Appearances Matter: The Visual in Educational History [2, 1 ed.] 9783110631258, 9783110634945, 9783110631715, 2021936239

Table of contents :
Contents
Challenges and Methodologies in the Visual History of Education
Part 1: Contested Pasts, Democratic Struggles, and the Image
Chapter 1 “Imagined Education”: Nationalistic Politics and Emotions in Two Visual Depictions of the Past and Present of Chilean Education (1941 and 1975)
Chapter 2 Memories of Light in Apparitions of the Disappeared: Impressions on the Latin American Landscape by Visual Artist Gabriel Orge
Chapter 3 Images That Portray, Challenge, and Refuse: Visual Content and Education in Francoist Spain, 1939–1975
Chapter 4 “And Now, Who Will Defend Us?”: Heroes, Salvation, and Counter-Narratives in the Television Show El Chapulín Colorado
Chapter 5 Sports, Politics, and Aesthetics: Educating Bodies and Sensibilities through Cinema in Peronist Argentina
Part 2: Images as Humanitarian Action
Chapter 6 Seeing, Feeling, Educating: British and American Quakers and the Visual Record of Humanitarian Relief Work in Russia and Poland, 1916–1924
Chapter 7 Westward Religious Image Vistas: Female Roman Catholicism in Colonial and Postcolonial India, 1904–1960
Chapter 8 Humanitarian Photography Beyond the Picture: David “CHIM” Seymour’s Children of Europe
Part 3: Recovering the Image as Artifact
Chapter 9 Marked Surfaces: Analog and Digital Re-inscriptions of a Portrait
Chapter 10 Can Images Have the Last Word?: Images and Narratives of Children at Play in Late Nineteenth-Century Argentina
Chapter 11 The Enigma and Value of “Found” School Photographs for Historians of Education
Notes on Contributors

Citation preview

Appearances Matter

Appearances – Studies in Visual Research

Edited by Tim Allender, Inés Dussel, Ian Grosvenor, Karin Priem

Vol. 2

Appearances Matter The Visual in Educational History Edited by Tim Allender, Inés Dussel, Ian Grosvenor, and Karin Priem

ISBN: 978-3-11-063125-8 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-063494-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-063171-5 ISSN 2628-1740 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021936239 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: “Found” photograph at a flea market in France. The photographic mount had been cropped and information on the author or photographic studio is not recorded. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents Tim Allender, Inés Dussel, Ian Grosvenor, and Karin Priem Challenges and Methodologies in the Visual History of Education

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Part 1: Contested Pasts, Democratic Struggles, and the Image Pablo Toro-Blanco Chapter 1 “Imagined Education”: Nationalistic Politics and Emotions in Two Visual Depictions of the Past and Present of Chilean Education (1941 and 1975) 23 Juliana Enrico Chapter 2 Memories of Light in Apparitions of the Disappeared: Impressions on the Latin American Landscape by Visual Artist Gabriel Orge 43 Eulàlia Collelldemont, Núria Padrós, and Raquel Cercós Chapter 3 Images That Portray, Challenge, and Refuse: Visual Content and Education in Francoist Spain, 1939–1975 63 Daniel Friedrich and Nicolás Arata Chapter 4 “And Now, Who Will Defend Us?”: Heroes, Salvation, and Counter-Narratives in the Television Show El Chapulín Colorado Eduardo Galak and María Silvia Serra Chapter 5 Sports, Politics, and Aesthetics: Educating Bodies and Sensibilities through Cinema in Peronist Argentina 109

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Part 2: Images as Humanitarian Action Siân Roberts Chapter 6 Seeing, Feeling, Educating: British and American Quakers and the Visual Record of Humanitarian Relief Work in Russia and Poland, 1916–1924 129 Tim Allender Chapter 7 Westward Religious Image Vistas: Female Roman Catholicism in Colonial and Postcolonial India, 1904–1960 155 Karin Priem and Frederik Herman Chapter 8 Humanitarian Photography Beyond the Picture: David “CHIM” Seymour’s Children of Europe 181

Part 3: Recovering the Image as Artifact Sandra Camarda Chapter 9 Marked Surfaces: Analog and Digital Re-inscriptions of a Portrait Inés Dussel Chapter 10 Can Images Have the Last Word?: Images and Narratives of Children at Play in Late Nineteenth-Century Argentina 233 Ian Grosvenor and Gyöngyvér Pataki Chapter 11 The Enigma and Value of “Found” School Photographs for Historians of Education 259 Notes on Contributors

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Challenges and Methodologies in the Visual History of Education The visual and the material have been receiving significant attention in the history of education in the last two decades. Taking inspiration from larger turns in social, cultural, and media theory, several groundbreaking studies have analyzed images and artifacts as records of the past that go beyond what has been kept in written archives.1 This expansion is evident in the growing number of articles and books devoted to these issues in the history of education, and also in the conceptual and methodological shifts in recent years. Since the publication of The Challenge of the Visual in the History of Education in 2000, there has been a growing interest in visual methodologies and more generally in the impact of the visual and material turns on the field.2 Some historians and scholars in media studies have begun to actively engage with the visual or pictorial turn, a trend that is also evident among historians of education. But this engagement and the claims made for the visual have also been the focus of some sharp debate. In 2005, Karl Catteeuw, Kristof Dams,

1 Seminal publications include W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Elizabeth Edwards, “Entangled Documents: Visualized Histories,” in Susan Meiselas: In History, ed. Kristen Lubben (New York: International Center for Photography; Göttingen: Steidl, 2008), 330–41; Elizabeth Edwards, “Photography and the Material Performance of the Past,” History and Theory 48, no. 4 (December 2009): 130–50; Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, eds., Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images (New York: Routledge, 2004); Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment (New York: Vintage, 2007); Stuart Franklin, The Documentary Impulse (London: Phaidon, 2016); Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2005); Lorraine Daston, Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2006); Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008); Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, The Public Image. Photography and Civic Spectatorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Don Ihde, Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999). 2 Marc Depaepe, Bregt Henkens, James C. Albisetti, Jeroen J. H. Dekker, Mark D’hoker, Frank Simon, and Johan Tollebeek, eds., The Challenge of the Visual in the History of Education, Paeadagogica Historica Supplementary Series, vol. 6 (Ghent: CSHP, 2000). On more recent trends in visual research in the history of education, see Inés Dussel, “Visuality, Materiality, and History,” in Handbook of Historical Studies in Education, ed. Tanya Fitzgerald (New York: Springer, 2020), 137–52; María del Mar del Pozo Andrés and Sjaak Braster, “The Visual Turn in the History of Education,” in Fitzgerald, Handbook of Historical Studies in Education, 893–908. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634945-001

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Marc Depaepe, and Frank Simon critically concluded in their contribution to a volume entitled Visual History: Images of Education: Our standpoint . . . is that the ‘pictorial turn’, if we really need such a dramatic title for an appeal to gain more attention for the visual in the history of education, can only be useful in that it draws more attention to visual aspects of the reality of teaching and education, and so there is no need for infinite analyses about the ‘representation of education and teaching in visual sources’. . . . The source material is too limited in its content and number to be a representation of reality and can only really be used as a complement to the textual sources with which it has to be interpreted.3

