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NARRAT IVE

Edited

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ALEX HUGHES <1nd ANDRE A NOB LE

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Unjvers1t\' of 1\fc;\V I\/texico Press

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Contents

List of Illustrations

tiU

Acknowledgments

lX

Notes on Contributors

Xt

Introduction
Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble

Part One: Photography and Testimony

Chapter r.

Nazi Photographs in Post-Holocaust Art:

Gender as an Idiom of Memorialization
Marianne Hirsch

Chapter

Narratives of Place: History and Memory and the

2.

Evidential Force of Photography in Work by Meridel

Rubenstein and Joan Myers
Judith Fryer Davidov
'

Chapter 3

41

Still Moving Images: Photographs of the Disappeared

in Fihns about the "Dirty War" in Argentina

Catherine Grant
I

Chapter 4

Part 1\vo: Photography and Narrative Commemoration

Image Memory Text

Nancy Shawcross

'V

fill t11 ,111 i S 111 }~ (' i lll J ~1 i l l C l i :

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Rodero's

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This chapte1 fo uses on the current problcn, ~tt izc1f ion urI tt)~~Lttll l ing
assun1ption~ about photogrdphy ~ts .1 IJunt.nti SI n I( .1vo r'. lltr u t r.t r li~ ~~ ~ i
unde1stood ()Sa belief in th e connnon~l i ty cl "'"''c1 nki" d'c c/p . , jc~trt
and aspirations . J C01nn10l1a1ity th ~lllr.rn ~k;c.; II Ck; u l lu rtt l, ( 'I ( ) JH rni c, g t,_
graphic, S0Cjctl, ~nd JdcoJogic.tl di ff:ort. rl cc; .. 'Th< r~< i:p crl si J, i lil y fin" nH ':
fellow "rnan" in1 pli jd by n h tl n l ~IJli C I]H.; r~~P ' cLive h n~: t~t vc r h < <; tl :;IH ll tl dered w~1ll r"p~"'dt ~r CC)fl1lTiii JJlelll l ll ctll lrvJ Ill (' ] <'\ <' 1HL II"Y "''
cl,,,Ji,,t.tttl,dI
jst V\1. T~u ~cnc Sn1ith (lgl8{8). ny ,t-" llirl g his p i H I! ()g l~. ,ll'y nr rl lt .d
Sp1in n xt to C1istina Garciti J'od(ro':-: 'nuc h JJI OJ"c ,.t.: 111 , 1,-.; ~:< !I<' '' '''
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covc'tlg<.: o[ the sa1ne ~t,bj:l<.:t, l higldiflll Jll:">l ()Jdy 1111 li r~io ' ': tltld
as~un1pUons of the photogrrtphic lr~t diliPll t"l!FJII.!Sl!llll:d hy ~;udll t ; ,,,
al~ohowGarcinl\odero'sjntetrC>{'at i OrJ ofht l11t. tni,"L i rtLl/'.t"'oCi h '' ttli Jl l
a11d iudiv)duaJJty, dS well f.ls of" J r. ll Oisl propd1~111d~1, ul t i 1 rt;tt~ l y ld o
.1pperd<> to univer'_a] valu st~cb ~~ s frcl!dnrn .t nd dt!nlO<'l-. ll ic ,,)r\1< .. <'"
taUon that art~ bL1tJ12J1ic; J'l1'; avow <~d r'"~li . .oll d'fl n~ . I r, ll. ll ~<f' : 11"g111' t f1 r!l
Garcia 1\out,;ro's ( orupl<.!X n l ~tl ionship
b.YII l p()l h I ir. () I IJ J:'i l ie>t1 lu
Slnitb'~.; approach 'Is Cr8ccd by IH.;:r pJH:>C<Jf1,l"t!ph ~' LIL k or l l , ll" l '~ll iv., cdll' l'encc. 'f'his ~j1u:11e" tl ern i11 r.1 V(:!.ty dif'lt: J"(rtl. pl tn l ogr.qd1 ic pL.J c rr on1
that oc ct.lpied . by 111e work orSJnitlL AI l l 1<;; Srt ll H I inl , I ~r i111.tgt~ txi::l
jn the narr"tiVt; 111d pbOI C'/~ '""phic cont~XI~ of' pot>:L- fl r",'" ~"i~ l ~~ lli 11,
against which tht;y t~rti c ul r.tlc... 1h<.;ir n1c ,~nint~ 'r'l l t' ' !tJnHc r1r "-,innrl l ctJt ~r )u ...

