Demarcation image and the experience of
landscapes as a geographical truth. Photographs by Francisco Moreno,
1897 [1]
Catalina Valdés [2]
* *
*
1.
In the
following text, I would like to make some considerations on the amphibological
condition of some images. Specifically, I will address the case of photography
for the value of objectivity it acquires through its alleged ability to capture
the instant. In this work, which is part of another, more encompassing one on
the process of designating a geological landmark as a “natural border” between
two nations, I would like to address the case of representations of the Cordillera
de Los Andes (The Andes Mountains) between Chile and Argentina, in which
the limit between science and artistic photography is blurred and both types
coexist in one and the same image, but not without disputes on their meaning.
2.
In
November 1902, King Edward VII of England announced the arbitration decision
that resolved the dispute over the frontier between Chile and Argentina,
settling much of the conflict which had started in the mid-19th century and the
ensuing demarcation activity in the long border running along the Andes
Mountains from the southern Atacama Desert to Cape Horn.
3.
A year
earlier, a major exhibition presenting photographs of the Argentine Patagonia
was opened at the Royal Geographical Academy of London. The author of the
images was Francisco Moreno (1852-1919), a self-taught scientist, mining
entrepreneur, founding director of the La Plata Museum and, amongst other
public functions, commissioned by the Argentine government in the 1870’s to
lead the frontier demarcation campaign with Chile.
4.
The
photographs Moreno exhibited on that occasion were a selection of illustrations
from the book known as Argentinian Evidence,[3]
a luxurious edition published in London in 1900, in English. Consisting of four
volumes and an atlas, the monumental work displayed Argentina’s perspective
before the conflict involving British arbitrators of the Andean delimitation.
More than 200 photographs, sketches and maps accompanied the text which
presented the diplomatic, historical and scientific arguments of the position
defended by Argentina.
5.
But
the first time these images were shown to the public was in Apuntes preliminares
sobre una excursión á los territorios del Neuquén, Rio Negro, Chubut y
Santa Cruz [Figure 1], a book published in Spanish by Moreno himself and
printed by the La Plata Museum in 1897. The book collects the experiences and
results of the team of scientists led by the expert, as well as the author’s
deliberations on various issues, as he narrates his third trip to the Argentine
Patagonia, conducted between 1895 and 1896.
6.
Despite
not having the official status of Evidence, Apuntes was translated into
French and had a major national and international circulation, which explains
the fact that its text and images are still today regarded as a source of reference
in research on the life and work of its author, the history of the frontier
conflict and Patagonia itself.
7.
Each
of these instances of dissemination involves a different level of inscription
of these images and emphasizes a particular role given to photography (as a
technique, as an image). These functions overlap and add meanings which
contradict one another, as I here intend to show.
8.
Are
these landscapes composed according to the style and intention of artistic
photography? Or are they rather cartographic photographs produced by a
scientific eye? Do they serve as evidence to illustrate a certain truth? Is the
control over nature, understood as territory, made visible in them? The
categories of scientific and artistic photography certainly coexist in these
pictures and what interests me here is to understand the dynamics of this
coexistence.
9.
As
Rosalind Krauss explained, it is necessary to address the context and the
circumstances in which photographs were produced before making an
interpretation focused on the represented forms.[4]
According to this author, looking at photos of nature and landscapes and
finding in them similarities with pictorial traditions, for example, is a
gesture of displacement that should be done consciously, watching for
anachronisms and analogies. This caution means to take distance from certain
preconceptions, such as photography as “the daughter of painting” or as a
“natural sign”.[5] Krauss’ proposal concerning photographs
of nature requires a reassessment of the artistic distinctions within the
framework of a pictorial intention: photography genres are not defined by
subject, theme or topic, but by the use or purpose that conditions the
existence of the image. Natalia Majluf advances a similar argument concerning
photo albums produced in the context of the railway lines’ works in the
Peruvian Andes in 1870, noting that
10.
landscape is not a valid category in
itself; inevitably it only remains as the context that frames the narrative of
progress. The places depicted by 19th-century photography were spaces that had
been assimilated to the dominant discourse by means of real interventions on a
particular geography; the photographic images were directly generated by these
interventions and would not have existed without them.[6]
11.