The visual turn recovers new pasts.4 With education as its theme, this book seeks to present a body of reflections that questions a certain historicism and fixed interpretations, and renovates historiographical debate about how to conceptualize and use images and artifacts in educational history, in the process presenting new themes and methods for researchers. The book aims to gauge the value of this turn and to start a dialogue on how images can be analyzed in non-representational ways; it also asks how the current availability of visual records in the digital age changes our relationship to these sources.5 Theoretically, this volume is situated at the intersection of visual and material studies. Images are interrogated as part of regimes of the visible, of a history of visual technologies and visual practices. This also means that images are studied

3 Karl Catteeuw, Kristof Dams, Marc Depaepe, and Frank Simon, “Filming the Black Box: Primary Schools on Film in Belgium, 1880–1960: A First Assessment of Unused Sources,” in Visual History: Images of Education, ed. Ulrich Mietzner, Kevin Myers, and Nick Peim (Bern: Peter Lang 2005), 203–32, quotation on 229. 4 Anton Holzer has described photography an ideal technology to capture specific moments in time while simultaneously transforming them into history. See Anton Holzer, “Die Zukunft der Fotografie: Editorial,” Fotogeschichte 40, no. 158 (2020), http://www.fotogeschichte.info/ bisher-erschienen/hefte-ab-126/158/editorial-fotogeschichte-158-2020/. 5 Non-representational theory may offer inspirations for a different take on visual analysis in the history of education: Lynne Fendler, “The Ethics of Materiality: Some Insights from NonRepresentational Theory,” in Educational Research: Material Culture and Its Representation, ed. Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 115–32. Wonderful examples of how photographs inspire new approaches to the history of education are rather recent publications by Carole Naggar, Tereska and Her Photographer (New York: Russet Lederman, 2019); Inés Dussel, “Photos Found in the Archive: An Approximation to the Work with Images Based on an Amateur Album on Children’s Games (Argentina, Late Nineteenth Century),” Historia y Memoria de la Educación 10 (2019): 91–129. A critical reflection on the uses of interpretation and objectification in educational research was published by Karin Priem, “Visual, Literary, and Numerical Perspectives on Education: Materiality, Presence, and Interpretation,” in Educational Research: Material Culture and Its Representation, ed. Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 53–69.

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as material practices that enter circuits of reproduction and dissemination where they assume a hermeneutic role that is based on their physicality, plasticity, and presentational forms (e.g., print size, cropping and enlarging, image configurations and orderings, combination of images and texts, paper and print quality, etc.). Other avenues of inquiry include the study of the history of technologies and artifacts, and of gatherings of people and objects as visual and material assemblages. Contrary to much previous research on the visual and the material, this volume looks at images and artifacts as reproducible and mobile objects that are part of a bundle of intertwined lines or threads in networks of meaningmaking.6 Pictures and artifacts are considered as complex objects in their material and affective qualities; they are not “bounded” objects whose truth is out there to be reached by perfected methodologies, but objects to think with.7 When considering the socio-material quality of the image, the analysis moves away from the use of images or objects as mere illustrations of written arguments, and takes seriously the question of the life and death of artifacts – that is, their particular historicity. Questioning the visual and material evidence in this way means considering how, when, and in which regime of the visible it has come to be considered as a source, and what this means for the questions contemporary researchers might ask. In other words, it brings forth the question of the archive, of what has been inscribed, by whom, when, and where, and of how a particular visual memory has been produced, defied, challenged, transformed. The archive of images and artifacts, then, appears less as a stable repository of records than as a space of fragility susceptible to continuous rediscoveries. In this way the archive is less a solution to historical puzzles than a creator of new ones, related to the silences and blind spots of the visual. These remarks are also relevant in the context of digital technologies that have enlarged the archives of culture to para-human magnitudes, as Arjun Appadurai has pointed out.8 Due to digitalization, it is much easier to study and circulate images today than ever before, and this has also made the processes of storage and transfer more evident and traceable. With 3D printers, it will soon be

6 Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines (London: Routledge, 2015). 7 See Karin Priem, Inés Dussel, and Marc Depaepe, eds., “Images and Films as Objects to Think With: A Reappraisal of Visual Studies in the History of Education,” special issue, Paedagogica Historica 53, vol. 1 (2017); Elizabeth Edwards, “Photography: A Strong History?,” in Photo Archives and the Idea of the Nation, ed. Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 321–29, 325; Catherine Burke, Jeremy Howard, and Peter Cunningham, eds., The Decorated School: Essays on the Visual Culture of Schooling (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2013). 8 Arjun Appadurai, “Archive and Aspiration,” https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mw-mediadesign/im ages/c/ce/ArjunAppadurai_ArchiveandAspiration.pdf.

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possible to store, preserve, and reproduce physical objects in digital formats, too. Changes in the regimes of attention have placed more emphasis on attraction than on narratives. Additionally, the relationship with images and objects is playful and iconoclastic, as can be seen in memes and other digital mash-ups and creations. If today’s technology means that anyone can claim the status of documentary photographer, the notion of documenting or leaving an archival trace is becoming much more complicated amidst automated programs that do not require intention or permission to record traces. But how does this new techno-cultural context frame our work as historians of education? How do we engage with the huge, ever-expanding virtual archive of historical knowledge which is of such scale that none of us can ever hope to become entirely familiar with it? How have new imaging technologies transformed the relationship between the real and the artificial? This is considering that the aura of believability and the truth claims associated with photography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have become compromised, because it is now possible not only to easily construct fictions but also to produce deceptively plausible evidence of scenes that do not exist, of events that never took place. Moreover, technological changes have facilitated the use of images and other primary sources for research and teaching, although this availability does not guarantee understanding. Here, new questions emerge. How appropriate and robust for a digitally rewritten world are the methods we use as historians? How might we change our practice so as to equip the next generation of educational historians to critically engage with this world? Can the digital, as Thomas and Ayers (pioneers in digital authoring) have argued, make visible or reconfigure in other ways “deeper connections among documentation, evidence, and analysis than a single plane of fixed text can offer”?9 Furthermore, what ethical issues emerge with the use of the visual in historical research? These are some of the questions that the contributors to this book engage with and discuss in three thematic sections. The idea for this book emerged from an all-day pre-conference workshop entitled “The Visual and History Practice in the Digital Age,” which was generously hosted by the International Standing Committee of History of Education (ISCHE) in Buenos Aires in 2017. Following this workshop, the authors felt inspired to further elabo-

9 William G. Thomas and Edward L. Ayers, The Difference That Slavery Made, http://www2. vcdh.virginia.edu/xslt/servlet/XSLTServletxml?/xml_docs/ahr/article.xml&xsl=/xml_docs/ ahr/article.xsl§ion=text&area=intro&piece=presentation&list=&item=.

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rate on their papers and to present them in an edited volume. The resulting essays make up the eleven chapters of this book, which is divided into three sections, or parts. The editors of this book would especially like to acknowledge the work of our manuscript and copy editor, Manuela Thurner. As with all writing in the humanities, the astute use of language to deepen and sharpen meaning is critical. Manuela’s tireless efforts in this regard have greatly benefited all the authors in this book as their respective chapters have taken shape. We are also grateful for the generous funding for this work which was provided by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH).

