TY - JOUR
AU - Sullivan, Megan, A
AB - In 1915, a pair of professional portrait photographers ventured outside the walls of their studio, large format view camera in tow, and into the night of Arequipa, Peru. Over the course of the next decade or so – the heyday of both their studio’s commercial success and Arequipa’s economic boom – the brothers Carlos (1885–1979) and Miguel (1887–1976) Vargas produced a striking series of nocturnal photographs of their high-altitude Andean city.1 They posed themselves and their nattily dressed collaborators down darkened alleyways, in the shadows of the city’s colonial era architecture, and on the arched stone bridges spanning the Río Chili. Figures sometimes appear caught in the midst of inscrutable actions, peering dramatically into an eerily lit doorway or gathered conspiratorially in tight clusters, but often strike more contemplative poses, perched in bell towers overlooking the city or resting pensively along the dry riverbed (Fig. 1). These exquisitely composed photographs, while evidently staged, attest to Arequipa’s energetic bohemian art scene and the flow of foreign luxury goods into the prosperous city during the early decades of the twentieth century. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos and Miguel Vargas, Untitled (Nocturne), c.1925, digital image from glass plate negative. Asociación Hermanos Vargas. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos and Miguel Vargas, Untitled (Nocturne), c.1925, digital image from glass plate negative. Asociación Hermanos Vargas. The 1910s and 1920s were pivotal years in the modern history of Peru and one of the most fecund periods of the country’s intellectual and artistic production. Those decades ushered in the first sustained modernisation efforts, which, galvanised by foreign capital, entailed a push to integrate the national economic system and an initial turn away from the semi-feudal relations of production that still reigned in the countryside. Accompanying these economic shifts came other significant changes: the increased importation of foreign technology and commodities, the emergence of widespread anti-oligarchic sentiments among the population, and a symbolic embrace of the indigenous highlands in the national imaginary, countering the Hispanist tradition that had prevailed since the colonial era.2 Arequipa, the country’s second largest city and hub of the southern Peruvian Andes, experienced these changes acutely. The Vargas brothers opened their well-appointed photographic studio just off the Plaza de Armas in central Arequipa in 1912 (Fig. 2), where established oligarchic families and the newly wealthy merchant class soon flocked for their exquisitely lit, posed, and retouched portraits (Figs 3 and 4). But beyond the scope of their commercial photography business, which turned these brothers of humble origins into quite wealthy men, the Vargases harboured rather serious artistic ambitions. After hours, they hosted poetry readings, art exhibitions, and concerts, their studio becoming the de facto gathering place for local and visiting artists, poets, and intellectuals throughout the most active years of the avant-garde experimentation and Indigenist thought.3 The brothers served as regional distributors for influential periodicals such as the Spanish Foto, which reproduced a variety of contemporary European artistic photography, Colónida, a symbolist poetry journal based in Lima, and La Sierra, a Cusco-based Indigenist journal; they were also closely associated with the Arequipeño poetry magazine El Aquelarre, in the pages of which they advertised their studio.4 Set amidst this lively artistic and intellectual atmosphere, their nocturnal photography was likewise part of a general flourishing of art photography in early twentieth-century Peru, which largely aligned with the tenets of pictorialism. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos and Miguel Vargas, Untitled (view of studio entrance), n.d., digital image from glass plate negative. Asociación Hermanos Vargas. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos and Miguel Vargas, Untitled (view of studio entrance), n.d., digital image from glass plate negative. Asociación Hermanos Vargas. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos and Miguel Vargas, María Aranguís, c.1925, digital image from glass plate negative. Asociación Hermanos Vargas. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos and Miguel Vargas, María Aranguís, c.1925, digital image from glass plate negative. Asociación Hermanos Vargas. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos and Miguel Vargas, La Condesa V., c.1925, digital image from glass plate negative. Asociación Hermanos Vargas. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos and Miguel Vargas, La Condesa V., c.1925, digital image from glass plate negative. Asociación Hermanos Vargas. Indeed, these connections to both European photographic trends and regional poetic movements have thus far framed the discussion of the Vargas nocturnes. Critics broadly agree that pictorialism was a crucial influence on the photographers’ attention to lighting and composition, as well as on their careful retouching of negatives and experiments with printing processes.5 Alternatively, some have stressed the impact of modernismo, so prominent in Arequipeño letters (and the Hispanic world in general) in the early twentieth century, as key to understanding the brothers’ particular aesthetic.6 The poet César Atahualpa Rodríguez, for example, set El Aquelarre’s distinctive modernista tone in its inaugural 1916 issue, describing the night – ‘one of Satan’s wings laid over the world’ – as the natural habitat of poets, prostitutes, and others from the fringes of society.7 It is this interest in the night as the realm of the sinister and otherworldly that critics Jorge Villacorta and Andrés Garay spy in the mysterious ambience permeating the Vargas nocturnes, their play of light and dark thus becoming emblematic of a decadent, fin-de-siècle imaginary. These interpretations have predominantly focused on the arrangement of figures in the foreground tableaux. There is good reason for this, as they are indeed striking, seeming to bear a greater resemblance to Jeff Wall’s staged photographs than anything produced by the Vargases’ contemporaries. Yet, out of reach of the careful staging and contemporary fashions, the volcanic peaks that surround Arequipa appear in many of the photographs, anchoring their fictional tableaux in a very real landscape. This subset of the nocturnes, and the particular encounter of electrified urban night and moonlit natural world that they imagine, is the focus of this essay. As I will argue, the mere presence of the snow-capped summits of the Andes glowing softly in the distance was itself a novelty in early twentieth-century Peruvian visual culture, which had no sustained tradition of representing the natural world. But beyond just picturing nature as background to the city, these photographs activate the distant night sky at the expense of the electrified