Therefore,
the instances of dissemination and the technology involved in the images here
at issue are important elements to consider when analysing the visual rhetoric,
since (at least as discovered so far) the book Apuntes is the first
illustrated publication including photographs amongst the large corpus of
books, maps and treaties that circulated at that time regarding the renowned frontier
conflict.[7]
12.
The
triple degree of inscription of these images (first, as a matter of scientific
interest in the magazine of the La Plata Museum, then as a borderline argument
in the official report of the Argentine government and, finally, as an artistic
image in the exhibition at the Royal Geographic Society of London), granted
successively in each of these publications, distinguishes the use that was
given to photography on both sides of the Andes.
13.
The
Chilean government commissioned German geographer Hans Steffen (1865-1936) to
lead the scientific expedition to Patagonia. The important geological
observations, plans and conclusions developed as part of Chile’s border defence
were fragmentarily published in different places and languages, but did not
have broader dissemination until several years after the British arbitration
verdict in 1909.[8] Due to circulation and registration
conditions, Steffen’s photographs had neither the distribution nor the
impregnation caused by the ones by Moreno.
14.
Although
the inclusion of photographs in a book of this kind was then exceptional, the
text of the Apuntes does not make additional reference in this regard;
it does not detail the authorship or the technical conditions of the shots, nor
does it make any direct reference to them. The author proceeds, in this case,
according to the conventional outlines of scientific expedition reports, in
which only sometimes the participants were mentioned and where images act as a
correlate of the text, hesitating between the cognitive function of the
illustration and the persuasive function of embellishment.[9]
Besides indicating the existence of the plates in the title, the photographic
act is only mentioned once, at the beginning of the text, when presenting the
expedition’s working plan, alluding to the status of the images as a mere
record, disregarding the procedures involved in their making, “They will also
take the biggest amount possible of photographs, sketches, etc., in order to
facilitate the examination of data and its reduction in the format of a book”[10].
15.
This
suggests that for the purposes of the expedition, the technology of representation
and reproduction is useful and subordinates itself, according to scientific
criteria, to the purpose of readability and dissemination of the information
contained in the text. Framed like etchings, the photographic reproductions
have their respective numbers, titles referring to the location represented
and, sometimes, a very brief description of the place or issue they represent.
All of them exhibit the phrase “Workshops of the Museum” instead of the author.[11]
16.
The first
approach I suggest to looking at a selection of these images is precisely
according to the connection between text and plates. The numbered reproductions
are included in pages interspersed throughout the text, and they will be
referred to in brackets. What interests me is that the photograph encodes or is
linked in various ways with its textual reference, not always in an
illustrative way.
Neither ekphrasis
nor illustration: relations between image and text
17.
Indeed,
the relationship between image and text is, but only sometimes, that of a
record, as in the case of the photographs of ranchos of European settlers [Figure
2 and Figure 3]. Although the two photographs that make up this page
correspond to two different episodes in the journey’s narrative, once they are
displayed together, they form a kind of ethnographic plate. The text connected
with them honours the settler, that new and desired inhabitant, while raising
criticism against the government’s policies that hinder the installation of
entrepreneurs in small-scale plots, hence favouring large farms. These
photographs, which could be described as group portraits or picturesque scenes,
are the only images in which characters not belonging to the expedition are
included.
18.
This
last issue is a sign of the non-“literalism” of the connection between text and
image, since none of the Apuntes’ plates shows indigenous people that,
however, are very present in the text (and in other photographs of the time,
taken by the same author). The consequences of this are programmatic: Moreno
wants to show that Patagonia is a place where the confrontation with the
original inhabitants of the region is a part of their past.[12]
It is worth mentioning that this expedition leader promoted the limitation of
indigenous people to controlled territories following the US model and, as the
director of the La Plata Museum, implemented the customary “scientific”
exhibition methods at the time, such as displaying living “specimens” of these
social groups in that establishment.[13]
19.