Part 1: Contested Pasts, Democratic Struggles, and the Image The first part of this book presents five texts written by scholars from IberoAmerican countries that have gone through harsh military dictatorships but which also have experienced the power of democratic struggles in the last century. In these contexts as elsewhere, but perhaps more evidently, the battles around conflicting narratives of the past are still being fought, and scholarly work is produced in dialogue and confrontation with these narratives. In these contested histories, images play a vital role. Susan Sontag said some years ago that “[t]o remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture.”10 In her view, contemporary imaginations about the past are mostly shaped by visual technologies that provide it with matter and texture, thus structuring people’s relationships with the past. Yet, this power of the visual is not something new: images have been at the center of political struggles throughout human history. One poignant example of the struggles over images is iconoclastic movements, in which what is contested is less the essence of images than their domination over the public space. For iconoclasts, offensive images – idols – have to be censored, denounced, punished, destroyed.11 These battles have been and continue to be particularly fierce and violent; thus, it is not surprising that idolatry as a term

10 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003), 89. 11 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 126.

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carries “a heavy history of colonial conquest, . . . the justification of genocides and repressions of all sorts.”12 The chapters in this section point to the relevance of media and of the material circulation of images as part of these battles over the past. Pictures, understood as material practices and deliberate acts of inscribing the visual,13 are produced by visual technologies that are entangled with particular epistemologies, politics, and affects. For example, the material presence of images has significantly increased due to the spread of mechanical technologies of inscription such as photography and film, which set new standards for “precision, memory, knowability” for every record of culture.14 More importantly in terms of historiographical practices, the emergence of these visual technologies was accompanied by particular truth-claims that turned pictures into seemingly unmediated registers of real events. Photographic and filmic inscriptions became documents of the past, with enhanced “know-show” functions in which the showing was equated to self-evident knowledge.15 Yet their power as records of the past was never uncontested, and debates about whose images and which interpretation are as old as these technologies.16 The studies included in this section provide insightful instances of these struggles, analyzing how photography, film, and illustrated books were significant media and technologies for shaping narratives about the past and for contesting them through democratic struggles. How are these relationships changing with the spread of digital technologies of inscription? While enhancing the circulation of images, digital media transform the ways in which pictures are produced and also affect their indexical quality and the calls they make to the spectators. Images are everywhere, and these media materials have become a privileged site for historical imagination. However, their quality as documents is changing. Thomas Elsaesser, a film historian, states that we live in “an age when cinema (and television) history is likely to become the

12 Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 178–79. 13 Mitchell, Picture Theory. 14 Mary-Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contigency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 24. 15 Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 1–2. 16 See, e.g., Thierry Gervais, “Witness to War: The Uses of Photography in the Illustrated Press, 1855–1904,” Journal of Visual Culture 9, no. 3 (2010): 370–84; Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photography and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Olivier Lugon, Le Style documentaire: D’August Sander à Walker Evans, 1920–1945 (Paris: Macula, 2017).

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only history our culture has an affective memory of.”17 This affective experience is part of a new ontology of the visual characterized by fluidity, velocity, and the simultaneity of inscriptions that cut loose the relationships of images to events and undermine their truth-claims. Pictures seem to be caught up in personal likes or dislikes and are conceived as surfaces to play with instead of objects involved in “know-show” functions. Yet these plays can also become the material for political and historical interventions, as is seen in the work of the artist Gabriel Orge, studied by Juliana Enrico in chapter two. Will the digital lives of images open up democratic debate about their multiple meanings, as in Orge’s digital re-appearances? Moreover, considering the decline of the document function in contemporary images, other questions emerge as to the persistence of contestations and struggles around pictures. How will the battles around images be fought in these new intermedialities? Will contested histories be sent to parallel universes of alternative narratives, or will there be a common ground for contesting their meanings? The five contributions included in this section analyze events or contexts in which images were mobilized to produce accounts of the past, paying particular attention to the role of the visual media in creating and disseminating these images and expanding our understanding of the complex entanglements between visual media, politics, affects, and epistemologies. In chapter one, Pablo ToroBlanco takes a comparative approach regarding the visual turn. He firstly examines the Exposición Retrospectiva de la Enseñanza (Retrospective exhibition of teaching) of 1941 – an educational poster exhibition organized by students and professors at the University of Chile to express their progressive views on historical changes in the country’s national education system. This is then compared with the propagandistic photography book Chile Ayer Hoy (Chile Yesterday Today), published in 1975 during the authoritarian rule of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990), where photographic images promoted the view of a “chaotic past” and a promised new order. The chapter sees the images in both the exhibition and in the photography book (though from different times and contexts) as visual devices that share aesthetic and epochal sensibilities in terms of their educational focus and relationship to the state. However, the political alignment of Chile Ayer Hoy is much more evident than the less self-conscious Exposición Retrospectiva de la Enseñanza with its more general themes. While the 1941 posters were artistic and ephemeral images, the photos of 1975 had a stronger visual efficacy conveying shocking emotional messages about a putative chaotic past that served the stereotypes promoted by Pinochet’s regime. Yet the images of both the exhibition and the book also had a

17 Thomas Elsaesser, “The ‘Return’ of 3-D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the 21st Century,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 2 (2013): 217–46, quotation on 218.

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significant afterlife, gaining other layers of meaning that were in fact counter to their original cultural and political purpose. Juliana Enrico, in chapter two, explores how images of the past can remain visible in digital times. In the digital age images remain carriers of meaning and do not become ephemeral even if there is now a hyperabundance of otherwise readily disposable images. This phenomenon is explored through an analysis of the work of Argentinian visual artist Gabriel Orge, whose work in the public space identifies the desaparecidos (disappeared people and bodies) during several South American dictatorships in the 1970s and the 1980s. Moving into the public space is critical because his art is intended for the viewer to look intensely, engage emotionally, and register the personal and community tragedies that his work conveys. Orge’s work facilitates this transition to the digital age by appropriating new technical possibilities to re-present his art, including re-montage and mixing as well as the use of light and texture, so as to add new meaning. Here, collective acts of looking through social media, live projections, and museum exhibits encourage communal acts of memory through a poetics that affirms the ongoing demand for justice, in face of both a social and individual sense of horror. In chapter three, Eulàlia Collelldemont, Núria Padrós, and Raquel Cercós analyze how social inequalities were promoted or challenged in education policy making in Francoist Spain between 1939 and 1975. Their analysis uses filmic representations contained in documentaries produced for and against this regime, and illustrates the gap between reality and fiction when compared with the evolution of the actual policies themselves. The chapter looks more deeply into how visual documentation allows the invisible to become visible, revealing previously hidden negligence in the government’s educational system as well as six patterns of action from both authorities and citizens in poor neighborhoods of Barcelona. It shows how the visual turn is revealing of officially silenced and veiled povertystricken lives in urban landscapes, not usually documented in the scholarship on the history of education in Spain. Thanks to the visual turn, this chapter is able to illustrate the negligence of government where it is not evident in the written record. Today, this history is further obscured as these earlier times of upheaval are used as a rebuke to more radical ideological discourses. Daniel Friedrich and Nicolás Arata, in chapter four, shift the focus away from schools and onto the study of cultural objects and other phenomena that have produced different kinds of knowledge and theorizations. Connecting cultural history and educational history, the chapter engages with El Chapulín Colorado (literally translated as “red grasshopper”), a popular television superhero throughout Latin America, as a trigger to consider the role of heroes in the history of education. This chapter analyzes El Chapulín Colorado as a complex cultural