foreground, rendered still and motionless. This effect, which suggests a confrontation between the countryside and the city, was achieved through an innovative use (and perhaps even misuse) of photographic techniques. As I will discuss, the Vargases utilised an ever-increasing array of electric and chemical light sources not in the pursuit of instantaneity but rather of indefinite duration, which allowed them to construct quite singular, if ultimately unsettled, images of a paradoxical modernisation process – one in which the countryside seems to prevail over the city, the rural over the urban, and the autochthonous over the foreign. Foreground While the figures are perhaps what first captures our attention in these photographs, it is light that emerges as their most intriguing feature. It takes the form of streetlights (a novelty barely a decade old in the mid-1910s) but also of powdered magnesium flashes, lanterns, automobile headlights, and bonfires, which the Vargases used to illuminate the undersides of bridges and other areas where permanent electric lights would not have been found. Moreover, it is not just a matter of the sheer variety of sources; light often inscribes itself so emphatically that it fails to illuminate much at all and even obscures its immediate surroundings. In the nocturnes, light sources do not illuminate quietly from somewhere outside of the frame so as to reveal the world around them; they seem intent on making themselves be seen. Streetlights imprint a rhythm of haloes across the images (Figs 5 and 6), while human figures appear dissolved by the force of light, juxtaposed with the dark blurs of bodies that hover just beyond its reach (Fig. 1). These rough-edged shadows bleed into the background of the darkened night sky, just as their brightly lit counterparts fade into the white stone of Arequipa’s centuries-old colonial architecture. The city and its occupants are not so much documented as formed and deformed, carved out and vaporised by the force of light itself. Light, in fact, is often inseparable from the figures that it pictures, radiating out from the clusters of bodies that shield it, if not held in the hand directly. In one nocturne, for example, a man can be spied holding the bottle of powder that he had just ignited, making visible both himself and the source of his illumination (Fig. 7). Bright explosions of magnesium powder appear alongside the steady glow of electric lighting, their instantaneous blaze an ostensibly gratuitous flourish. Through their use of these multiple light sources within a single image, the Vargases bring together two views on the night that had traditionally been opposed. As Alexander Nemerov has argued, early nocturnal flash photography was of a wholly different order than photographs of the urban night illuminated by electric light. The latter offered a vision of a nocturnal world already conquered and tamed by technology, its mystery cast out by the steady glow of artificial illumination. The flash, however, seemed ‘in league with the darkness it briefly displaces’.8 Whether in the darkness of an African jungle or the gritty parts of London, the flash momentarily revealed an unknown territory, only to immediately return it to a darkness felt ever more strongly. Yet, the Vargases were unwilling to privilege just one of these views, instead combining them in a way that cancels out both the clarity of the electrified night and the mystery of the flash. Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos and Miguel Vargas, Untitled (Nocturne, Plaza de Santa Marta), c.1920, digital image from glass plate negative. Asociación Hermanos Vargas. Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos and Miguel Vargas, Untitled (Nocturne, Plaza de Santa Marta), c.1920, digital image from glass plate negative. Asociación Hermanos Vargas. Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos and Miguel Vargas, Untitled (Nocturne, view of Mercedes Street), c. 1925, digital image from glass plate negative. Asociación Hermanos Vargas. Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos and Miguel Vargas, Untitled (Nocturne, view of Mercedes Street), c. 1925, digital image from glass plate negative. Asociación Hermanos Vargas. Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos and Miguel Vargas, Untitled (Nocturne, aqueduct bridge, San Lázaro), c. 1922, digital image from glass plate negative. Asociación Hermanos Vargas. Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos and Miguel Vargas, Untitled (Nocturne, aqueduct bridge, San Lázaro), c. 1922, digital image from glass plate negative. Asociación Hermanos Vargas. This layering of lighting sources becomes all the more jarring when one realises that it is, in a way, unnecessary. The mountainous background that appears in some of the photographs, far from the reach of the artificially lit foreground, is in fact illuminated by the moon. The presence of the moonlit mountains adds yet another light source to an already long inventory, but even more importantly, it indicates that these photographs are in fact the product of long exposure times (as long as one hour, according to Yenne and Benavente), not the fractions of a second for which the various lighting technologies foregrounded in them would have allowed.9 Artificial light, then, serves as a superfluous ornament, dramatic addition, or even blinding excess, rather than as an instrument for the pursuit of instantaneity. For all their evident eagerness to experiment with those new sources of light, the Vargases seem to have regarded them as objects of curiosity rather than effective tools. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, developments in photography were driven by the pursuit of instantaneity – the ability to capture a single instant in time and freeze an action as it occurs. This was part of the broader use of photography, along with cinema, in the reconceptualisation of temporality in the modern world; it was called upon to record, regulate, and rationalise its seemingly ever-increasing onslaught. If photography artificially embalms that which is pictured, it also sets objects in motion. As Thierry de Duve neatly puts it, the snapshot ‘refers to the fluency of time without conveying it’.10 With the publication of Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering motion studies this endeavour was carried even further, as photography transcended the limits of human vision, accessing a slice of time that cannot be perceived with the unaided eye.11 And in concert with more advanced cameras and new electric lights, the advent of the magnesium flash allowed photographers to take nocturnal and dark indoor photographs with exposures of less than one second in duration. The night now longer had to be the stilled, moonlit realm of the romantics; it became the potential site of action. The scenes in the foregrounds of the Vargas nocturnes mimic such stilled instants – motion successfully frozen by improved photographic and lighting technologies. The figures, engrossed in their enigmatic activities, do not