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in Spain.
In 1950 Smith completed vvl1at is consjdered an1ong the finest
photographic essays, "Spanish Village,'' which he shot in Deleitosa,
Extremadura, and which was published by Life magazine the follow ing year (fig. 8. r). His comments about his photographs are revealing.
Reflecting on the significance of on e of the i1nages i11 the series, he
attacks Francoist propaganda and repression and asserts his Republican sympathies: ''Away from the p ublicized historical attractions,
away from the unrepresentative disproportion of the main cities, avvay
fro1n the tourist landmarks, Spain is to be found. Spain is of its villages, simple down to the poverty line, its people unlazy in slow-paced
striving to earn a frugal living from the ungenerous soil. Centuries of
the blight of neglect, of ~:xploitation, of the present intense domination weigh heavily; yet th~ peoEJ~ are not defeated. Believing in life,
2
they reluctantly relinquish tl1eir dead." And about another ph.ocograph in the series he commen ts: "The Spaniards are a people who are
not easily defeated. They work the day and sleep the night, struggle
for and bake their bread and believe in life." Throughout: his life :he
focused passionately and compassionately on concerns such as "the
blight of neglect, of exploitation," and the life-and-death struggle in
harsh environments. Another statement reveals thac for him photography was a means of triggering universal recognition of a con1mon
human spirit, righteous anger in its defense: '~11d each time I pressed
the shutter release it was a shouted condemnation hurled v~rith the
hope that the picture might survive through the years, \+Vith the hope
that they (sic] might echo through the minds of 1nen i11 tbe futurP-ecausing them caution and remembrance and realization." 3
In 1955 Smith joined Magnum, the photographers' cooperative set
up in New York in 1947 to ptlrsue projects promotino the humanistic values that he championed and that -vvere espoused by the socialist views of the agency's foundi11g mernbers.t! 1agnum's first
conlmission, for the n1ass-circulation Ladies Ho1ne Journal, was a project titled "People Are People the \J\Torld Over," \ vhich recorded the
lives of farmers and their families around the vvorld.S ...t\t the same
time, one of Mag11un1's founding members, David Seymour, \+Vas documenting the situation of impoverished children and orphans in postvvar Europe for UNESCO. In the same year Smith also contributed
pbotographs (though none fron1 ''Spanish Village") to The Famil)r of
1

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been identified as one of the prin cipal features of the grotesgue in art
and literature. 1 Consequently, I claim that Garcia Rodero's photography
may be i11serted into a well-established tradition of grotesque art

.L .1. v J J ..&. U.J. .&. u

HUMANISM REIMAGINED

8.!.
W. Eugene Smith, Spanish Wake, from "Spanish Village," r95 r .
FIGURE

Man exhibition, held at the Museum of Modern Art in Nevv Yorl(,

one of the key exhibitions of the medium's history. The 503 phot ographs selected from more than two million submitted from arou n d
the world I4 percent were taken by Magnum photogr ap hers are
distinguished by their emblematically classic, at times monumental
composition. The viewer was to be inspired by the human spirit portrayed by images t hat, in t h e words of the exhibition's organizer, the
photography pioneer Edward Steichen, were "conceived as a mirror
of the universal elemen ts and emotions in the everydayness of liP-eas a mirror of the essential oneness of mank.ind throughout the
6
world." The enterprise was aided by captions citing great men; the
classics of world literature, from the Bible to the Bhagavad Gita; and
proverbs and V<f~_rse from nonmetropolitan ethnicities, specifically
those of the Sioux, Pueblo, I<waldutl, and Navajo Indians, as well as
the Maori. All such texts underline what are presented as universally
recognizable ideals and themes related to humanity's cycle of birth
and death: justice, love, childlike purity, parenthood, industry, fortitude, and, above all, hope, represented by the last photograph of
the exhibition, a 1946 photograph by Smith. Showing his children
wallcing into the brilliant light of a forest, it is titled The Walk to
JOHN D . PE RIVO LAR IS