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product and as an alternative construction of the teacher-savior. By means of visual analysis, this chapter invites the reader to unravel established binaries such as those between savior and saved, between hero and victim. It does so by looking more deeply at the complex ways in which society has been educated after the democratic reopening of public schools following the dictatorships in Latin America. It looks at characters in children’s comics and TV shows as cultural ambassadors that communicate imaginaries about the lives of children, and about the complex ways in which their experiences are related to social change, family ties, and public conviviality practices. The final and fifth chapter in this section, by Eduardo Galak and María Silvia Serra, analyzes the film Escuela de campeones (School of champions). Premiered in Argentina on December 19, 1950, it became emblematic of broader moves in Argentinian society to introduce sports into the school curriculum. This had been an ongoing issue ever since Alexander Watson Hutton had tried to include football at the elite St Andrew’s School after his appointment in 1885, and it is this story that the film is about. The film’s significance is broader, however. Its release coincided with the rule of Juan Domingo Perón and with a new cultural and political awakening in Argentina. Using as its source a feature film, the chapter deconstructs Peronism in both a literal and metaphorical/aesthetic sense. In this way, the visual turn helps the historian capture some of the essence of Peronism as a cultural project in 1950, unadulterated by subsequent political revisionism during later decades in Argentina.

Part 2: Images as Humanitarian Action The second part of this book presents three texts by scholars who focus on humanitarian and charity organizations and the prominent role that photography has played – and continues to play – within this context. Humanitarian photographs have been disseminated en masse in order to initiate public debate, shape opinions, and convince audiences. Indeed, humanitarian and charity organizations have felt the urge to promote their causes and to demonstrate urgency by means of photography. As a result, critical media scholars have conducted valuable research on humanitarian propaganda and policies. Many journal articles, book chapters, and edited volumes have been dedicated to the “politics of humanitarian aid,” the rationales of charity, and humanitarian branding, as well as to the questions of how disasters are used in and by the media to create an “imperative to reduce suffering,” how humanitarian agencies are globally or internationally “selling mankind,” and how humanitarianism is built on Western concepts

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of ethical superiority and related policies.18 In addition, historians of photography and media studies have critically analyzed photography as a technology of domination, arguing that the act of representation constitutes a claim and an expression of ethical and cultural superiority.19 Indeed, in the humanitarian and charity domains photography as a technology fosters an impetus for production, reproduction, and dissemination. Photographic images, in this context, assume a role that is based not only on the content of images but also on technology. They need to be analyzed as assembled, reproducible, and mobile objects.20 Photographs as material objects and small media also affected the archiving and editing of printed materials and continue to play an important role in the digital world. This means that researchers also need to focus on the physical “lives” of photographs, analyze their complex material inscriptions and appearances, and investigate their making and specific handling as material objects. To do so, they need to break away from merely moralistic debates and instead look at humanitarian photographs as actors within media ensembles, analyzing how photographs shape and “interweave narratives” across

18 See, e.g., Eric A. Belgrad, “The Politics of Humanitarian Aid,” in The Politics of International Humanitarian Aid Operations, ed. Eric A. Belgrad and Nitza Nachmias (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 3–17; Peter Burnell, Charity, Politics and the Third World (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992); Anne Vestergaard, “Humanitarian Branding and the Media: The Case of Amnesty International,” Journal of Language and Politics 7, no. 3 (2008): 471–93; Craig Calhoun, “The Imperative to Reduce Suffering: Charity, Progress, and Emergencies in the Field of Humanitarian Action,” in Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics, ed. Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 73–97; Poul Duedahl, “Selling Mankind: UNESCO and the Invention of Global History, 1945–1976,” Journal of World History 22, no. 1 (March 2011): 101–33; Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Erica Bornstein and Peter Redfield, eds., Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism between Ethics and Politics (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2011); Lilie Chouliaraki, “Re-Mediation, Inter-Mediation, Trans-Mediation,” Journalism Studies 14, no. 2 (2013): 267–83; Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown, eds., Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 19 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 473–96; see also Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others; Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser, eds., Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (London: Reaktion Books, 2012); Lilie Chouliaraki, “The Symbolic Power of Transnational Media: Managing the Visibility of Suffering,” Global Media and Communication 4, no. 3 (2008): 329–51; Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick, eds., The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict (London: I. B. Tauris & Co., 2014); Roger Silverstone, Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). 20 Edwards, “Entangled Documents.”

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different media and different humanitarian organizations over time.21 Rather than focusing on the philosophical and ethical discussions surrounding the content of individual images, this volume aims to map processes of mediation and remediation and to elicit how images are involved in processes of (political, ethical, and professional) meaning-making.22 By doing so researchers are able to provide insights into how images and their circulation actively shape causalities, how they present what there was to see or was suppressed in fields of power. Analyzing the contexts of photographs is therefore as important as analyzing their content.23 This also echoes Hariman and Lucaites’ argument that the moral, or ethical, analysis of public images does not do full justice to what images do and how they frame judgments while circulating in the public world. Instead, and this is also what this volume sets out to do, they argue that it is “important . . . to reaffirm that photography is not only a medium of representation but also one that operates performatively. It not only records something but also displays it to a spectator for dedicated, artistically enhanced observation and response” while putting on display “performances” of social life and “adding viewers along with other potential spectators to the audience.”24 This section contains three chapters. In chapter six, Siân Roberts shows how Quaker humanitarian relief teams in post-WWI Europe made extensive use of images to educate the public about the consequences of war. Examining two different collections of images – one created at the organizational level and one a personal archive –, the chapter explores the emotional geographies such images embodied about relief work in post-WWI Russia and Poland. Under pressure to raise funds, well-meaning Quaker agencies used increasingly disturbing and stereotypical imagery that focused on the horror of naked and emaciated bodies of children. The image was also used by Quaker relief workers to disseminate their message to missionaries via lantern slide lectures and oral testimony. Focusing on the work of English Quaker Florence Barrow and fellow Quaker activists, the chapter argues that their use of images went further, aiming to produce pedagogic outcomes for these children by encouraging audiences to recognize their shared humanity with distant others. To give additional depth to this analysis,

21 Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 94. 22 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation; Bruna Seu and Shani Orgad, “The Mediation of Humanitarianism: Towards a Research Framework,” Communication, Culture and Critique 7, no. 1 (2014): 6–36. 23 Cristina Twomey, “Severed Hands: Authenticating Atrocity in the Congo 1904–1913,” in Batchen, Gidley, Miller, and Prosser, Picturing Atrocity, 39–50. 24 Hariman and Lucaites, The Public Image, 14.