appear posed for the camera but rather caught off guard. Likewise, the automobile that appears in several of the nocturnes (one of the first in Arequipa and owned by the photographers themselves) would seem to be rapidly traversing the city and its environs (Fig. 8).12 The backgrounds tell us a different story: they not only undercut that appearance of instantaneity but also manifest visible signs of movement withheld in the foregrounds. In many of the nocturnes, the firmament is noticeably streaked with traces of the apparent movement of the stars through the sky during the extended exposure. While in some cases the fine lines are relatively subtle, in others they register as bright, long diagonals slicing through the darkened sky, raining down upon the shadowy figures in the foreground (Fig. 1), or echoing the electrical wires overhead (Fig. 8). The star streaks present us with another mode of recording time, quite opposed to the instantaneity effect of the foreground: akin to the techniques of futurist ‘photodynamism’, they capture the uninterrupted trace of motion at the expense of blurring to the point of illegibility the objects in motion themselves. Fig. 8. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos and Miguel Vargas, Untitled (Nocturne, view of the old Tingo Bridge), n.d., digital image from glass plate negative. Asociación Hermanos Vargas. Fig. 8. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos and Miguel Vargas, Untitled (Nocturne, view of the old Tingo Bridge), n.d., digital image from glass plate negative. Asociación Hermanos Vargas. Upon recognising these traces of motion in the sky, we are forced to rethink the nocturnes’ foregrounds. What at first glance had given off the air of being a single instant in a larger drama – a film still of sorts – now exposes its artificiality; it becomes a staged tableau vivant or an even more complex arrangement of bodies and events that never coexisted in real space and time. The automobile (that quintessential symbol of modern speed, for the futurists and many others) had not been frozen by the camera but was rather standing motionless the whole time. The figures, which had appeared to be in midst of action or caught in moments of self-absorbed contemplation, were in reality stiffly posed for the camera. If some bodies had seemed translucent, it was not that the harsh glare of electric light had pierced their solidity but rather was an effect of the long exposure times; those figures had appeared in the scene only briefly, their bodies and that which they had momentarily occluded upon entering the scene fused on the photographic plate. And while the flashes did indeed mark fractions of a second, the larger scene now imbues them with a stillness and permanence antithetical to their nature. Most significantly of all, what had appeared to be a picture of an isolated instant is revealed to contain a span of uninterrupted time in which little, save the rotating of the Earth, happens. This play with time and movement, and with their representation, points to larger questions of modernisation in the region. The stilled car is certainly a rebuke to any futurist embrace of mechanised velocity, but might likewise be indicative of a broader attitude toward the machine in Peru. The emerging poetic avant-garde provides us with some clues. Just as the symbolist El Aquelarre released its inaugural issue, fellow Arequipeño Alberto Hidalgo introduced a more aggressive idea of modernity to Peru with two collections of poems: Arenga lírica al emperador de Alemania y otros poemas (1916) and Panoplia lírica (1917). Shot through with the odes to velocity, electricity, machines, and even violence common in futurist poetry, Hidalgo adamantly opposed modernismo’s sleepy rhetoric and moonlit nocturnes with the frenetic dynamism of automobiles and aeroplanes and the unnatural glare of the electrified urban night.13 But rather paradoxically, Hidalgo’s machines were rendered, more often than not, as forms without function. He invoked the automobile, for example, primarily as a living body. The mechanical source of its power, when mentioned, was equated to the organs of a powerful beast, thus converting this advanced industrial commodity into a zoomorphic curiosity: ‘El Auto es un enorme paquidermo mecánico: / su sangre es la gasolina’.14 As Mirko Lauer observes more generally, machines routinely populated the verses of Peruvian poetry of the 1910s and 1920s, yet they often served as mere decorations. The machine, rather than serving as a metonym of urban modernity, was ‘incorporated into the kingdom of nature’.15 Whether or not these odes to the automobile, the aeroplane, and the radio were meant to serve as social criticism, they nonetheless present us with a society that, for all its interest in modern technology, was yet to be modernised. During those years, most rural workers in Peru were still landless peasants and the economy was driven by the exportation of primary products, minerals above all. The country only began to plan a national highway network in 1925; the automobiles found in the first Peruvian futurist poems, and in the Vargas nocturnes, would have had nowhere to go. For all their enthusiasm, Peruvian consumers had a distant relationship to the technologies that underpinned these new machines. Lauer argues that the imported machines did not feed, and perhaps even numbed, any sort of significant technological development, producing rather a habitual ‘faith in the finished product’ that only reinforced Peru’s historical condition as purchaser of new inventions and seller of goods that are ‘constantly more traditional and antiquated’.16 Technology arrived on Peruvian shores in the form of consumer goods, their inner workings neither understood nor able to be replicated in a country with little infrastructure for either technological research or industrial production. In a society that could not produce (or in some cases even utilise) these new technologies, machines were prized for their sumptuous appearance and their status as luxury goods; they were objects of much admiration but less certain utility. Thus, imported technologies did little to modernise the country. On the contrary, these new industrial commodities seemed to only increase the sense of distance from the processes of capitalist modernisation taking place elsewhere and reinforce the traditional, pre-capitalist modes of production that remained deeply entrenched. The Arequipa region felt this disjunction in an especially acute manner. Between 1885 and 1930, Arequipa stood at the centre of the region’s prosperous international wool trade. Trading houses and wool-producing haciendas expanded throughout the city and rural surroundings, respectively, leading to a significant influx of wealth, imported luxury goods, and foreign traders. Arequipa’s rapid integration into the global market did not, however, lead to any significant change in the relations of production or socioeconomic structures in the region. The trading houses served as go-betweens, linking the pre-capitalist agrarian economies