Other
times, the correlation between image and text is given as the materialisation
of a historical or autobiographical evocation of the past. This is the case of
the landscape whose textual reference is the memories of the camp of the 1876
and 1880 expeditions to the same area [Figure 4], or the photographs of Lake Lacar [Figure
5], which led, in the
account, to the memories that Moreno kept of Swiss Lake Lucerne, a place he had
visited some time before and that he then used as reference to elaborate a long
comparison between the Andes and the Alps.[14]
20.
In the
plate entitled “Orígenes de los Ríos Biobío y Aluminé” [Figure 6], we see an extremely dense and clear close-up formed
by bushes in the foreground, the background where you get to see some Araucaria
treetops and finally, in a higher and distant horizon, the silhouettes of these
huge trees that prevail in the region. One side of the foreground seems to be
interfered by a group of stones that allude to the presence of a stream. Maybe
due to reproduction imperfections, or to the very composition of the
photograph, it is a complex image that demands a lengthy observation in order
to apprehended it.
21.
The
narrative in which the reference to this image is inserted is of great
inspiration; it describes how the members of the expedition, “tempted by the
beautiful scenery”, accompany in “full-gallop” the course of this stream that,
as we read below the photograph, is the source of the Bio Bio River. The
excerpt seems to follow by the letter the writings of the French geographer
Elisée Reclus (1830-1905), who in 1869 published his History of a stream.
In this book, as well as in History of the mountain (1880), Reclus
displays his humanistic theory of a “universal geography”, which connects the
subjective and the social experience of the subject in its close interaction
with nature in a kind of a total discipline. The excerpt, thus, introduces a
kind of geographical experience justifying the apparent illegibility of the
photograph and, in this case, operating as an index (in the sense given by
Carlo Ginzburg) of the narrative of the Bio Bio River.
22.
This
is not the history of just any river, because the Bio Bio River, as it was the
case with the Black River in Argentina, worked as an internal border between
the colonized country and the Mapuche territory for centuries, a frontier that
until a short time ago had remained an insurmountable obstacle for the national
domain. This photograph is also an evidence of the Andean border dispute, since
the representation of the source of the river in the foreground and the highest
peak in the background depicts a scenario where the chorographic and
hydrographical criteria are simultaneously manifest. This photograph constructs
a point of view where both demarcation criteria defended by each of the nations
involved in the conflict appear unified, thus erasing the differences of both
positions and enabling the geolocation of the frontier as a line marked in and
by nature, established by the coincident locations of the high peaks and the
water division.
23.
But
besides everything that this image connotes, it is the least conventional
composition of the whole group. In it we do not find a continuous horizon that
enables the measuring of space, the multiplicity of planes prevent the
identification of scales, and the light grey splotch that occupies much of the
picture introduces an almost abstract dimension to the composition. Having said
that, it is difficult to relate this image to a conventional landscape
composition, encoded according to the pictorial tradition.
24.
To
delve further into this point, I propose then a second way to approach these
images, according to their material condition as photographs and related to the
aesthetic dimension of the landscape.
Landscape in the
age of mechanical reproduction
25.
As we
have mentioned before, at least in the Apuntes, Moreno does not specify
the type of equipment he used in the Andean Patagonia expedition. However, by
comparing the proportions between his body and the machine that are projected
as shadows on the ground [Figure 7], we can assume that it was a medium sized camera that
could be easily transported, with a tripod that allowed for focus adjustments.
Considering that these photos were taken between 1893 and 1895, the negatives
used must have been in an already emulsified paper and the development process
must have been carried out once they were back in the city of La Plata, in the
workshops of the Museum.
26.
This
same plate allows us to observe the operation, carried out during this process
or in print, which consists in uniting several clichés (three in this case)
into a panorama. This allows us to assume that Moreno did not have the specific
technology to take pictures of this type, although they were already available
at the time.[15] Knowing the multiplicity of meanings
contained in the term panorama[16] at that time, it is significant that
Moreno introduces it in the caption. In this way, he makes reference not to the
technological stratagem, but to a way of seeing, at the time already
culturally assimilated as a hybrid device, halfway between the cartographic
recognition, the feeling and popularization of sights and scenery, and an
all-embracing, comprehensive, continuous and, simultaneously, synthetic and
instantaneous view – in the cognitive sense of the word.
27.