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the chapter also takes into account the contextual narrative of these images, including the author’s own subjectivity when assessing the activities of Quaker in Eastern Europe. Tim Allender, in chapter seven, examines the changing experiences of Roman Catholic female religious orders in India in the pre- and post-colonial eras, between 1904 and 1960. During this time, these female women religious deployed their own image productions through the medium of their school magazines. This was where they could convey themselves as holding European, though not always colonial, mindsets. However, these image productions changed in the 1930s when the British began to lose control on the subcontinent. To establish their bona fides after Indian independence from the British in 1947, the image productions of these women religious moved away from their cloistered domains. Now they wished to represent themselves as a worthy part of the independent Indian landscape, increasingly displaying their teaching and their social outreach programs as wholly Indian in intent. Starting in the late 1940s, their visual literacy extended to showcasing their transnational alumnae, demonstrating a diaspora that was part of an emerging and global India. Modern-day digital visual technologies now decenter these earlier visual products of power, reinscribing these products with multiple authorships, far less controllable by any one intent. In chapter eight, Karin Priem and Frederik Herman concentrate on photography as a technology that goes beyond the image. The chapter looks at documentary photography as an institutional and material practice of humanitarian ‘propaganda’ and discusses how notions of childhood intensified the urgency of humanitarian campaigns. It analyzes how UNESCO carefully selected and edited David Seymour’s photographs of children of war-devastated Europe, and how the organization adapted and exploited his photographs for its own ends. Besides tracing these practices of meaning making, the chapter also looks at the itinerary of one of Seymour’s most fascinating photographs and the different stories that have evolved around it to the present day. In a nutshell, the essay suggests that photographs, by both providing information and stimulating imagination, become actors of meaning making and storytelling. Photographs did not only help UNESCO manage public consent and add urgency to humanitarian causes; they also triggered public debate on social media, cooperated in historical research, and inspired literary work.

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Part 3: Recovering the Image as Artifact The essays that make up the third part of this book focus on images as artifacts of the past. Photographs isolate and contain within a frame a moment in time. Lens and shutter enable a particular moment to be privileged over other possible instances which are lost. The moment is arrested in the flow of time through the projection of light onto a photosensitive surface which in turn, through the use of water and other chemicals, grants the moment a future. Sealed as an image on paper, the photograph becomes a memorial object which can be viewed time and time again in different presents. In this sense it is the viewer who gives life to a photograph. It is the viewer who looks to make meaning, in the expectation that looking will result in revelation. The viewer looks to find coherence in what is presented in front of them. The properties of the image they see remains constant, but what is seen, what is revealed to the viewer is never static but instead changes in different presents and associated contexts. Further, what is seen and recognized will also vary because the camera lens inventories reality, it leaves nothing out, and by so doing produces an excess of information and a proliferation of signs which were not necessarily the concern of the photographer. Consequently, photographs refuse to be trapped within a single interpretation. This random inclusiveness of photographs has implications for both archival and historical practice. Archives are institutional sites of memory; they hold the traces of the past from which history is written. But what happens when photographs enter the archive? They are conserved and catalogued, and words are ascribed to them to enable their accessibility for users. The linguistic grid of the archive catalogue generally operates at the level of generalization and, as Christopher Pinney has written, “the language of the archive” can imprison an image. Words anchor images, direct looking, and produce an effect of certainty. Words can fill in “the blank space of the photograph” and erase the “undecidable nature of the image.”25 Words can shape what is seen and how images are experienced. Change the words and meaning can be displaced. For historians, what had previously assigned any fixity to a photograph’s meaning can come unstuck when different questions are asked of the past. Indeed, it has been said that it is the role of each new generation of historians to ask new questions of the past.26 Such questions change according to contemporary preoccupations and the demand in society for new knowledge and understanding. Similarly, 25 Christopher Pinney, “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography,” in Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (London: Yale University Press, 1992), 90. 26 See John H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1969).

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details captured in a photograph allow exploration of elements that might not have been considered historically important at the time of image production. It follows that photographs also need to be understood in terms of the technology that produced them. The singularity of the process of production is something that the Canadian artist Jeff Wall confronted in his influential essay “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” sketching a genealogy where wet procedures in the darkroom connected analog photography “to the past, to time” and where the emergence of the digital meant “the displacement of water in photography” and a consequent altering of “the historical consciousness of the medium.”27 This change in the photographic image-making process has been accompanied by a fundamental shift from the photograph as a stand-alone artifact to “a unit of communication,” and a consequent production of an over-abundance of images and a severing of the past’s hold on the present.28 Faced with multitemporal readings of photographs, the practices of the archive as a social institution, the shifting preoccupations of the now and fragmentation of the past in the ever emerging present, the final group of essays collectively offer a considered response to the enigma that is the photograph and in doing so recover the image as artifact. The concluding part of this volume addresses exactly these issues from various angles. Chapter nine by Sandra Camarda examines the site of images themselves. It deconstructs the contextual outlines and other traces that have accompanied traditional photography in the past and the way their archiving and other subsequent organizing modalities can reconfigure how these images are experienced. Drawing on the multi-dimensional ways the image conveys meaning, the chapter examines a photographic portrait in a collection focusing on its corporeality, phenomenology, and performative qualities. This examination includes the portrayal of a Native American boy in an image taken in 1864, now held in the British Museum, London, as part of the Blackmore Collection. This and a large trope of other images are illustrative of traceable changes in thought about Native Americans in the nineteenth century as well as about those who captured these images. The chapter then considers the relatively recent intervention of digital technology and how this overlay changes some interpretative aspects of images in terms of their accessibility, their new materiality, and their reinscription. Inés Dussel, in chapter ten, analyzes the relationships between images and words in the publication of pictures of children’s play, part of an amateur album 27 Jeff Wall, “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” in Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 109–11. 28 Nathan Jurgenson, The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (London: Verso, 2019), 7–9, 51.

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produced in late nineteenth-century Argentina. The pictures, of unusual quality, depicted mixed groups of children in mundane, banal scenes that sought to record the natural environment of children’s play. Dussel reflects on the role of photography in shaping imaginaries about childhood and on the material copresences in which images were produced and circulated. Several of these pictures were published in two illustrated magazines between 1897 and 1903, with different and at times conflicting texts. In her analysis, the gaps and cleavages between images and words allow for a more complex understanding of the affections and epistemologies about children at the turn of the century. Of particular interest are the overlaps between the “schooled child” and the “playful child” visible in the publications, and their connections with pedagogical discourses. Throughout the chapter, Dussel warns about the fragmentation of images in their digital appearance, and the need to reinscribe these pictures in a longer series of technical media and meaning networks in order to understand the contested histories through which they have come before us. Finally, chapter eleven by Ian Grosvenor and Gyöngyvér Pataki takes as its focus the enigma posed by “found” photographs of past schooling – photographs that have been lost, forgotten or thrown away and that present to the viewer nameless faces and places and no information about the photographer who took them. The essay draws on Grosvenor’s collection of “found photographs” which began with the acquisition of a postcard in 1997 from a stall in a Frankfurt market and has been added to ever since. For the collector, each acquisition marks “an unrepeatable conjuncture of subject, found object, place and moment,” but what of the value of the “found” discursively produced artifact for the wider historical community and beyond?29 Using photographs acquired during visits to Latvia and Hungary between 2013 and 2018, the authors explore the problems associated with the enigma of the “found” image and the natural desire of the viewer to find meaning and thereby grant the “found” image a past and a future. They show how photography was a mechanism for communication with others and how, as documentation, these “found” images of past schooling made visible the collective face of the schooled body – a collective that, because of photography’s reproducibility, could be consumed by new publics. Reduced to visual representation, the schooled child became an object for the modernist gaze. The “found” photographs point to the value of thinking about developing a “grammar” of the schooled body, of the schooled body as a temporal sign of identity, as a site of representation, and as a product

29 Roger Cardinal, “Collecting and Collage-making: The Case of Kurt Schwitters,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 68.