of the high Andean plateau (altiplano) to international markets but did nothing to alter the essentially feudal structures of the hacienda system. Unlike coastal sugar plantations or other agricultural endeavours in the central highlands, wool production in the southern Andes was touched little, if at all, by new technologies, leaving the land, like society, essentially unchanged.17 The city of Arequipa itself, while inundated with imports ranging from textiles to automobiles, was slow to industrialise in comparison to coastal Lima, the country’s capital, and even compared to other Andean cities; by the end of the 1920s, the city produced goods such as crackers, soap, and beer for local consumption but little else. There was neither an industrial bourgeoisie nor a proletariat in the Arequipa region to speak of in the early twentieth century, and the question of transforming the region’s peasants into proletarians would not be raised in any serious way until the 1940s. As the eminent historian Alberto Flores Galindo has argued, Arequipa’s reliance on the external market not only failed to significantly alter the region’s basic social or economic organisation but also contributed to the southern Andes’ ‘backwardness’ in comparison with other parts of the country.18 Thus, it is perhaps no accident that, for all the technological potential for speed and instantaneity at hand in the automobile, the electric lighting, the flash powder, and the camera itself, the Vargas nocturnes are not ultimately defined by those characteristics. They are instead governed by a palpable sense of stillness in an undefined duration. If the futurist photographers had rejected instantaneity in favour of a lengthened ‘duration of the present’, they nonetheless continued to define that interval as the time required for the completion of an action or event.19 But in the Vargases’ photographs no action delimits the boundaries of the extended present represented, and time becomes an unregulated extension – indivisible, indefinable, and uncorrelated to notions of progress or event. The time of the photographs is excessive, as are the electric lights; the trappings of technologically advanced photography are made unusually visible but surprisingly ineffectual. What might it mean for technology to be so emphatically foregrounded only to be rendered without function? And how, then, are we to understand the majestic presence of the mountains in the midst of this drama of technological impotence? Background We can confidently rule out the possibility that the presence of the natural world in the background was accidental or undesired; the photographs make evident the mastery of all the technical tools that would have allowed for an instantaneous but shallow recording of the urban foreground at night. Had the Vargases employed such long exposures only in pursuit of particular foreground effects (to allow certain figures to appear twice within the frame or to render bodies transparent), they could have easily removed the backgrounds that betray the photographs’ duration. The Vargas nocturnes, as should by now be clear, were not predicated on some notion of transparent truth, yet they nevertheless opted against “correcting” the backgrounds, allowing the mountains to remain visible and the star trails to undo the effect of instantaneity. The mountain that appears most often in the photos is El Misti, the more than 5,800-meter-tall snow-capped volcano that towers over the city of Arequipa and feeds the Río Chili with its seasonal snowmelt. While the inclusion of this emblematic peak might have been intended to mark these photographs as of Arequipa, I want to suggest that its presence serves as more than a symbol of local pride. It points to a larger reconceptualisation of the significance of nature in Peru. Latin American pictorial practice, from the sixteenth-century conquest until the late nineteenth century, was marked by a general absence of landscape depictions. This was, in part, an inheritance from the Spanish colonisers, who likewise possessed no such tradition. Beyond just the realm of art-making, the Spanish more generally neglected the world beyond the city’s edge. This attitude was a reaction to the foreign and overwhelming flora, fauna, and terrain of their American colonies, but also a carryover of Renaissance Iberian thought that equated the space of the city with the civilised community ruled by the law of both God and man; to live outside of the city was to be supra- or sub-human (a god or a beast).20 In the New World, the city’s gridded plan became a matrix of both political and divine order imposed on the chaos of nature.21 During the nineteenth century, with the effort to turn colony into nation after independence, this neglectful attitude towards nature evolved into a concept of the Andes as a ‘single, vast barrier’ – a solid block of highland territory running down the centre of the country between the coast to the west and the Amazon rainforest to the east – representing a clear obstacle to territorial integration, political control, and social modernisation.22 As positivist models of race and geography flourished, an essential link developed in the minds of European-descended elites between the native peoples of Peru and the highlands. Just like the rugged mountains, the indigenous population emerged as a roadblock to progress and modernisation.23 This identification reinforced the suspicion of nature among the local elites. As a result, Peru’s nineteenth-century national imaginary was formed via costumbrista depictions of urban types and manners, with its back firmly turned to the natural world.24 Landscape depictions, so prominent in the European and US efforts of nation-making, had little purchase during the early years of the Peruvian republic. Quite tellingly, the first depictions of Peruvian nature consisted of the paintings and drawings made by the European ‘traveler-artists’ who crisscrossed Latin America in the years just before and after independence. These works, by German, US, and British painters, among others, were geared towards foreign audiences.25 When domestic pictorial renderings of the Andean landscape finally appeared in the 1870s, they took the form of photographic albums linked to public works projects, most notably the construction of a national railway that would connect the coastal capital to provincial cities in the Andes, including Arequipa (Fig. 9). These depictions conformed to what Natalia Majluf describes as the ‘scientific and pragmatic view of nature’ held by the cultural, social, and economic elites of Lima.26 Unfathomably deep chasms spanned by new bridges and fresh tunnels dug through insurmountable peaks presented a world onto which the elites could rest ‘their hope of transforming the rural world into an extension of the modern metropolis’.27 These first domestic representations of the Andes, then, functioned as images of their symbolic defeat. The triumph of technology over nature was the message as well as the medium of these nineteenth-century survey photographs. As Majluf speculates, even if Henry Meiggs, the US entrepreneur in charge of the Peruvian railway project, had encountered trained landscape painters upon his arrival in Peru, he would nevertheless have employed photography, ‘perceived as an achievement of modern technology and a sign of progress’, to record his projects.28 It was through the camera’s automatic inscription and objective gaze that nature could be pictured as already tamed by technology. Fig. 9. Open in new tabDownload slide Eugenio Courret, Viaduct of Chaupichaca, c.1875, albumen print. 