Podcast Summary: "Portraits in the Andes: Photography and Agency, 1900-1950" – Jorge Coronado on New Books Network
Podcast: New Books Network – Native American Studies Channel
Host: Ryan Tripp
Guest: Professor Jorge Coronado (Northwestern University, Spanish & Portuguese)
Date: November 9, 2025
Book: Portraits in the Andes: Photography and Agency, 1900-1950 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018)
Overview
In this engaging episode, host Ryan Tripp interviews Professor Jorge Coronado about his book Portraits in the Andes, a deep exploration of studio portraiture and photographic practices across the southern Andes between 1900 and 1950. Coronado discusses how Andean subjects and photographers used studio photography to negotiate modernity, subjectivity, and social agency, offering a new lens to view Indigenous and mestizo self-representation beyond “lettered” or textual sources.
Key Discussion Points & Insights
1. The Striking Cover Image & Photographic Technique
- Foto-Olio Explained: The cover features a foto olio, an illuminated (hand-painted) photograph by Sebastian Rodriguez and his brother Braulio Rodriguez.
- Significance:
- Chosen for its unique presence of color; the book includes no color plates otherwise.
- Embodies themes of self-representation and photographic agency.
- Quote:
- "It's a very striking photo… it's actually what's called a foto olio, which is an illuminated photograph. It means that it's been painted by hand." (Jorge Coronado, 02:01)
2. Why Focus on Studio Portraiture (not Identification Photography)?
- Personal Academic Journey:
- Coronado shifted from studying Indigenismo in literature to photography due to access issues; photography granted direct insight into previously marginalized Andean subjects.
- Portraiture vs. Identification Photography:
- Portraiture expresses subjectivity and agency; ID photography is for state identification and lacks this intention.
- Quote:
- "I was interested in portraiture because it did something else… it portrayed this sort of intimate subjectivity of individual subjects." (Jorge Coronado, 04:46)
3. Theoretical Reinterpretation & Modernity
- Redefining "Modern":
- Photography introduced technological modernity to the Andes, democratized by falling prices.
- Photography’s role shifted: from “scientific” reality-capture to a medium shaped by consumption and self-fashioning.
- Quote:
- "The reinterpretation of photography has to do with the movement from a technology that portrays the real… to one that's thought of from the angle of consumption." (Jorge Coronado, 07:33)
4. Agency and Imitation in Early Photographs
- Miners vs. Engineers:
- Andeans learned photographic tropes from images of elites and adapted them, inserting their own objects and gestures to create new meanings.
- Quote:
- "There's a sort of learning going on of these everyday Andeans… they learn these sorts of postures and really the fabrication of self-portraits from them and then employ these strategies to make pictures of themselves." (Jorge Coronado, 09:26)
5. Limits of "Lettered Indigenismo" and Power of the Visual
- Constitutive Contradiction:
- Indigenismo was largely by and for the mestizo middle classes—Indigenous and lower-class mestizos had little access to print culture.
- Photography democratized representation, allowing self-fashioning in ways literature did not.
- Quote:
- "A lot of that self-representation of indigenous peoples and mestizo lower class people takes place within the photography… it gives you a vision onto subjects and a sector of society that lettered indigenismo couldn't do." (Jorge Coronado, 11:49)
6. Text Versus Image: Hierarchies and Illustrative Uses
- Photographs as Illustration:
- In archaeological and tourist literature, photos served to illustrate, thus subordinated to text.
- Yet, the images sometimes held tensions or counter-narratives to the written word.
7. Cusco School of Photography & Social Reach
- Loose Network:
- Many photographers active, but not a coordinated “school.”
- Spread of affordable photography made portraiture accessible to the non-elite, revealing seldom-seen self-representations.
- Quote:
- "The value for the historical record is enormous because you have access to the self-representations of those people who had no direct access to writing, which is a technology of the powerful…" (Jorge Coronado, 17:29)
8. Presentation of Bodies, Dress, and Private Space
- Significance of Sartorial Choices:
- Objects, clothing, and posture in portraits were deliberately selected to signal identity, aspirations, economic status, and modernity.
- Most studio portraits were disseminated in private realms: albums, homes, family spaces.
- Quote:
- "An enormous amount of care that goes into not only the way that the face is presented, that the body is held, but also the details, the sort of objects—clothes, jewelry, shoe wear, clocks—that create sense within the image." (Jorge Coronado, 19:17)
9. Changing Relationships, Group Portraits, and Migration
- Photographic Social Ties:
- Portraiture evolved to record not just individuals but complex webs of relationships, labor groups, and migrant networks.
