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The history of photography and the analysis of photographic practices and experiences in modern Mexico are claiming a central place in the discussion of modernity and culture in Mexican society. Not so long ago, cultural and art historians summed up the contributions of photography to Mexican culture with the honorary mention of one or two photographers, after dedicating the most attention to the fabulous lives and deeds of the three great Mexican mural painters Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Roberto Tejada has written a book that effectively challenges the secondary position art historians have assigned to photography in the landscape of Mexican cultural history. Written as a collection of essays dedicated to pivotal figures in the development of Mexican photography — the Casasola family, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the Boystown collection — National Camera successfully expands the horizons of the debate on Mexican visual arts from a transnational/ transborder perspective.The book sets sights on repositioning photographic production in Mexico as a truly transnational practice where cultural exchange and border-crossing between Mexico, the United States, and Europe are integral components of a shared visual environment generated in Mexican territories by native and foreign artists. Starting with the Casasola family’s photographic experiences and finishing with the Boystown collection and its odd itinerary in American cultural institutions from its genesis on the U.S.-Mexican international border, Tejada provides a vibrant, complex, and passionate study. He argues convincingly that photography in greater Mexico provides a unique angle from which to analyze the emergence of cultural and intellectual modernity in the twentieth-century Mexican artistic landscape.Tejada’s ambitious essays document his quest to discuss and redefine the meanings of modernism and modernity in its Mexican version, while refusing to accept the position assigned to photography as a minor development in the national narrative of Mexican culture. He incorporates in a rigorous and lucid manner the ways in which cultural, national, gender, and sexual differences are embedded in the visual arts to generate a shared image environment floating along the porous border between Mexico and the United States.Tejada’s discussion and analysis of the images produced in Mexico by Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, and Manuel Alvarez Bravo provide a fresh and inspired view of the cultural landscape in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. The book is at its best when discussing the cross-fertilization of intellectual and artistic trends that shaped photographic artistry in the turbulent Mexico of that time. In a truly transnational and transcultural narrative, Tejada sheds light on the cultural and intellectual thread between Paris, New York, and Mexico City by which photography evolved and emerged.While always intriguing and compelling in their own right, not all the essays in the book are written with the same degree of analytical complexity and therefore are not equally persuasive or convincing. Moreover, in trying to connect photographic practice to contemporary positions on modernity, the argument follows sometimes unnecessarily long detours, taking the reader through philosophical and metaphysical debates from Mexican and European thinkers.Notwithstanding these points, National Camera expands the discussion of Mexi-can photography in innovative and insightful ways, providing the reader with a fresh and sophisticated interpretation of the artwork by some of the most prominent photographers of twentieth-century Mexican history. It represents an important contribution to the debate on Mexican intellectual and cultural modernity from the point of view of a transnational image landscape. It will certainly stimulate further research and discussion.
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