27 x 20.5 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima. Fig. 9. Open in new tabDownload slide Eugenio Courret, Viaduct of Chaupichaca, c.1875, albumen print. 27 x 20.5 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima. The de facto prohibition against the depiction of the local landscape extended into the studios of portrait photographers. The hand-painted backdrops used for middle class carte de visite portraits in the late nineteenth century portrayed vague, non-descript scenes that adhered to the conventions of European landscape painting. Although they faded from fashion in Lima and the major Andean cities shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, these backdrops remained a fixture for itinerant Andean portrait photographers for decades to come. Thus, even when nature was deemed an appropriate stage for self-fashioning, it was against imported landscapes that Peru’s new middle classes chose to pose themselves. (Majluf notes that the one mountainous landscape backdrop that appears in Andean portraits was in fact Swiss, copied from an imported cookie box!29) This aversion began to relent in the early twentieth century as the first generation of Andean landscape photographers emerged. A key figure in this process was Max T. Vargas, in whose Arequipa studio the Vargas brothers (of no relation) learned their craft alongside Juan Manuel Figueroa Aznar and Martín Chambi, the most famous Andean photographer of this generation. Max T.’s turn-of-the-century views of Lake Titicaca in Puno (including a 1908 nocturne illuminated by moonlight), the volcanic crater of El Misti, and indigenous peasants in the countryside around Arequipa stand as some of the first non-instrumental landscape images of the Andes. It was Chambi, upon relocating to Cusco in 1923, who carried this endeavour forward most forcefully. Over the course of several decades, he produced a large catalogue of photographs that capture the sublime grandeur of Andean nature, often untouched by modern infrastructure and populated only by the ruins of Inca civilisation and its living descendants. In contrast, little of Chambi’s picturesque attitude toward the land or its inhabitants can be found in the Vargases’ photographs: they fail to grant us any access to the natural world without the mediation of the city, they present no direct communion of individual and the nature, and the rural inhabitants of the Andes appear nowhere in them. There is no attempt to represent nature as an Edenic world untouched by civilisation. Nevertheless, the Vargas nocturnes give us a more subtle and complex image of nature’s shifting role in the Peruvian, and particularly Andean, imagination in the early twentieth century. The natural world is not simply visible in the Vargas nocturnes; it also serves as the only source of dynamism in these strangely stilled images. The nocturnes, it should be stressed, are neither landscapes nor pastorals. They are pictures of bodies in and around urban space, of nattily dressed, presumably well-to-do dandies, rather than impoverished indigenous peasants, and of one of the first automobiles in town. Yet, while the foregrounds, replete with modern goods, have been rendered motionless, the traces of the stars across the darkened sky remind us of their steady movement during the exposure time. Nature has been granted the status of dynamic agent, while the automobile, that symbol of material progress, remains visibly inert, motionless. These pictures represent a marked reversal of expectations. It was modern urban space that was supposed to be the site of speed and progress, of time’s simultaneous acceleration and taming. Nature, for its part, was to be ahistorical and static, the outside of or refuge from the relentless pace of city life. But here, the natural world is cast as dynamic while the urban foreground appears passive, if not sterile. The inactivity of the men in the foreground only augments the effect of stillness. We are confronted with figures at rest, or bored, or lost in thought, or caught up in small moments of sociality, but never engaged in labour. Perhaps these were adequate modes of being for the night (a natural time of reprieve from the work day), but they also speak to an urban centre still in the thrall of a rural, agrarian economy. They point to the absence of a dynamic bourgeoisie and of the productive forces that would allow for consumer goods to be manufactured locally. In the world imagined by the Vargas nocturnes, the city serves as a kind of stage set on which the trappings of modernisation are displayed but where no productive work is undertaken. These images urge us to acknowledge that the driving force of modernisation in Arequipa continues to be the long-repressed natural world. Labour did indeed take place in the region, but it was done by indigenous workers in the unseen rural areas beyond the city limits. Even the electric lights, the most dominant element of the foreground, are themselves, indirectly, a product of Andean nature: the first electric power stations in Arequipa, like elsewhere in Peru, were hydroelectric, harnessing the steep slopes and deep valleys of the mountains as a source of power.30 The pictured riverbeds might be dry and still, but the blazes of light are themselves functions of the Andes in motion. The nocturnes, as I have argued, share an interest in the machine with Alberto Hidalgo’s futurist poems, but they are more explicit in their presentation of the disjunctions involved in the transfer of foreign technologies. Critics at the time, including Clemente Palma and César Vallejo, denounced Hidalgo’s odes to Marinetti, electricity, and the automobile for being ‘set against a neutral curtain’.31 The Vargases, for their part, not only restored the specific background against which these importations took place but imagined a world in which that backdrop becomes the agent of those scenes. Their nocturnes attest to a modernisation process in which nature, rather than being defeated or tamed by technology, seemingly absorbs these imported machines and consumer goods into its orbit, thereby emerging as the unacknowledged economic engine of a society anxious for imported goods and technologies but still reliant on feudal modes of production. Thus, the Vargas nocturnes pay due recognition to the role of Andean nature in a pre-capitalist economy. But I want to suggest that they also stress the importance of autochthonous nature for the larger endeavour of rethinking the Peruvian nation. In this sense, they overlap