151

~araazse

Captioned i~1 the exhi bition catalog '~ith a

line by St. John Perse, A world to be ~orn un der your footsteps/'
Smith's photograph faces the catalog's inside back cover image by
Cedric Wright, a photograph of waves brealcing. The exhibition thus
served as a photographic "mirror" of "Mankind," uniting all nations
under a humanism that malces them imri1ediately legible, so that the
strong photographic compositions undergird t h e assttrance of the
exhibition's themes and sentiment. It vvas this confident period of
postwar American photography that Marshall M cLuhan had in n1ind
when, in his 1964 Understanding 1\1edia: The Extensions of' Man, he
""rote: "[The photograph] wipes out our nation al fro11tiers clnd cultural barriers and involves us in The Fa1nily oj'l\1a1:, regardless of any
particular point of view."7
It is no accident that the exhibition's location vvas t:he sa1ne as
that of the headquarters of the United Nations, t h e organizatio11 that
emblematized its values, optimism, and concerns. A photograph of
the UN General Assembly~ appears on page 184 of the exhibition catalog, along \Alith a passage~from--t!!e United Nations Charter referri11g
to its mission to "reaffirm faith
fundamentall1umcn1 rigl1ts, in the
dignity and worth of the human person, in tl1e equal rights of men
and women and of nations large and small." Th e Fan1ily of Man too](
place at the end of the first decade of the United Nations, with both
projects indisputably necessitated by the h or rors of the recent vvorld
war and the threat of global holocaust unleashed by the 11t1clear arms
8
race. The dangers and benefit s of the nttclear age are debated
through t he juxtaposition of a Siou x passage u rging the respo11sible
("sacred") use of fire and a quotation fro m the U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission urging the same responsibility -vvitl1 regard to nuclear
energy, both running down the center of a two-page spread displaying a photograph of an office building, each.ofwhose -vvindo-vvs is illuminated by abundant electricity, and nuclear scientists and engi11eers
at work.9 lv!eanwhile, on page 178 there is a photograph of a young
Nagasaki victim of radiation burns, opposite a conde1nnation of the
nuclear arms race by Bertrand Russell. ro The assumed internationalism, ease, accessibility, an~ immediacy of the ideals represented by
The Fan1ily of Man are directly related to its location i11 the immediately postwar United States and are reliant on a reception based on a
Jj beral consensus of values only co11ceivable before the late and
postindustrial age of globalized travet transnational media distribution, youth and sexual revolutions, Vietnan1, and ethnic separatistn
in the United States. But the ultimate foundation of such confident
universalism is the superpower status the United States enjoyed in

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HUMANISM

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by itt coaning of cultural. ag~, maniodel'llJsm in stract expresston1s1n and

_-.:or
as the cultural capital of th~ cold
.... ...,. that a serted, to use Mar1anne
perspective that subordinates the word
authority of self-assured, self-assuring
with the lives of forelgners that it fi xes

of

the detail of which I revjsit below,

~
the particular,

midcenturj~

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photograp Ic

contested

ideologlcal hue. Tl1e

,5
Village" and the work . of Cris~ina
forty
later, in Ig8g, 1s star_tl1ng.
age of photographi~ rep~e~entat1~n , a
__ of national 1dent1t1es, n1ar 1<:ed
by
ve admission to full mem:bership,
...
Martin Parr, whose hostile and
of working-class life in Britain and mass
11
tiODS of his ridiculing manl(ind in l1is
..,..,s
k compositions of eve11ts inaccessibly
and unaided by textual captions accon1panying
her images difficult to assimilate not only by
but also by Spaniards not fron1 the locatio11s phosense of disorientation is dramatized by the fact that
those of a Spanish photographer, whose exploration
promtses the ethnographic depiction of a "dark consted by the title of her book, Espaiia oculta (Hidden
there JS no recourse to the ethnographer's reassuring nar,.nfic categories or to National Geographic's attractive exotiCJJJn. Her photographs are, in this sense, antihumanist, since the
authonty of universal values is undermined.
In the context of Spanish photographic history, as outlined by
pain's foremost historian of the medium, Publio L6pez Mondejar, in
hls authoritative 1997 Historia de La fotografia en Espafia (History of
Photography in Spain), I would also consider th ese photographs antiNationalist. This is because they disallow the pictorialist celebration
of an eternal, epic Spain contrived by p hotographers favored by the
Francoist regime's propaganda apparatus, par ti cularly the Direcci6n
General de Prensa y Propaganda. One s uch photographer was Jose
Ortiz EchagUe, who traveled the length an d breadth of Spain to
m
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HUMANISM REIMACINEO
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Spanisbness and Spanish types, \tVhich he published in a tetralogy

of books: Espatia/ tipos y trajes (r933; Spain, Types and Costumes); .