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of society and its history. This, they argue, is the benefit of bringing “found” images into conversation with each other so as to generalize about schooling, rather than trying to locate individual images in time and place. They conclude that perhaps the true value of the “found” photograph for the historian sits with Walter Benjamin’s idea that access to the past can only ever be regained through fragmented moments evoked by an image or object and that collecting what was lost is a means of grasping hold of past experience, of arresting memory loss and allowing stories to unfold. It is the hope of the editors that this collection of essays will inspire further debate on the visual history of education. Perhaps one of the most forceful arguments is that historians of education need to study images considering their social-material qualities, their social biographies, their intermedial relations and technologies of reproduction, and the diverse processes of meaning-making in which they become entangled with humans, also in the digital age. The essays also point to the need to consider the politics of the (digital) archive, raising questions about what has been inscribed, by whom, when, and where, and how a particular visual memory has been produced, defied, challenged, and transformed in the history of education.

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. “Archive and Aspiration.” https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mw-mediadesign/im ages/c/ce/ArjunAppadurai_ArchiveandAspiration.pdf. Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008. Barnett, Michael. Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Batchen, Geoffrey, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser, eds. Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. Belgrad, Eric A. “The Politics of Humanitarian Aid.” In The Politics of International Humanitarian Aid Operations, edited by Eric A. Belgrad and Nitza Nachmias, 3–17. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Bornstein, Erica, and Peter Redfield, eds. Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism between Ethics and Politics. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2011. Burke, Catherine, Jeremy Howard, and Peter Cunningham, eds. The Decorated School: Essays on the Visual Culture of Schooling. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2013. Burnell, Peter. Charity, Politics and the Third World. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. Calhoun, Craig. “The Imperative to Reduce Suffering: Charity, Progress, and Emergencies in the Field of Humanitarian Action.” In Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power,

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Ethics, edited by Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss, 73–97. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Cardinal, Roger. “Collecting and Collage-making: The Case of Kurt Schwitters.” In The Cultures of Collecting, edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, 68–96. London: Reaktion Books, 1997. Catteeuw, Karl, Kristof Dams, Marc Depaepe, and Frank Simon. “Filming the Black Box: Primary Schools on Film in Belgium, 1880–1960: A First Assessment of Unused Sources.” In Visual History: Images of Education, edited by Ulrike Mietzner, Kevin Myers, and Nick Peim, 203–32. Bern: Peter Lang, 2005. Chouliaraki, Lilie. “Re-Mediation, Inter-Mediation, Trans-Mediation.” Journalism Studies 14, no. 2 (2013): 267–83. Chouliaraki, Lilie. “The Symbolic Power of Transnational Media: Managing the Visibility of Suffering.” Global Media and Communication 4, no. 3 (2008): 329–51. Daston, Lorraine. Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. New York: Zone Books, 2006. Depaepe, Marc, Bregt Henkens, James C. Albisetti, Jeroen J. H. Dekker, Mark D’hoker, Frank Simon, and Johan Tollebeek, eds. The Challenge of the Visual in the History of Education, Paeadagogica Historica Supplementary Series, vol. 6. Ghent: CSHP, 2000. Doane, Mary-Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contigency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Duedahl, Poul. “Selling Mankind: UNESCO and the Invention of Global History, 1945–1976.” Journal of World History 22, no. 1 (March 2011): 101–33. Dussel, Inés. “Photos Found in the Archive: An Approximation to the Work with Images Based on an Amateur Album on Children’s Games (Argentina, Late Nineteenth Century).” Historia y Memoria de la Educación 10 (2019): 91–129. Dussel, Inés. “Visuality, Materiality, and History.” In Handbook of Historical Studies in Education, edited by Tanya Fitzgerald, 137–152. New York: Springer, 2020. Dyer, Geoff. The Ongoing Moment. New York: Vintage, 2007. Edwards, Elizabeth. The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photography and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Edwards, Elizabeth. “Entangled Documents: Visualized Histories.” In Susan Meiselas: In History, edited by Kristen Lubben, 330–41. New York: International Center for Photography; Göttingen: Steidl, 2008. Edwards, Elizabeth. “Photography and the Material Performance of the Past.” History and Theory 48, no. 4 (December 2009): 130–50. Edwards, Elizabeth. “Photography: A Strong History?” In Photo Archives and the Idea of the Nation, edited by Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena, 321–29. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. Edwards, Elizabeth, and Janice Hart, eds. Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images. New York: Routledge, 2004. Elsaesser, Thomas. “The ‘Return’ of 3-D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the 21st Century.” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 2 (2013): 217–46. Fassin, Didier. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Fendler, Lynn. “The Ethics of Materiality: Some Insights from Non-Representational Theory.” In Educational Research: Material Culture and Its Representation, edited by Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe, 115–32. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014. Franklin, Stuart. The Documentary Impulse. London: Phaidon, 2016.

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Gervais, Thierry. “Witness to War: The Uses of Photography in the Illustrated Press, 1855–1904.” Journal of Visual Culture 9, no. 3 (2010): 370–84. Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Guldi, Jo, and David Armitage. The History Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Hariman, Robert, and John Louis Lucaites. The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Holzer, Anton. “Die Zukunft der Fotografie: Editorial.” Fotogeschichte 40, no. 158 (2020), http://www.fotogeschichte.info/bisher-erschienen/hefte-ab-126/158/editorialfotogeschichte-158-2020/. Ihde, Don. Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999. Ingold, Tim. The Life of Lines. London: Routledge, 2015. Jurgenson, Nathan. The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media. London: Verso, 2019. Kennedy, Liam, and Caitlin Patrick, eds. The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict. London: I. B. Tauris & Co., 2014. Lugon, Olivier. Le Style documentaire: D’August Sander à Walker Evans, 1920–1945. Paris: Macula, 2017. Mar del Pozo Andrés, María del, and Sjaak Braster. “The Visual Turn in the History of Education.” In Handbook of Historical Studies in Education, edited by Tanya Fitzgerald, 893–908. New York: Springer, 2020. Miller, Daniel, ed. Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “The Right to Look.” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 473–96. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Mondzain, Marie-José. Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Naggar, Carole. Tereska and Her Photographer. New York: Russet Lederman, 2019. Pinney, Christopher. “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography.” In Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920, edited by Elizabeth Edwards, 74–95. London: Yale University Press, 1992. Plumb, John H. The Death of the Past. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1969. Priem, Karin. “Visual, Literary, and Numerical Perspectives on Education: Materiality, Presence, and Interpretation.” In Educational Research: Material Culture and Its Representation, edited by Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe, 53–69. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014. Priem, Karin, Inés Dussel, and Marc Depaepe, eds. “Images and Films as Objects to Think With: A Reappraisal of Visual Studies in the History of Education.” Special issue, Paedagogica Historica 53, vol. 1 (2017). Seu, Bruna, and Shani Orgad. “The Mediation of Humanitarianism: Towards a Research Framework.” Communication, Culture and Critique 7, no. 1 (2014): 6–36. Silverstone, Roger. Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003.