significantly with the aims of the Indigenist movement. A loose confederation of intellectual, artistic, and political projects directed towards the recognition and vindication of the region’s indigenous peoples, Indigenism flourished in early twentieth-century Peru as well as other Latin American countries with considerable native populations. Within the realm of the visual arts, Peruvian Indigenism is mostly associated with the painter José Sabogal, in whose work the Indian emerges as either the present-day inhabitant of the Andes or the builder of pre-Columbian cultures,32 as well as with Martín Chambi, who, besides picturing rural and indigenous subjects, was indigenous and a native Quechua speaker himself.33 Yet Indigenism as an artistic movement had an intellectual counterpart, one with which it did not fully align and, moreover, was itself divided into different camps.34 For Marxist Indigenists like José Carlos Mariátegui, perhaps the most important Peruvian intellectual of the twentieth century, the goal was to break up the semi-feudal relations of production that still dominated the Andean economy and, more broadly, the entire social edifice of the country.35 Others, however, placed culture, race, and geography at the very centre of their reflections. Two of the most prominent exponents of this branch of Indigenism, Luis Valcárcel and José Uriel García, held quite divergent views on the future of Andean culture and who its proponents might be. For Valcárcel, it was the pure Indian race that was called to assume the historical task of renewing the national culture. The Indian, in this formulation, was the main protagonist of Peruvian history: ‘For ten thousand years’, he declared, ‘the Indian has been the only worker in Peru’.36 García, on the other hand, adhered to a much broader, non-racial definition of who could participate in the cultural renewal of the country. According to him, both the indigenous population and middle-class mestizos (a group to which almost all the Indigenists belonged) could partake in this endeavour insofar as both inhabited the Andes. It was geographic belonging that, transcending the differences of race and class, would eventually produce a properly Andean cultural identity which would radiate out to the rest of the country. The vision that he proclaimed was that of a new national identity in which culture was not bounded by race. Despite these differences, both authors shared the belief that this identity would be rooted in the tremendous natural force of the Andes. Thus, Valcárcel described the mountainous landscape as an ‘inexhaustible fountain of vitality’, capable of producing a ‘perpetually renewed union between man and the earth’,37 while García referred to ‘the highlands [as] an enduring heartbeat of indigeneity’.38 These intellectuals, seeking to correct the notion of Peru as a Hispanic country, turned to the highlands as a source of national identity. In their eyes, the Andean territory was indeed unique and powerful, invested with geological and biological forces that would govern the formation of an autochthonous national culture. Key to this reconceptualisation was the appropriation of nineteenth-century positivist discourses that had once been used to argue for the immaturity of the native peoples of the Americas, which were resignified via the vitalist philosophies of Henri Bergson and Oswald Spengler.39 In this context, some writers regarded avant-garde practices as instrumental for this return to the autochthonous, suggesting the possibility of an ‘Andean modernity’.40 But without going into further details, what I want to stress is that, during the 1910s and 1920s, the Peruvian Andes, long disdained as obstacles to modernity and civilisation, emerged not only as the apt setting for the formation of an autochthonous culture but also as its engine. This is precisely the point of the Vargas nocturnes. I am certainly not suggesting that the Vargases should similarly be considered Indigenists in the way Chambi has been. Unlike Chambi, the brothers had at best casual relations with the core group of Indigenist thinkers (many of whose key writings post-date the nocturnes), and relatively little of their attention was directed towards the indigenous population. Their nocturnes are not landscapes at all but urban scenes. Nevertheless, insofar as they posed urban foreground against rural background, they revealed nature as both the economic and spiritual engine of the region. Thanks to their self-conscious play with light and time, they portrayed the Andes not only outside of the instrumentalist grip of mining and railway photography but also replete with telluric power. With this added layer of significance, as well as being a critique of Arequipa’s particular form of modernisation, the nocturnes become a potential celebration of the cultural rebirth of the Andes as the heart of Peru. The Camera as Mediator If nature triumphs in the Vargas nocturnes, it is thanks to, and through the mediation of, the camera. While it stands self-consciously between the viewer and the natural world, that modern, imported technology also allows for the dynamic of the photographs’ strange temporalities to be made visible. The Vargases may well have pictured the force of nature as no other Andean artist did, and they did it using the tool seemingly least suited to the task. Despite the growth of photographic studios in the early twentieth-century Andes, there remained a widespread suspicion of photography as art in the region; few who ascribed to the belief in the telluric power of Andean nature thought that the camera could be capable of capturing it.41 While the camera’s status as a foreign technology certainly did not help, sceptics were mostly critical of its automatic mode of recording, a seemingly less apt conduit of Andean vitality than the sentiment and touch of the artist. The very characteristics, then, that had made photography the perfect visual corollary to the construction of the railway in the 1870s and its symbolic defeat of nature seemed to render it fundamentally unsuitable for capturing this new, non-instrumental attitude toward the Andean world. Figueroa Aznar, for example, employed photography for self-portraits and modernist, bohemian images of costumed types, but he only rendered landscapes in oil on canvas, a medium through which the ‘truth’ of nature, and not just its superficial appearance, could be recorded.42 This attitude, as Deborah Poole argues, was the result of the initial introduction of the camera in the Andes by (largely foreign) expeditionary scientists and travellers. Thus, the camera’s first task in the region was to produce a ‘a scientifically grounded popular image of Peru as an empty land, a Fallen Empire, a country of backward and impoverished Indians whose future progress would depend on both foreign capital and Western progress’.43 It was a prejudice with which any Andean artist pointing the camera at the natural world would have to grapple. In response to this legacy, Chambi embraced something closer to a modernist, straight