Espana, pueblos

) 1 paisajes

(1938; Spain, Villages and Landscapes);

Espana mistica (1943; Mystical Spain); and Castillos y alcazares ( rgs6;
Castles and Fortresses). 14 The probability that Garcia Rodero's own
Espaiia oculta might be read as an intertextual parody of the third title
m the series is increased by the bathetic distance her photographs
evince from the values attributed to Ortiz Echague's work by Friar
Justo Perez de Urbel, writing in rg48:
Throughout his work V\7e witness filing past men from every
province and also every period, those who have made that colossal history that exceeds the 1naddest distortions of epic poetry.
Thus we can see the heroes of Nurnancia and the conquistador
of America, the anonymous settler of the Reconquest, Don
Quixote, Hernan Cortes.
A traves de su obra vemos desfilar al hombre de todas las
provincias y tam bien de todos los tiempos, el que ha hecho esa
hlstoria descomunal que supera los mas locos extravios de la
poesia epica. Asi vernos al heroe de Numancia y al conqu istador americana, al repoblador an6nimo de la Reconquista, a
don Quijote, a Hernan Cortes. IS
Less bombastically, we might note that, to a certain degree, a photograph is an optical reprodu ction as w ell as a re-creation of reality.
It is pre-digital photography's necessarily empirical encounter with
the phenomenological world that allows Garcia Rodero to coincide
with the aesthetic project of Gilbert and George, English artists who
w ork with photographic installations and who have illuminated the
optimism of their work by declaring, "We want to create a reality
that doesn't exist in art .... It's not usual to show the human person.
16
Normally what is shown is a human condition." Her photography
coincides, too, ..with that of one of Magnum's founding members,
Robert Capa, whose rg36 photograph of a Republican soldier shot on
the Cordoba Front is perhaps the most famous war photograph ever
taken. Of Capa, another Magnumite, Eve Arnold, says the following,
countering the impression that his pictures "were not consistently
1
well designed" 7 by highlighting their immediacy : "He was aware
that it is the essen ce of a p icture, not necessarily its form, which is
18
important."
JOHN 0. PER I VOLARIS

155

It is to the documentary quiddity of Capa's phot ographs, taken

before and at the outset of Magnum, prior to Smith's membership and

to The Family of Man, to which Garcia Rodero's work harks back. Her
images move beyond the conspicuous equillbrium of Smith's compositions, whose interpretive intention as messages is underlined by his
declaration, at the beginning of his career, "I want them to b e symbolic of something." 19 The inherent immediacy of the medium the
pre-digital photographer's obligation to be, in Smith's w or ds, "physically present" unsettles the detachment of aestheti cs, a designed
20
view of reality, or ideas of self-expression and social r esponsibility.
Smith resolutely brought the latter to bear on his w ork, t hrou gh a narrative essay form of photography that involved flaw less composition,
sometimes directed or even posed; strictly controlled ch iaroscuro; and
copious captions. 2 1 In this, he remind s us of Henri Cartier-Bresson,
one of the original Magnum fo unders, who was traine d as a painter
and could master th e vvorld he p h otograph ed th r ou g h h is cult ivated
virtuosity and an intellectual's sen se of photography as a tool for
discovering "significance" 'in the_world. In his landmark 195 2 book,
The Decisive Moment, Cartier-Bresson set for t h thus his philosophy of
the medium:

'

'

To me, photography is the simultan eous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a
precise ~rganization of form s wh ich give. the event its pror>er
express1on . ... But this talces care only of the conter1t of the
picture. For me, ~ontent cannot be separated from form. By
form, r. mean a rtgorous organization of the interplay of strrfaces, h~es and values. It is in t h is organization alone that Otl r
conceptrons and emotions become concrete and commttnicable. In photography, visual organization can stem only from a
developed _instinct ..... ~hotograpl1y must seize upon this
moment and hold 1mmob1le the equilibrium of it.22

