A fresh look at the Casasola Archive

Abstract

Agustín Víctor Casasola has generally been considered the photographer of the Mexican Revolution (1910–17). This role has assigned him authorship of the most important images made of the armed struggle and assumes that he covered many of the events which made up that civil war.1 For the past two years, I have been in charge of cataloguing the Casasola Archive on computer for the Fototeca del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, which has enabled me to study this collection in a way that no other researcher has. As a result, I have discovered that the archive, which is composed of around 600 000 negatives and was built up over a period of70 years (1900–70), is made up of the work of at least 483 photographers. I have also determined that Agustín Victor Casasola erased photographers' names from the emulsion of many thousands of negatives, the majority of which appear to have been those of his brother, Miguel.

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