photography for his landscapes and rural scenes (which he generally did not retouch or otherwise manipulate), an effort to reveal the unmediated truth of that (perhaps fast-fading) reality. The Vargases, however, were clearly a far cry from anything like straight photography. Although they might have tinted or otherwise experimented with some of the original prints of their nocturnes (few of which survive), their obvious play with light sources and exposure times suggest that, in general, they did not intend to erase the traces of photographic process on the surface of the print.44 As we have seen, they explicitly embraced, exaggerated, and even misused the camera and its potential. In doing so, the Vargases turned a tool seemingly most suited to picture nature’s symbolic defeat into a unique medium for picturing its dynamism. They were less interested, I have argued, in capturing any unmediated reality than in exploring the play of time and space at stake in Arequipa. The Vargases wilful lack of transparency and even ‘misuse’ of the camera comes closer to the 1920s experiments of the Brazilian writer, photographer, and ethnomusicologist Mário de Andrade, whose photographs are likewise self-reflexive. Andrade, who brought his beloved Kodak on his trips to the Northeast of Brazil and deep into the Amazon, was highly conscious of the possibilities and risks of the camera as tool for picturing Brazilian landscapes. As Esther Gabara has noted, he harnessed photography’s indexicality as a means by which to inscribe the specificity of place within his practice; it was a way to produce a modernism grounded in Brazil. But Andrade also acknowledged certain dangers inherent to photography. By that time, it bore a significant legacy of being enlisted in positivist, instrumental endeavours: of extracting usable information about the rural interior and the wealth it contained.45 Beyond the question of mapping the Amazon’s hidden resources, he feared creating a nameable, static image of Brazil – one that could congeal into an exotic emblem. This tension plays out on the surface of his photographs, in which strange framing, reflections, and angles fail to position the viewer in any secure position or to reveal any potentially useful information about the territory pictured. By misusing the camera – a variety of ‘errant modernism’, to reference the term of Gabara’s own coinage – Andrade disguised photography’s excessive detail while holding on to its indexical specificity. He sought to inscribe location without revealing too much. The Vargases, however, were less concerned with the camera’s potential indiscretion and more interested in finding ways to make it show more than it would normally allow. This is particularly evident in the way they inscribed time in their photographs. Rather than utilise the camera to capture speed and action in ever-shorter exposures, the brothers exploited its ability to represent long durations. In doing so, they managed to capture a natural world in motion but also a city strangely stilled. The bodies pictured, as I have argued, are fully ensconced within the urban foreground and its effervescent lighting but also within the extended temporality of the rural background. It is this split that the Vargases’ use and misuse of the camera makes visible. Thus, city and country prove inseparable in the nocturnes, and it is the camera that stitches them, albeit uncomfortably, together. The city’s stillness is only revealed through nature’s movement, and nature’s movement only made visible through the urban realm’s strange stillness. In harnessing the camera to picture the city caught up in the rhythms of the natural world, the Vargases questioned any easy alliance of its technology with either the accelerated pace of an imported modernity or the unmediated truth of the natural world. We are presented here neither with a technological pastoral that stresses the power of steady-state illumination nor with a naïve celebration of the purity of nature. In the Vargases’ hands, the camera rather became the perfect tool for portraying the slow drama playing out between city-as-stage and Andes-as-backdrop – one in which the protagonist proves to be the scenery itself. Footnotes 1 " Peter Yenne and Adelma Benavente suggest that Miguel may have been the artistic visionary of the pair and Carlos in charge of the day-to-day operations of the studio. Peter Yenne and Adelma Benavente, ‘El estudio de arte, sus aprendices y el problema de autoría’, in Estudios de arte Vargas Hnos (Lima: Cervesur, 2004), 14. But as it is generally not possible to assign definitive authorship of specific photographs to either brother, I will consider their entire corpus to be co-authored. 2 " For a succinct account of these changes, see José Luis Rénique, Los sueños de la sierra. Cusco en el siglo XX (Lima: Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales, 1991), 63–98. 3 " Jorge Villacorta and Andrés Garay, ‘La estética de los nocturnos de los Vargas Hermanos de Arequipa’, in Andrea Cuarterolo (ed.), La Fotografía, reflejo de nuestra historia (Buenos Aires: Sociedad Iberoamericana de Historia de la Fotografía, 2006), 287–90. ‘Indigenism’, broadly defined as an intellectual, artistic, and political movement committed to the vindication of indigenous peoples, will be discussed at some length later in this article. 4 " Villacorta and Garay, n.p. 288. See Michele M. Penhall, ‘El pictorialismo en los Andes’, in Natalia Majluf and Luis Eduardo Wuffarden (eds), La recuperación de la memoria. Perú 1842–1942, (Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima and Fundación Telefónica, 2001), 158. 5 " Peter Yenne and Adelma Benavente, ‘El pictorialismo y los hermanos Vargas’, in Estudios de arte Vargas Hnos, 122–3. In spite of this influence, the brothers’ nocturnes seem to routinely exceed the established repertoire of pictorialist techniques. On this point, see Penhall, 156–60. 6 " Villacorta and Garay, n.p. 287–9. In the Hispanic tradition, the term ‘modernismo’ refers to the turn-of the-century artistic movement that, stemming from French symbolism and Parnassianism, revolutionised poetry and the arts in general; it is most often associated with the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. Writers José Santos Chocano, Abraham Valdelomar, and Manuel González Prada were among its leading exponents in Peru. 7 " Quoted in Villacorta and Garay, n.p. 287. 8 " Alexander Nemerov, ‘Burning Daylight: Remington, Electricity, and Flash Photography’, in Nancy K. Anderson (ed.), Frederic Remington: The Color of Night (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art and Princeton University Press, 2003), 78. 9 " Peter Yenne and Adelma Benavente, Arequipa en blanco y negro: el estudio de arte Vargas Hnos. 1912–1930 (Lima: TurnerPhoto Perú, 2008), 129. 10 " Thierry de Duve, ‘Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox’, October, 5 (Summer 1978), 116. 