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Of course, the ~rtless candidness of many of Garcia Rodero's hotographs (fig. 8.3) 1s no less contrived than and involves as In
P
th ti d
any aese c eclSlons as Smith's more rhetorical approach In the S . . . l
h t
h '
h

pan1s 1
l enses enabl es
P
h o ograp er s case, t e frequent choice of wide-angle
.
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. the. length of lines ' vanishing
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arge num er of figures in the same shot most of \AJho
attention b bein 1
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Mor
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of lugh art.
Garcia Rodero works in the wake of a resurrected interest in documentary realism, a genre largely dormant since the Republican p eriod
but revived by-Spanish photographers such as Jordi Olive and M anuel
Ferro!. Her work was also enabled by the emergence, toward the end
of the Franco period, of art photography, oppositional photojournalism, and formerly prohibited genres such as the nude, as well as by a
boom in iconoclastic experimentation exemplified by the Nueva Lente
group of the rg7os, of w~c4 Garcia Rodero and her sister, Marigrci,
were memberS. 2 4 Garcia Rodefop~ents post-Franco Spain in the form
of a series o_f discontinuous momeilts, empty of historical significance.
If folklore iS the repository of national identity, then the images she
creates are vacant and disarticulated. If Catholicism was the mainstay
of Francoism, religion merely provides, in her photography, the stage
set for absurdist drama. Eschewing, however, the nihilism of that dran1atic genre, Garcia Rodero's photography undertal(es a scrupulous representational voiding of the homeland and Spanish history, by pushing
the .search for decentralized regional identity to its extreme. Her book
proposes-a q'-:1-est for an "Espafi.a oculta,'' an invisible Spain beyond the
misrepresentations of propaganda and tradition, and challenges the
preservationism of regional cultural patrimony enshri11ed bv the de\rolutionary dir,ection that Spanish politics adopted after F~anco. The
Spain s?~ seeks has b~en made invisible, overshadowed by the epic
mascul_m1t~ _of conq~tstadores and Catholicism promoted by the
Franco1st Vl.SlOl~ of ~s:ory and projected duri11g tl1~ dictatorship by
photograpl11c p1ctoriahsm. Her willful unintelligibility confounds tl1 e
tr~dibonal f~tishization of Spanishness, tapping the same vein as that
rruned by Goya another artist of post-Enlightenment historical
uphe~vals in his use of tl1e grotesque, particularly in his pri11 t series,
Caprtchos. (1799) and Los proverb!os (r82o-24), and i 11 paintings such
as El con;ur~ (1797-98) and El pelele (r7gr-g2). Many of her photo~raphs mam~estly recall such paintmgs, through their gravitation
to~~rd ~he d1~torted or excessive over the harmonious; through their
pr1v1leging ofn1congruous detail over emblematic unit)r, vulgarity over

I
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........... ....

most striki~g irony allied to the two photographers' differing

approaches is that a veteran photojournalist such as Smith should have
striven to validate his rhetorical gravity in terms of "art." He on ce
likened the symbolism of his photographs to that inherent in "many
2
of the Old Masters of the Paints." 3 Meanwhile, Garcia Rodero, who
trained as a painter and has been a professor of photography at the
Complutense University in Madrid, avoids the archety pal resonances

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HUMANISM RE IMA GI NED

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(fig. 8.4). 2 5 Of course, Mikhail Bakhtin, in his study of Rabelais, has

the

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he
at
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S,

ch

...

demonstrated that the grotesque involves the renovation of customary

representation. On the other hand, Jo Labanyi writes that monsters
.
k
1
"
26
"challenge the laws of form that enable representation to ta e pace.
Garcia Rodero's antiauthoritarianism uncannily disturbs the familiarity of universalism, makes the homeland unhomely for a moment, and
is literally monstrous according to the etymology of the word, given
that monstrosity signals "that which reveals" renegade possibilities of
perception and identity. 2 7 That her iconoclasm paradoxically follows a
tradition of the grotesque in art is confirmed by Wolfgang I<ay ser's
important study, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, which identifies
major elements of the grotesque as "estrangement," "suddenness," and
28
"surprise." These features, along with a "strong affinity with the
physically abnormal," associate Garcia Rodero's worl<: w ith grotesqu e
art and writing, particularly in their Spanish and Latin American
2
modes 9 modes in evidence in the painting of Goya and Velazquez;
in the picaresque novel and the more modern literary genre that is the
esperpento; and in the cinematic work of Bufiuel.3 Her photography,
like a number of Hispanic narrative works that have recourse to the
1
grotesque, interrogates established conceptions of national identity.3
Its engagement with the grotesque is unsurprising, insofar as photography is an ideal vehicle for the identifying features of the grotesque
that Kayser isolates, by virtue of its inherent candidness and immediacy, or at least its appeal to these phenomena.
Garcia Rodero's jagged moments at the sidelines of events '\"e ~movv
little about give nothing away. The paternalistic compositions of
family groupings undertaken by Smith, as photographer, and by
Steichen, as curator compositions that in their "precise o:-ganization
of forms ... give the [family] event its proper expression" (CartierBresson's words) are overwhelmed in her overpopulated images,
whose numerous subjects (often involved in simultaneous and various activities) and 11umerous details (such as limbs at curious angles
and grotesquely distorted or inappropriate facial expressions) divert
our attention fro_m a familiarizing thematic reading, as do the mystifying circumstances of each photograph. Often shot flat-on, Garcia
Rodero's photographs assume an artless perspective giving equally
impassive attention to every feature within the frame. Smiths use of
light and shadow, a chiaroscuro painstakingly refined in the darkroom, strove conversely to focus the eye on the essence of the picture,
excluding distractions through careful framing and cloal<ing shadows.
Unlike Smith, whose compassionately narrative photographic essays

