre historia de Colombia e Hispanoamérica (2023).