Before
discussing the specific issue of the landscape, I would like to draw attention
to the fact that the subsequent intervention in the photographs – cutting,
uniting, ordering, altering light and shadows, etc. – is in overt contradiction
with the idea of a positive evidence or “natural sign” with which a photograph
in the service of a scientific argument should be considered. These photographs
are presented as panoramas but, technically, they are not; they are assembled
subsequently, and although ruled by topographic data, they imply an
intervention in the natural order to which they refer and represent an
alteration of photography’s status of truth grounded in its instantaneity. This
was understood by the Chilean side of the dispute, for after the year of the
publication, they started rejecting the use of photographs as a demarcation
evidence, since they recognized in this practice not only the likely
alterations made during the phases of developing and reproducing photographs,
but also a high degree of subjectivity in the framing and composition when
taking a photograph.
28.
In
fact, this kind of intervention was very common amongst the amateurs of
artistic photography, known as Pictorialists. The characteristics of this
movement , which started in England in the 1880s, are beyond the scope of the
present work, but I do think it is important to mention that the movement was
an international practice organized around elite clubs who declared to be unconnected
and contrary to any commercial purpose, defending the artistic status of
photography not as a tool for reproducing reality, but as the result of
experimentation, composition and subsequent edition of the image.[17]
29.
The Amateur
Photographic Society of Argentina, established in Buenos Aires in 1889, was
founded, amongst others, by Estanislao Zeballos, an important intellectual and
politician and one of the main promoters of the Desert Campaign (the advance of
the national army in the Mapuche territory). Moreno belonged to the selected
group and this link must have motivated the collaboration of the Society with
the works of the Boundary Commission with Chile, as explained in this
advertisement:
30.
The Photographic Society, willing to
contribute in its sphere of action with transcendent public purposes, has made
its workshops available to the Commission in charge of demarcating boundaries
with Chile, has instructed its staff in the management of photographic
equipment and has practiced in its social place all work that was needed by
that Commission.[18]
31.
I
hereby would like to propose that the artistic practice that took place in the
pictorial circles of London and among members of the so-called Buenos Aires
society permeates Moreno’s photographs beyond the techniques of developing and
reproducing, conferring them style, artistry, and, in our case, the possibility
of seeing his pictures as photographic landscapes.
32.
Between
1883 and 1893, Moreno lived in London, worked with the Museum’s collection and
interacted with members of the Royal Geographical Society, of which he later
became an honorary member. During that time he most likely contacted other
amateur photographers and must have seen publications and photo exhibitions
that were held in the circles of London’s cultivated elite. In my opinion, this
period actually contributed to stylize Moreno’s photography at the same time
that it provided an aesthetic density, enhancing its eloquence as an
ideological device.
33.
Hoping
to gather more specific information about the connection between Moreno and the
artistic photography movement, I suggest the comparison with the photographs
taken before his stay in England, during an expedition to the Andes, near
Mendoza’s whereabouts, in 1883 [Figure 8 and Figure 9]. These photographs are useful for an ethnographic
archive, for their landscape is nothing but a blurred background. People and
objects are facing the lens in a clear attitude of pose, there is no
artfulness: the record is that of a scientific illustration with its topics and
usual codes as, for example, in the photograph portraying a group of
potters displaying their goods, or in the group portrait of the members of the
expedition.[19]
Photography as the
evidence of landscape
34.
The
photographs published in the Apuntes that have been mentioned here were
included, as explained above, in the official report that Argentina gave to the
British mediator in 1900. The Chilean reaction to such procedure was immediate:
Francisco Fonck, a former arbitrator of the border conflict for the Chilean
side, wrote a critical review of Moreno’s work presented in London, describing
it as a propaganda worthy of a “dazzling impression”. Concerning the inclusion
of photographs, he declared that
35.
However, despite these merits, the work
has flaws because of its twofold geographic-descriptive and litigious nature,
even if ignoring the heart of the matter. Essentially being a plea in favour of
the Argentine titles, it is clear that a few of the great panoramas and a more
condensed material of text and views would have been enough for this purpose.
Nevertheless, as defence, much of the work is needless; for information or
artistic recreation, as the one dedicated to the alpine sport, the whole
section devoted to defence is not necessary, as it provides the ensemble with a
hybrid character and prevents a pleasant mood when consulting it. [...] we even
get the impression that Arjentina (sic) wanted to hide the weakness of its
cause by means of this great defence apparatus.[20]
36.