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59

FIGURE

8.4.

Cristina Garcia Rodero, El ofercorio, frorn Espafia oculta, r989

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HUMANISM REIMA.GlNEO

cia1npioned the resilience of the human spirit, its grace under tl1e
of inhumane situations, Garcia Rodero defies narrative ii1telin her ' 1nonstrifyi11g" images. She does so in the spirit of the
Tra11sylvanian) philosopher E. M. Cioran, who exl1orts us
ourselve~ up to "the philosopl1y of unique 1noments, the only
2
hy."3 I-!er vvorl< recalls Cioran's conviction that we should
....... to face with being, and 11ot with tJ1e 1nind,"JJ and his belief
,...,..g in an archnihilist, given the optin1ism of rebirth th.at it
) that \\'e should "let the moment do its \vorl<, let it reabsorb
--ms."34 And Garcia Rodero's photography causes us to reflect
intricacies of pl1otographic temporality, i11vol(ed both by
as he reflected on ho\t\7 photography prodttced in h]m a "long~ I.U.t was '"fantasmatic, deriving from a l(ind of second sight
seems to bear [lrim] forward to a utopia11 time, or to carry [him]
to somewhere in [himself],"35 and by Christian Metz in his disof the "timelessness" of photography, its "instanta11eous
of the obiect out of the world into another vvorld, into
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6
kind of time ."3 Photographic temporality tln binds time fr om
of inevitable cat1sality, from a mortal teleology, and is conse, says Metz, comparable to "the timelessness of the unconand of memory," indeed of possibility.37
"'~a Rodero's Calibanesque work is driven by an apparent
that is act ually utopian in its pursttit of a freedom of the split
.,.,.a..&d; a type of r ev italizin g death promising an ttn precede11ted rite
passage; an ir1terruption in time best invol(ed b y t h e com plexity
of the pho t ograph ic m oment, vvh ose irresolttt ion 1n ortally unsettles
the narrative composure of Sm]th and The Fatn:ily of Man . At tl1e same
time, her w ork releases th ose photograpl1ed, and t h eir viewers, from
the ahistoricisn1 of Steich en's exhibition, by attacking the sense of
8
perpetu ity suggested by its uni versalism .3 But vve are still left
hau nted by the necessity of the p roject of advocacy pursued by
Steichen and the United Nations, and left hau11ted, too, by the necessary integrity and cornpassion of a photograph that has been
described as "the pieta of the century"J9: Smith's photograph 1of a
fifteen-year-c)ld girl fro1n Minan1ata, Japan, To1nol(o Ue1nura, b eing
bathed by her mother. The photograph of a girl crippled by 1nercury
poisoning fron1 eating fish contaminated by effluent from a local
chemical plant was part of Smith's last photographic essay, undertal<en bet-vveen 1971 and 1975 as a personal crusade by a phot ographer vvho was shortly to die with eighteen dollars in the bank,
1

.0 ..-. ......

.........6

considered virtually unemployable by the n1agazjnes of his day

because of his commitment to unpalatable causes.
J0 H N

l) .

P E R I V (l L A R I S

6J

..

... -. - - - - - ...... I

..