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Thomas, William G., and Edward L. Ayers. The Difference That Slavery Made. http://www2. vcdh.virginia.edu/xslt/servlet/XSLTServlet?xml=/xml_docs/ahr/article.xml&xsl=/xml_ docs/ahr/article.xsl§ion=text&area=intro&piece=presentation&list=&item=. Twomey, Christina. “Severed Hands: Authenticating Atrocity in the Congo 1904–1913.” In Batchen, Gidley, Miller, and Prosser, Picturing Atrocity, 39–50. Tyrrell, Ian. Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Vestergaard, Anne. “Humanitarian Branding and the Media: The Case of Amnesty International.” Journal of Language and Politics 7, no. 3 (2008): 471–93. Wall, Jeff. “Photography and Liquid Intelligence.” In Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews, 109–11. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007. Wilson, Richard Ashby, and Richard D. Brown, eds. Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Part 1: Contested Pasts, Democratic Struggles, and the Image

Pablo Toro-Blanco

Chapter 1 “Imagined Education”: Nationalistic Politics and Emotions in Two Visual Depictions of the Past and Present of Chilean Education (1941 and 1975) Introduction It is not unusual to read or hear that a picture is worth more than a thousand words. There is probably much truth in that commonsensical phrase – especially when it comes to understanding how it is possible to promote, quickly and in a direct appeal to the emotions, political ideas such as, for example, nationalism. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when the visual has largely taken over the field of communication, images play an ever-greater role in constructing meanings about the difference between the past and the present. In the service of state propaganda, conservative or revolutionary political imagery, brush strokes, and photographic shots have been used, and continue to be used, as devices to generate and reinforce “emotional regimes” – to use the concept proposed by William Reddy1 – or manifestations of resistance against them. Against this backdrop of the exponential increase of images, which extends from the great centers of political, economic, and cultural power down to the level of the individual (who is able to produce images as never before with a cell phone camera and make him/herself visible ad nauseam through the selfie), education too is undoubtedly transformed by images and pictures.2 Thus, the historical research on education faces increasing challenges as the visual dimension is introduced and the complexity of the sources increases. The documentary value of the image becomes more complex, since it is no longer feasible, especially since the “visual turn,” to embed the visual in the exercise of historical knowledge as if it

1 Reddy defines “emotional regime” as “the set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them; a necessary underpinning of any stable political regime.” William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 129. 2 For an overview of the historiography in the field, see Inés Dussel and Karin Priem, “The Visual in Histories of Education: A Reappraisal,” Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 6 (2017): 646, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00309230.2017.1392582. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634945-002

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was just illustrating, or secondary to, the (apparently) explicit meaning of the written texts. The past and present visual orders are not easily decoded. The images, and their different material supports, are not simple transcripts of a reality that is manifested through them. Instead, they become multidimensional signs that help us to better read the past to the extent that we take them into account in the most comprehensive way possible. This is a process similar to what happened with the written text: for a long time, the written text was the primary foundation of historical reconstruction and was initially interpreted in a literal sense; over time, these interpretations have become more fruitful by incorporating questions that go beyond what has traditionally been known as internal and external criticism of the document. By adding additional layers of analysis, the text became more than a mere vestige, as researchers started to ask questions about its physical dimension, its circulation, the concatenation of concepts present in it (both synchronically and diachronically), and other meaningful elements. In the same way, images can generate a better historical understanding as long as they are seen, following Inés Dussel’s proposition, not as a faithful mimesis of reality but as constructs.3 Therefore, it is worthwhile to determine, among other things, how they relate, as Thomas Popkewitz points out, to “available technologies, visual languages or genres, and contexts of production and reception.”4 This essay intends to take a similar approach to address the problem of images and education in historical perspective. Recognizing in posters and photographs a confluence of different material attributes as well as of possible common meanings and uses, this chapter takes a perspective on education that goes beyond the physical scope of the school and the ritual space of teaching. Rather, it proposes to focus on education as a discursive component of political legitimation. It is concerned with the presence of two phenomena in two cases with obvious temporal and material differences: first, the construction of a polar visual discourse (past versus present); and, second, the participation of the images in the elaboration of a nationalist imagery intended to provoke emotional effects in its viewers. More specifically, this chapter aims to shed light on two episodes of visual depictions of the past and present of Chilean education under two entirely different historical

3 Inés Dussel, “The Visual Turn in the History of Education: Four Comments for a Historiographical Discussion,” in Rethinking the History of Education: Transnational Perspectives on Its Questions, Methods, and Knowledge, ed. Thomas S. Popkewitz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 29–49. 4 Thomas S. Popkewitz, “Styles of Reason: Historicism, Historicizing, and the History of Education,” in Popkewitz, Rethinking the History of Education, 15.

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circumstances. The first is the Exposición Retrospectiva de la Enseñanza (Retrospective exhibition of teaching) of 1941, which served as a platform for students and professors at the University of Chile to express, through posters (“interpretative billboards,” as they were called in the exhibition catalogue), their progressive visions of profound historical changes in national education. The second is Chile Ayer Hoy (Chile Yesterday Today), a propagandistic book published in 1975 to support the civil-military dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990), which made intensive use of photographic images, displaying a visual chasm between a “chaotic past” (regarding Salvador Allende’s failed transition to socialism during Popular Unity, 1970–1973) and an upcoming alleged “new order.”5 Following Inés Dussel and Karin Priem’s invitation to consider pictures as “objects to think with, to problematize as signs or traces of complex entanglements of the past but also of the present,” this chapter seeks to interpret the posters from 1941 and the photography volume produced in 1975 as visual devices that, despite their contextual and formal differences, share the fact that they were both part of an aesthetic and epochal sensibility and displayed visual discourses regarding education.6 By understanding aesthetics as a system made of “implicit, latent, and contingent” signs, this essay aims to relate these visual repertories to their contemporary aesthetic environment and explore their emotional and political implications.7 There are obvious differences between the two corpora of images analyzed in this chapter. The posters of the Exposición Retrospectiva were only one part of a larger exhibition. Lily Jiménez Osorio, who has studied the exhibition indepth, argues that its official nature was quite clear, given that “its organizing committee included state agents, researchers, and independent artists of the museum that housed it [the exhibition], so it was the Government of Chile that expressed itself through it, using it to make explicit its ideology about education in the country.”8 In contrast, it is my view that the exhibition was partly the result of a collaborative and voluntary response by university students and

