Visual Alterities: different photographic inscriptions of Latin America’s indigenous peoples in ethnic-racial portraits in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Abstract

This article analyzes the visual inscriptions of historical alterities, approaching the ways in which the indigenous peoples of Latin America have been represented through the camera at different times in 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a theoretical study that explores "botocudos’s" portraits by E. Thiesson (1844) and the racial paradigm by Étienne Serres in National Museum of Natural History (Paris); the ethnological portrait’s scientific standards and the “costumbrist” and commercial’s portrait, presenting the discussions of the ethnologists about photography and ethnographic methods. Likewise, the images of the "Founders" of Mapuche’s photography in Chile (1886, 1890) are reviewed and contrasted with other forms of visual inscription, those of the vanquished at La Plata Museum (1885) and the Anglican-Mapuche project (1903) as modernization of a race. There are many and different colonial perspectives in which, but nevertheless, two categories subsist as an iconographic substratum, race and ethnicity as markers of alterity.