. ............ ,

...,. .....

b b

A '-" I

.r

beginning of a new millennium and evmce a need f?r c?m~on narratives. This need is confirmed by the second repu blication, 1n rgg6,
of the original catalog to The Family of Man, amid heated interllational debates about the role of the United Natio11s, i11 tl1e wak.e of
the fiftieth anniversary ofthat organization ill 1995 al1d in the after- . -:
math of Rwanda, war in the Balkans, and the Pi11ochet case . Garcia .:t::.-in.-r
Rodero's greatest challenge to and greatest affinity with t l1e h uman..
ism represented by Smith and the UN, her redemption of a Goyesque

m .tl

:--11

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pessimism regarding human action, lies in her often teeming photographs' deferral to the multiple lool<s of specific men, women, and
children who contest their framing photographic, familial, and
national. Hence, perhaps, the title of her monograph: the part of
Spain in danger of being hidden most by humanism, artistic or political, is precisely the contesting look of humanity, a lool{ that should
be guaranteed by Spain -{lewly born institutions and with which
she aligns herself as a Spa =sn~ .oman photographer. It is a contesting lool( ~egistered distracting y through tl1e looking glass of a
photography whose focus elicits humanism's mortality: a renewable
history, continually displaced by its subjects, who will not be fixed
by the shutter's click but demand to see and be seen. By seeing,
Garcia Rodero dramatizes the undeterminable contingency of
bulllanism, nationalism, and the institutions of community and
family. These are re constituted through their reframing b~y anonymous su}?jects who locally re-present their Spanishness in front of
her lens by .registering physical discomfort witl1 their current roles
through their grotesque poses. She recompenses t~1e hitherto invisible ("occult") "dependence of the visible (Spain] on that vvhich
places us _under the eye of the seer," in an encounter of solidarity
with her COJ?patriots that mal<:es the photographer answerable to
t4em in her deflectio11 of custom and authority. 4 For, if the photographic gaze ~is an inquiry into who people are, then, in their turn,
tho~e. who look back a: the photographer and viewer interrogate the
pos1t10n ~n_d_ ~ss.~mptwns _o~ t?~t gaze . And, by focusing the split
between mvislblhty and V1S1b1hty, seer and seen, to a point of convergence on the photographic plane, the drama she stages emerges
o_ut of the momentary releasejcapture of photograpl1ic time; the contmual r~assertion of freedom within the validating enclosure of
respons1ve photographic framing; and subsequent narratives of
n~t.ional his_tory, institution~! representation, and photographic tradition rewritten by responsible humanist critics.

HUMANISM REIMAGJNEO

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I should hke to thank Thorn.1~ Dou bhcz

V U f(lr per ll11w,1on to 1 cp ucl ucc

Cristina Garcia's photographic work, (l~dited to Cr1t.tiu1 G,aritl HodcJO, Agcn<.:;c VU. I
4H A).tCIH.: c

should also like to thank Mngnunl fuJ then pcun1~.:,lnJllO 1cpr oducc Snuth's photogr r~ph~,,
which are credited toW. Eugene Sn1ith (M~~!n\lnl l'hoto ).
t. See Arthur Clayborough, The c;,otC\fJUt' ,, lHl(~li ..h LilCJ"(lf.lJ1(' (Oxft>l d: Cl ..ll"CIH.l<.>ll,
tg6s), 70; Lee Byt on .Jennings, The Ludrc' ous Vctnon . A~.pccts nf the Grotesque in
German Post-RontaPttic Prose, Publlcations in Modern Philology, voJ. 71 (Hcrkc.:lcy:

University of California Press, 1963), 26.

2. W~ Eugene Smith, W. Eugene Smith (New Yor-k: Apcl'turc, 1q6g), n.p.
3 Cornell Capa, ed., The Concet-ned Photographer 2 (London: 'T'harncs and Hudson,
1972), n.p.
4 Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Pront I.. itHI of Jlistmy (London : Pin1lico,

1999), 1 9-73
5 See Miller, Magnum, s6- s7 62.
6. Edward Steichen, ed., Catalog to The Iamily of Man exhibition, 1955, with a prologue by Carl Sandburg (New York : MOMA, 1996), 4
I

7 Marshall McLuhan, Vnderstandin,~ Media: The Extcnswns of Man (New York :

Mentor, 1964), 177

8. Marianne Husch, Family Frarnes: Photography, Na1-rative, and Pustrncrn ory
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), so.
g. Steichen, Family of Man, 82-83.
IO. Ibid ., I79
II On the CIP:s campaign to promote American cultur e, especially abstract impressionism, over that of Europe, as part of U.S. cold wa r policy, see Frances Ston our
Saunders, Who Pazd the Prper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (Lon don: Granta,
I

2000) .