11 " See Marnin Young, ‘Photography and the Philosophy of Time: On Gustave Le Gray’s Great Wave, Sète’, Nonsite, 19 (May 2016) <http://nonsite.org/article/photography-and-the-philosophy-of-time>, and Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second: A History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), accessed 1 April 2017. 12 " Peter Yenne and Adelma Benavente, ‘City of Night: Curators’ Statement’, Fotofest International <http://www.fotofest.org/vargas/index2.htm>, accessed 1 December 2013. 13 " Mirko Lauer, Musa mecánica. Máquinas y poesía en la vanguardia peruana (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2003), 73–4. 14 " ‘The Automobile is an enormous mechanical pachyderm: / its blood is gasoline’. Alberto Hidalgo, ‘Oda al automóvil’, in Panoplia lírica (Lima: Imprenta Víctor Fajardo, 1917), 112. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 15 " Lauer, Musa mecánica, 75. 16 " Lauer, Musa mecánica, 49. 17 " Manuel Burga and Alberto Flores Galindo, Apogeo y crisis de la república aristocrática (Lima: Horizonte, 1977), 34. 18 " Alberto Flores Galindo, Arequipa y el sur andino: siglos XVIII–XX, 2nd edn (Lima: Rikchay Perú, 1981), 137. 19 " Lauer, Musa mecánica, 49. 20 " Richard Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 21. 21 " Thomas B.F. Cummins, ‘Forms of Andean Colonial Towns, Free Will, and Marriage’, in Claire Lyons and John Papadopoulos (eds), The Archeology of Colonialism (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2001), 205. There is at least one important exception to this rule in the late colonial period; in eighteenth-century Cusco School devotional paintings, mountains occasionally appear either in the background of paintings of miraculous statues or merged with the body of the Virgin herself. On the emergence of the Andes in these late colonial religious paintings, see Ramón Mujica Pinilla, El barroco peruano, 2 vols (Lima: Banco de Crédito del Perú, 2002). 22 " Benjamin S. Orlove, ‘Putting Race in its Place: Order in Colonial and Postcolonial Peruvian Geography’, Social Research, 60/2 (Summer 1993), 317. 23 " Orlove, ‘Putting Race’, 325–7. For a larger study of this collapse of race and geography, see Cecilia Méndez, ‘De indio a serrano: nociones de raza y geografía en el Perú (siglos XVIII–XXI)’, Histórica, 35/1 (2011), 53–102. 24 " See Natalia Majluf, ‘Pattern-book of Nations: Images of Types and Costumes in Asia and Latin America, 1800–1860’, in Reproducing Nations: Types and Costumes in Asia and Latin America, ca. 1800–1860, exhibition catalogue (New York: The Americas Society, 2006), 15–56. 25 " See Katherine Manthorne (ed.), Traveler Artists: Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (New York: Fundación Cisneros, 2015). 26 " Natalia Majluf, ‘Photographers in Andean Visual Culture: Traces of an Absent Landscape’, History of Photography, 24 (Summer 2000), 91. 27 " Majluf, ‘Photographers’, 91. 28 " Majluf, ‘Photographers’, 91. 29 " Majluf, ‘Photographers’, 98. 30 " See Un siglo de luz en Arequipa (Arequipa: Empresa de Generación Eléctrica de Arequipa, 2005). 31 " Mirko Lauer (ed.), La polémica del vanguardismo, 1916–1928 (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2001), 39. 32 " It is worth noting that outside of the group of Indigenist painters based in Lima, largely students of Sabogal, Indigenism in the visual arts was not a well-defined movement. There existed no single school, doctrine, or manifesto, and the label ‘Indigenist’, rather than being adopted by the artists themselves, was most often applied by scholars after the fact. For a thorough account of Sabogal’s work, see Natalia Majluf and Luis Eduardo Wuffarden (eds), Sabogal (Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 2013). On Indigenist visual art in Ecuador, see Michele Greet, Beyond National Identity: Pictorial Indigenism as a Modernist Strategy in Andean Art, 1920–1960 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2009). 33 " This label, however, has not gone unquestioned. José Uriel García, for example, celebrated Chambi’s work as the manifestation of a ‘native sensitivity’ but also resented its occasional alignment with the idealised views of ‘tourists and foreign photographers’. José Uriel García, ‘Martín Chambi, artista neoindígena’, Excélsior: Revista Mensual Peruana, 14/185–6 (1948). For an expanded discussion of Chambi’s relationship with Indigenism, see James Scorer, ‘Andean Self-Fashioning: Martín Chambi, Photography and the Ruins of Machu Picchu’, History of Photography, 38/4 (2014), 379–97. On Chambi’s lesser-known photographs of urban indigenous subjects, see Jorge Coronado, The Andes Imagined: Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 134–62. 34 " On the distinction between social and artistic Indigenism in Peru, see Mirko Lauer, Andes imaginarios. Discursos del indigenismo-2 (Cusco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolomé de Las Casas and SUR Casa de Estudios del Socialismo, 1997). 35 " See José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, trans. Marjory Urquidi ([1926] Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press, 1988). 36 " Luis Valcárcel, Tempestad en los Andes, 3rd edn ([1927] Lima: Editorial Universo, 1972), 103. For excerpts of the book translated into English, see Orin Starn, Carlos Iván Degregory, and Robin Kirk (eds), The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 219–22. 37 " Valcárcel, Tempestad, 106. 38 " José Uriel García, El nuevo indio. Ensayos indianistas sobre la sierra surperuana, 2nd edn ([1929] Lima: H.G. Rozas Sucesores, 1937), 8. 39 " Deborah Poole, ‘Figueroa Aznar and the Cusco Indigenistas: Photography and Modernism in Early Twentieth-Century Peru’, Representations, 38 (Spring 1992), 54. 40 " On the relation between Indigenism and the avant-garde in Peru, see Yazmín López Lenci, El laboratorio de la vanguardia peruana (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1999), and Cynthia Vich, Indigenismo de vanguardia en el Perú. Un estudio sobre el Boletín Titikaka (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2000). 41 " Poole, ‘Figueroa Aznar’, 64–5; Coronado, The Andes Imagined, 155. 42 " Poole, ‘Figueroa Aznar’, 64. 43 " Poole, ‘Figueroa Aznar’, 67. 44 " Like Figueroa Aznar and Chambi, the Vargases had been trained to hand-illuminate their studio photographs as a means by which to restore the touch of the hand that the camera denied. We know that Miguel Vargas, the younger of the brothers, had learned the techniques of foto-óleo (likely from Figueroa Aznar), in which photographic prints were hand-painted in oil, and that both utilised a variety of printing techniques, including bromoil and gum bichromate processes. 45 " Esther Gabara, Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 42. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved
TI - Nature and Modernisation in the Vargas Brothers’ Nocturnes: A Mediated Encounter
JF - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcx025
DA - 2017-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/nature-and-modernisation-in-the-vargas-brothers-nocturnes-a-mediated-jRXBZP1nur
SP - 449
VL - 40
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
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