- Images documented adaptation of rural traditions to urban modernity.
- Quote:
- "Extraordinary images of miners...and images of recently arrived migrants...are extraordinarily rich in communicating both the ways in which traditions are brought from rural culture...and the way in which those traditions are...readapted to the particular context." (Jorge Coronado, 21:40)
10. Invention, Performance, and Historical Punctum
- Photograph as Elaborate Invention:
- Portraits fuse documentary value and self-invention, making visible how Andeans performed identity and modernity.
- The “punctum” (Barthes): particular objects or gestures that “sting” or resonate historically.
- Quote:
- "These fictions that are communicated in the visual record are extraordinarily useful for negotiating this sort of symbolic imaginary…" (Jorge Coronado, 25:37)
11. Omission, Gender, and Sartorial Politics
- Image Erasure & Gendered Costume:
- Photographs often exhibit intentional omissions (erased faces/figures) or framed absences, indicating strategies of self-presentation.
- Female attire (notably the Pollera skirt) in Bolivia becomes a visible assertion of indigenous pride and economic mobility.
- Quote:
- "It's clearly a point of pride, by which I mean a point of indigenous identity that wants to be projected by the subjects… and it's also an indicator…of the economic wherewithal of indigenous women within urban space." (Jorge Coronado, 29:17)
12. Ownership, Class, and Market Transformations
- Who Owns the Image?:
- Initially, photo subjects (and their families) had control over their images—important for agency.
- Over time, images often enter commercial/collecting markets, disconnecting them from original contexts.
- Julio Cordero Case Study:
- Cordero (Aymara descent) began as an elite-focused photographer, distancing himself from indigenous identity.
- Economic pressures in the 1930s broadened his clientele and led to cheaper, more widespread portraiture.
- Quote:
- "Ownership gave authority to what we can think of as subaltern subjects to manage their own self image and how that would be transmitted." (Jorge Coronado, 32:13)
- "He banned the speaking by his family of Aymara in his home…[but] economic pressures mean that after 1930s, he has to start taking pictures of people with a broader class background." (Jorge Coronado, 34:37)
13. Horizontal Relationships & Archive Tensions
- Collaboration, Not Hierarchy:
- Coronado challenges the model of photographer as sole author, emphasizing clients’ active, “shoulder-to-shoulder” input.
- Archive Dynamics:
- The Andean photographic archive is vast, with images preserved both locally and in national/international collections, raising questions about connection to original communities and histories.
- Quote:
- "From interviews and from other research, my understanding is that it was actually much more of a collaborative effort between subjects and photographers." (Jorge Coronado, 37:41)
Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments
-
On Agency & Fabrication:
"People fabricating images…and in this case, fabricating has to do with the ways in which they pose. And it's a very elaborate photo…with the beer and the cigarettes and the mining tools and the dirty clothes." (Jorge Coronado, 08:44) -
On Duality of Archive:
"This archive... allows access to an enormous kind of historical social richness… That same archive… is perhaps troublingly also being removed from those same spaces… it puts images into a trajectory... that has less to do with the places within which they originated." (Jorge Coronado, 38:54)
Key Timestamps
- 02:01 – The cover’s foto olio and its significance
- 04:46 – Why portraiture shows agency in a way ID photography cannot
- 07:33 – Modernity, technological change, and theoretical reinterpretation
- 09:26 – Miners’ self-fabrication and imitation of elite portraiture
- 11:49 – How photography challenges the limits of lettered Indigenismo
- 17:29 – The Cusco school’s breadth and democratization of image-making
- 19:17 – The role of body, dress, and private space in sense-making
- 21:40 – Migration, group portraiture, and adaptation to modern contexts
- 25:37 – Documentary as invention; photographic “punctum”
- 29:17 – Gender, the pollera, and sartorial politics in Bolivia vs. Peru
- 32:13 / 34:37 – Ownership, Cordero’s trajectory, and changing clienteles
- 37:41 – Horizontal (collaborative) relationships in the studio
Closing & Future Work
- Future Project Sneak Peek:
- Coronado is researching the cultural biography of the “Andino” concept and examining transnational consumption, including “neo-Peruvian” cuisine.
- Also initiating a broader study on literacy, intellectuals, and subaltern agency in the Andes and Latin America.