See Hirsch, Famrly f,-ames, 52, 41 -77, 10 1-4.

13. See Miller, Magnum, 295
14. Publio Lopez Mondejar, 1Jist or~ia de fa fotografia

12.

ell h~pana (Ba rcelona: l.unwcrg,

1997 ), I 00-1 I 4, I78- 83

IS I bid., 179
6. Gilbert and George, "Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat,'' Interview with Wolf Jahn, The
1
17.

18.
19
2

o.

2.1.

22.
23.
24.
25.

Independent on Sunday, October 3, 1999, 21.

Miller, /VIagnunt, 82
Ibid., 83.
Ben Maddow, Let Truth Be the Prejudice: W. Eugene Smith, f!is T.. ife and Photographs
(New York: Aperture, 1985), 12 n. 66.
Smith, cited in Jicnning :Hansen, Myth and Vision: On "The Walk to Paradise
Garden'' and the Photography of W. Bugene Smith (Lund: Aris, 1987), 6g.
Glenn G. Willumson, W. Eugene Smith and the Photographic lJ.ssay (Can1bridgc:
Cambridge University P ress, 1992), 242-48.
Miller, Magnum, 102; my emphasis.
Jim. Hughes, W Eugene Smtlh Shadow and Substance: The Life and Vvo,k of an
American Photographer (New York: McGraw HilL 1989), 36.
Lopez Mondejar, Historia, t26-37, r6o-264.
See Jennings, The Ludicrous Demon, 8, 18.
JOHN D. PERIVOLARIS

.,
I

b.

Jo Labanyi, Representing the Unrepresentable: Monsters, Mystics, and Feminine

Men in Galdos's Nazarin/' Journal of Hispanic Research I :2 (1993): 226.

27

. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)," in Monster Theory:

Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1996), 4

28. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesqae in Art and Literature (Bloomington: Indiana

-.

University Press, 1963), 184.

29. Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (London: Methuen,. 1972 ), 9.

30. Though I cite some pictorial manifestations of the grotesque, this literary mode of
representation is particularly prominent in the imagery employed by writers. See
Jennings, The Ludicrous Detnon, 21-22; James Tffland, Quevedo and the Grotesque

(London: Tamesis, 1978), 35-39.

31. Two twentieth-century examples from literature might be cited here: Juan
Goytisolo's novel Reivindicaci6n del Conde don Julian (1970; Count Julian) and Severo

Sarduy's De donde son los cantantes (1957; From Cuba vvith a Song).
32. Emile M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

rgg8), 164. Emphasis in original.

33 Emile M. Cioran, The Trouble tvith Being Born (London: Quartet, 1993), 43
34 See Cioran, Temptation: r81. The view he expresses in this statexnent is quite consistent with. his upbringing~~s ._the son of a Greek Orthodox priest. The Orthodox

conception of liturgical time ~syn~[tronic, not historical, and views the body and
blood of Christ, his Crucifixion and "it~surrection, as transcendent realities experienced daily by w orshipers. Of more relevance to Garcia Rodero's liberation of history, through her focus on transcendent moments of daily life, is the On:hodox
liturgy's simultaneous synchonicity and diachronicity: "It is synchronic si1"'1Ce it
shares in the eternal liturgy, but it is also (of necessity) historical, since it is throt!gh
the daily repetition of the liturgy that the mystery of salvation is 1nadc present
within time." Anthony Lappin, 1n conversation with the author.
35 Roland Barthes, Came1a Lucida: Reflections 011 Photography, trans. R1chard I-IO\N3rd
(London: Fontana, 1984), 40.
36. Christi~n- Metz, "Photography and Fetish," in Overexposed: Essays on Conternporaty
Photography, ed. Carol Squiers (New York: Nevv Press, rggg), 213-14.

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37 Ibid., 213.
38. See Hirsch, Family Frames, 57
39 Maddow, Let Truth Be the Prejudice, 34
40. Relevant to this is Jacques Lacan, "The Split bet\AJeen the Eye and the Gaze," in Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmonds\vorth:
Penguin, 1994), 72.

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HUMANISM REIMAGINEO