Whether
the Apuntes is propaganda or not, it undoubtedly shares the very hybrid
nature of an object that is simultaneously ideological and aesthetic,
scientific and rhetorical. The text’s travel account is permanently crossed by
a utopian projection of what Patagonia will be once the trans-Andean railway
links the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean in the south. As an expert, Moreno
sees an ideal future in a Patagonia populated by settlers who exploit their
wealth intensively, without any indigenous people and with its natural beauty
protected by the administration of parks and the promotion of tourism. The
descriptions of these projects in Moreno’s text allow for this utopia, which is
also the counterpart of the criticism he permanently addresses to another
place, that where the centralized power dwells. Moreno’s imaginary geography is
extremely political in this sense; the capital city not only ignores this
remote territory, but it also despises its potential. With a logic that blends
the perception of nature with the definition of territory and the construction
of a national identity, Moreno complains about the geographical Argentine
imagination, strongly determined by the pampas’ vast regions of flat land,
making no room for the mountain.
37.
The
geological narrative that includes a long-term temporality also pervades
Moreno’s expedition and utopia. By the end of the 19th century, the practice of
geography implied not only the physical description of a region built from
experience and personal knowledge, but also the interpretation of its
geological age from fossil evidence (which, by the way, was one of the passions
of the expert, who collected them since childhood). That is the reason why
establishing the antiquity of a locality was as important as identifying
potential wealth. Attentive to this dimension, the Apuntes is actually a
narrative of simultaneous time frames in which the different time durations
shaping the utopia of progress are combined. The photographic scenery seems to
be the synthetic image, the “jeu d’espaces”, according to Louis
Marin’s appropriate expression,[21] where multiple diachronic convergences
are found.
38.
This
is the aesthetics with which a space until then virtually unknown becomes a
territory. Together with his expedition team, Francisco Moreno travels to a
region equipped with few and imprecise maps, which justifies the reiteration of
passages where the author makes his importance as a pioneer explicit. The
investigation, record and disclosure of this region is motivated by the purpose
of domination, and supported by knowledge acquired through experience. Moreno
moves through this preliterate territory taking as guides Darwin and Fitz Roy,
who did not complete the journey through the region in the 1830s due to their
focus on coastal areas. Before them, Francisco de Viedma, an expeditionary of
the Spanish crown who founded some cities and forts south of the Rio Negro in
the late 1770s, as well as a few others, travelled through that territorry.
39.
The
pioneer status of the expedition led by Moreno, together with the border
dispute and the colonialist political purposes encouraging it, implies a sort
of turning point within the tradition of travel books and scientific
expeditions released massively during the 19th century, constituting the bibliography
of the discipline then called Natural History[22].
In the Apuntes, geography takes precedence over history and the
experience argument outweighs the one of tradition. In this context, the image
of nature, that is, the landscape, is no longer understood as an
exemplary place assuming the form of views and panoramas predominant in
19th-century painting and visual culture. Landscape is here understood as a
territorial and geographical unit, more specifically, a legal-political and
topographical unit, approaching the notions of country or region that refer to
an “objective space of existence, rather than the view covered by a subject”[23].
40.
The
Universalist approach that characterized the mid-century Natural History,
contributing with and accomplishing the process of territorial formation of
modern nations is left behind in the Apuntes, where no anthropological
dimension of the landscape is elaborated. The life and habits of the
inhabitants of the regions they crossed are neither a part of the textual nor
the visual description Moreno makes of those places, except when, in the
aforementioned messianic tone, he describes the life of the settlers. For the
expert, the latter influence space by dwelling, forming a “practiced place”
that, as defined by Jens Andermann[24], composes “a site activated by
movements, actions, narratives and signs”, in opposition to any notion of
determinism whatsoever. In his description, Moreno actually leaves aside
deterministic observations, once his colonialist utopian discourse is a part of
the “civilizing” state machine that won over the (human and geographic)
resistance of Patagonia. In other words, according to the hygienist logic followed
by the author, those determined by the environment were the different groups of
Mapuches; groups which in previous expeditions Moreno acknowledged to have
found and that in the this last one diminished almost to nothing were part of a
past so remote in ideological terms as recent in chronological terms[25].
The account of the recent history of the region appears to support the
civilizing utopia, since as in Moreno’s view, the human group determined by the
remote and wild habitat would disappear in the same pace with which progress
was being installed.
41.
The Apuntes
makes the Argentine reader familiar with a territory regarded until then as
exotic and alien. The photographs contribute to this approach by providing
modern forms to a colonial expansionist discourse. In short, the Patagonian
experience that Moreno and his team portrayed in Apuntes goes well
beyond the border dispute. In my opinion, what is represented is the Argentine
expansion of frontiers, extended in boundless pampas or gathered in cities of
European appearance, and now gaining a mountainous landscape with mild climate
and fertile lands. These photographs which Moreno disseminated both inside and
outside Argentina, re-join (perhaps not so indirectly) the painters’ and
writers’ debate concerning national landscape; an image stumbling stubbornly,
as explained by Laura Malosetti, with the resistance the pampa imposed to its
visual representation. Besides a natural border, territory, promise of
industrial and touristic wealth, the mountain, which was explored, renamed and
photographed by Moreno, is endorsed as a possible landscape for Argentina.
42.
Considering
this, I go back to one of the issues raised at the beginning of this
investigation, in which the very category of scientific photography was
questioned. In a short article Georges Didi-Huberman dedicated to this
category, he proposes to rethink the well-discussed Benjaminian idea of
photography as the end of the aura in the art world, and to reconsider the
creative potential of scientific photography that, by means of technological
manipulation, constructs highly conceptual images. A shift in its aural value
takes place; the repetition of an experience (of a vision and of an experiment
that may lead to a discovery) is a foundational gesture for both photography
and modern scientific practice. In this sense, I think Moreno’s photographic
landscapes persist in an aura that no longer abides in material substance, but
in the fascination of the experience and in the use of photography as a means
to capture a more accurate, auratic, Adamic and ground-breaking moment.
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______________________________
[1] Translation by Elena
O’Neill
[2] Catalina Valdés
Echenique is head of the Bachelor programme of Art Theory and History of the
Art Department at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile. She
accomplished her postgraduate studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, the Instituto de Investigaciones (IDAES),
Universidad de San Martin (UNSAM), Buenos Aires, and at the Faculty of
Philosophy and Humanities at the Universidad de Chile. Her on-going PhD
dissertation is on representations of the Andes Mountains, between Argentina
and Chile, during the 19th century.
[3] Argentine-Chilian
Boundary. Report presented to the Tribunal appointed by her
Britannic Majesty’s to consider and report upon the diferences which have
arisen with regard to the frontier between the Argentine and Chilian Republics
to justify the Argentine claims for the Boundary in the summit of the
Cordillera de Los Andes, according to the Treaties of 1881 & 1893. Printed
in compliance with the request of the Tribunal, dated December 21, 1899.
London: Printed for the Government of the Argentine Republic by William Clowes
and Sons, Limited. Stamford
Street and Charing Cross, 1900. This book was studied by Carla Lois, Las
evidencias, lo evidente y lo visible: el uso de dispositivos visuales en la
argumentación diplomática argentina sobre la Cordillera de los Andes (1900)
como frontera natural. In: Treballs de
la Societat Catalana de Geografía, 70, 2010, p. 7-29. This and other works
of this historian of geography develop studies that point to a more abstract
and aesthetic dimension of the discipline, analysing the processes of
perception, representation and construction of spaces (in this case,
frontiers).
[4] KRAUSS, Rosalind.
Photography´s Discursive Spaces, In: The Originality of the Avant-Garde and
Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985.
[5] I hereby resume W. T.
J. Mitchell’s considerations regarding the distinction between convention and
nature in Nature and Convention: Ernst Gombrich. In: Iconology. Image, Text,
Ideology. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press,
1987.
[6] MAJLUF, Natalia.
Rastros de un paisaje ausente: fotografías y cultura visual en el área andina. Caiana,
n. 3, December 2013. Dossier: Los estudios del arte del siglo XIX en América
Latina. Available at: http://caiana.caia.org.ar/template/caiana.php?pag=articles/article_1.php&obj=126&vol=3. Accessed on: 20/02/2014.
[7] Although books
illustrated with photographs were still not very common, Argentina was
up-to-date, concerning the periodical press, in this kind of modern techniques.
Pioneer in this issue was the Ilustración Argentina, founded in 1881, and Caras
y Caretas, founded in 1898, was an emblematic example. Both
magazines published maps, photographs, cartoons and articles discussing the
contingency of the negotiations concerning the Andean border, which evidences
the network of intellectuals and journalists contributing to the understanding
and dissemination of the case pursuing the formation of a favourable public
opinion, in this case, Argentina’s position. The Museo de La Plata also had
their own annual magazine, copiously illustrated with photographs, drawings,
maps and even collages, in which it spread, as noted, the content of these Apuntes.
[8] This information was
released in the book Viajes de esploracion i estudio en la Patagonia
Occidental 1892-1902. 2
vols., 1st edition: Santiago: Imprenta Cervantes, 1909 (Santiago: Cámara
Chilena de la Construcción, P. Universidad Católica de Chile y DIBAM, 2010). Prior to the ruling, Steffen published five reproductions of photographs
in his report on his expedition to the Cisnes River: Informe
sumario acerca de la espedicion exploradora del rio Cisnes (en la Patagonia occidental), (Santiago, Imprenta Nacional, 1898). The originals of these photographs, documents and drawings made by
Steffen are kept on file at the Iberoamerican Institute (IAI) in Berlin. Some
of these photographs were included as illustrations in the introductory essay
by historian Carlos Sanhueza for the reediting of their Viajes
above-mentioned. A careful investigation of these images is still pending; of
course, this investigation is suitable for a dialogue with the photographs
herein.
[9] For this and other
issues in this work concerning scientific objectivity as a product of
convention, visual and linguistic constructions, that is, encodings of a
subjective perception of reality, I refer to Bruno Latour’s deconstruction of
the discourse of modernity and Lorraine Daston’s and Peter Galison’s brilliant
history of the objectivity, included in the bibliography.
[10] MORENO, Francisco Pascasio. Apuntes preliminares sobre una excursión á los territorios del Neuquén, Rio Negro, Chubut y Santa Cruz. La Plata: Museo de La Plata, 1897, p. 20.
[11] The pages of the
plates are not numbered accordingly to the text. In the frame of the photograph
reference “Rev. del Museo de La Plata. Tomo VIII” to the right side and, to the
left, “Moreno: Region Andina” is indicated, followed by the number of the
plate. This responds to the fact that both the text and the pictures were part
of the eighth edition of this magazine published by the museum annually, in
these cases corresponding to 1898. The printing plates of the photographs must
have been diagrammed having this publication in mind. Although the text and the
appendixes’ information are identical in both publications, in Apuntes,
the plates are presented interspersed, while in the magazine they appear all
together, at the end of the text.
Note that the two previous issues of the magazine were devoted to disclosing
the Andes’s scientific expeditions of the museum’s scientific staff to northern
and central Argentina. In number IX, meanwhile, the article “The Argentine
Chilean border issue”, by the expert Steffen, was followed by a “Critical
Review” written by Enrique S. Delachaux, director of the Cartographic Section
of the Museo de La Plata. In this case maps, not photographs, were included.
[12] It is striking,
however, that none of the photographs published in the book refers to
indigenous huts and villages, ruins of war camps or forts that Moreno would
frequently find in his way, milestones which he would resort to in order to
narrate battles and comment on how the indigenous population recoiled in the
territory “won” by the Argentine government during its successive military
campaigns in the region. This kind of photograph does appear, however, in the
version published in the Revista del Museo de La Plata,
1898.
[13] The historian of
Argentine science, Irina Podgorny, has devoted several works on various aspects
of the Museo de La Plata founded by Francisco P. Moreno. The collections formed
from the “Desert Campaign” are studied in the article “Los
esqueletos araucanos del Museo de La Plata y la Conquista del Desierto”, Arqueología
contemporánea, n. 3, 1992 (73-79). For a
comparative view of the treatment implemented by the Chilean and Argentinian
concerning the Mapuche people and their culture, I recommend the article by
André Menard, Archivo y reducto. Sobre la inscripción de lo Mapuche en Chile y Argentina, Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, vol. 5, n. 3, septiembre – diciembre
2011. Available at: www.aibr.org. Accessed on
20/02/2014.
[14] The Swiss historian
François Walter has addressed the innumerable “Switzerlands” recreated since
mid-19th century by Europe and the United States. Moreno’s comparison is
another example of the power acquired by the Swiss model of mountain and lake
landscapes, promoted at the time due to their medicinal benefits (clean and dry
air, thermal baths, etc.) and tourism. A notable example of this “alpine
aesthetic” is the reference made by Natalia Majluf, in the work mentioned at
the beginning of this article, of the painted backdrops that served as a
background for photographic portraits in mid-19th century in Lima. This model
determines also an architectural style that, as Rodrigo Booth studied in the
case of Southern Chile, was transplanted to hotels and to the infrastructure of
tourist resorts.
[15] Looking closely at the
two photographs that compose this plate, one can see the junctions of the
clichés. At the same time, it is noteworthy that being a panoramic shot with an
ad hoc equipment, the shadow would appear at the centre of the
landscape and not on the side. I thank Fabio D'Almeida’s observations
concerning this and the generous conversations about the topics discussed in
this paper in general.
[16] Concerning the
panoramas, a large bibliography can be consulted. Denise Blake Oleksijczuk
traces the history of the term since its invention (as a neologism with which
the optical device was baptized), its meaning encompassing all “extended”
images and its metaphor to describe a “total” or, saying even more,
imperialistic gaze. The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
[17] The history of
Pictorialism in Latin America still needs further research. In European and
American domains good progress has been made, with exhibitions and research
showing that this movement, at the same time conservative and experimental,
naturalistic and idealistic, elitist and amateur, is a quarry from which it is
possible to extract examples of the founding contradictions of modernity.
[18] Almanaque Peuser, Year
IX, 1896. I thank Professor Veronica Tell for her generous help with this
reference and for showing me the photographs of the expedition Moreno Mendoza.
She leads pictorialism studies in Argentina, and has written an exemplary
article “Gentlemen, gauchos and modernization. Una lectura del proyecto de la Sociedad
Fotográfica Argentina de Aficionados”, published in Revista Caiana n. 3
December 2013. (Available at: http://caiana.caia.org.ar/template/caiana.php?pag=articles/article_1.php&obj=110&vol=3; accessed on 20/02/2014).
[19] This comparison could
be extended to photographs of Antonio Pozzo in the context of the Desert
Campaign, studied by Veronica Tell in, Panoramica y close up:
construcciones fotográficas sobre una usurpación, (LASA, Rio de Janeiro,
2009).
[20] FONCK, Francisco. Examen Crítico de la obra del señor Perito Arjentino
Francisco P. Moreno como contribución a la defensa de Chile. Valparaíso:
Imp. Gillet, 1902, p. 5.
[21] “Historiquement,
la fonction de l’utopie est celle d’une pratique à la fois poétique et
projective […] Les jeux d’espaces que produit la pratique utopique (au
double sens du terme « jeu ») constituent un mode d’être historique,
la forme « esthétique » de son historicité” (MARIN, 1973, p.10).
[22] As examples of the
Natural History of the countries involved in this case, I consider the works of
Claude Gay (1800-1873), with its Physical and Political History of Chile
(published in Paris between 1844-1848) and Alcide d'Orbigny (1802 -1857), with Voyage
en Amérique méridionale (also published in Paris between 1835-1847).
[23] BESSE, Jean-Marc. Ver a terra. Seis ensaios sobre a paisagem
e a geografia. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2006, p. 21.
[24] ANDERMANN, Jens. Paisaje: imagen, entorno, ensamble. La Plata: Revista
Orbis Tertius, 2008, n. XIII, v. 14.
[25] Mónica Quijada (1998)
has studied Francisco Moreno’s anthropological production, explaining how the
scientific discourse managed to homologate human remains from prehistoric times
to bodies and objects of the Mapuches killed during the same years in which the
expeditions took place.