5 Chile Ayer Hoy “is the graphical and visual argument that compares the politically chaotic yesterday with the hopeful and tidy present,” as two researchers on the aesthetic dimensions of the Pinochet dictatorship point out; see Luis Hernán Errázuriz and Gonzalo Leiva Quijada, El golpe estético: Dictadura militar en Chile, 1973–1989 (Santiago: Ocho Libros Editores, 2012), 64. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are the author’s. 6 Dussel and Priem, “The Visual in Histories of Education,” 646, italics in the original. 7 Pablo Pineau, “A modo de introducción: Estética escolar – manifiesto sobre la construcción de un concepto,” in Escolarizar lo sensible: Estudios sobre estética escolar (1870–1945), ed. Pablo Pineau (Buenos Aires: Editorial Teseo, 2014), 24. 8 Lily Jiménez Osorio, “Una educación al servicio del país: la Exposición Retrospectiva de la Enseñanza de 1941 en contexto,” Colecciones Digitales, Subdirección de Investigación DIBAM, 2017, 3, http://www.museodelaeducacion.cl/648/w3-article-81606.html.

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professors to the stimulus of a specific cultural policy: the Plan de Chilenidad (the Chilenity Plan).9 Meanwhile, Chile Ayer Hoy was a book publication issued by a state publisher, Editorial Nacional Gabriela Mistral. Therefore, it is plausible to assume that it represented the official view of the Pinochet dictatorship. The exhibition posters had an expiry date from the moment of their creation: their purpose was to depict the differences in a specific area (education) in binary terms (past/present), but they were part of a temporary exhibition shown at a museum. On the other hand, the photographs published in Chile Ayer Hoy had no expiry date: their mission was to induce changing emotions in their readers as long as the book existed. This goal would be achieved not only by comparing the past and present in education but also by constructing a global narrative that referred to multiple actors of Chilean reality – including women, workers, peasants, the military, and youth.10

The Exposición Retrospectiva de la Enseñanza: Drawing Progress with Ink and Paper The posters presenting a comparative vision of the past and present of Chilean education were part of a broader exhibition launched in September 1941. According to the Ministry of Education, the exhibition was designed to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the foundation of Santiago and to make visible the educational progress achieved during the nation’s history.11 Along with an exhibition of bibliographic treasures and works of art, organized by the University of Chile, and a sample of educational materials, the posters had an impressive, albeit short public life. The Exposición Retrospectiva was, to a certain extent, synchronized with a comprehensive educational policy carried out in 1941: the Plan de Chilenidad (Chilenity Plan).12 The government of President Pedro Aguirre Cerda (1938–1941), 9 For more information on the Plan de Chilenidad, see footnote 12. 10 Interestingly enough, the Catholic Church did not receive special attention in Chile Ayer y Hoy, notwithstanding its political, social, and cultural influence in Chile. The most likely reason is that the Chilean Church became an early antagonist of Pinochet’s regime. Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez (in conjunction with evangelical and humanitarian groups) organized the first structures to defend human rights and gave shelter to persecuted leftist militants. 11 “Orientación más científica y nacional para nuestra enseñanza,” El Mercurio, September 2, 1939, 21. 12 The Plan de Chilenidad, created by Supreme Decree 3791 on July 28, 1941, was meant to reinforce nationalism and loyalty to political authorities through school ceremonies, patriotic

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leading a moderate leftist coalition called Frente Popular, embodied a progressive and civic version of nationalism. As an ideological proposal, civic nationalism would have to deal with the effects of the political activation of the popular masses prudently in order to avoid the expansion of fascist, militarist, or revolutionary tendencies.13 Its objective was therefore to promote a political regime of social class conciliation, seeing the cultivation of progressive and non-personalist nationalism as a critical element in this effort. In the educational field, this meant supporting the “study of the dominant problems of Chilean life” and developing all kinds of examples to emphasize the shared elements as a nation, which involved studying the “development and evolution of the Chilean culture.”14 Against this background, the posters of the past and present of Chilean education, made by students and professors of the University of Chile, can be understood as elements designed to visualize the objectives of the Plan de Chilenidad, even though the plan was a program designed primarily for the field of school education: In the campaign undertaken by the President of the Republic, it [the Plan de Chilenidad] comprises several topics, including, due to their significance, the formation of character, of spirit, honesty, truthfulness and responsibility, the teaching of a national, mostly peasant, economy, the feelings of cooperation and solidarity, and as for teaching itself, the preparation of programs with mostly national content, not in a puerile political sense but in relation to nature, national art, and the modalities of the country.15

The retrospective exhibition, the Chilenity plan, and civic nationalism were concentric circles that – from the ephemeral nature of a commemorative event to an allegedly solid, long-term ideological proposal – were put at the service of a common goal. This goal required visual assets that could promote a desire for both national transformation and national unity as well as the social peace necessary at this critical juncture in the nation’s history. As Bárbara Silva has pointed out,

commemorations, and readings. It was a curricular proposal that went beyond a passive reception of Chilenidad as an idea, as the Decree makes clear: “it is not enough to have patriotic sentiments, but it is necessary to show them in such ways as respect for national authorities, institutions, and symbols.” For further information and analysis of the Plan de Chilenidad, see Patrick Barr-Melej, Reforming Chile: Cultural Politics, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Middle Class (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 205–10. 13 For further comments on civic nationalism and education, see Pablo Toro-Blanco, “‘Como se quiere a la madre o a la bandera’: Notas sobre nacionalismo, ciudadanía y civilidad en la educación chilena (1910–1945),” in Nacionalismos e identidad nacional en Chile, Siglo XX, vol. 1, ed. Gabriel Cid and Alejandro San Francisco (Santiago: Ediciones Bicentenario, 2010), 133–58. 14 Liceo Experimental Manuel de Salas, Programa de Chilenidad: Resumen de las actividades en pro de la chilenidad en las distintas asignaturas (Santiago: Senda, 1941), 7. 15 “Una cruzada de Chilenidad,” Informaciones de Chile: Órgano Oficial de la Dirección General de Informaciones y Extensión Cultural 1 (August 1941): n.p.

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referring to the Popular Front project, “in a context of transformation, it was necessary to strengthen some aspects that would account for that national unity, both as a guarantee of the nation’s permanence and to reassure the oligarchs that everything would be harmonious.”16 In this context, it is obvious that the images and texts of the posters shown at the Exposición Retrospectiva posited an opposition between past and present. However, their messages seem to have been interested more in improving national education in the future than in indicting the past, be it colonial or republican. Since the political-cultural imperative at the time of the exhibition was to reinforce national unity, the images and texts were characterized by a predominantly optimistic tone. It was a very different mood, as we will see later on, than that communicated by Chile Ayer Hoy. It is also important to note that the images on the posters of the exhibition were presented to the viewers in a specific affective context. The artistic exposition, held at the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts, took place in September, as part of Chile’s Fiestas Patrias festivities. On the same days that the Exhibition was open to the public, activities related to education were also taking place in the context of the patriotic mobilization of students, professors, political authorities, and the population in general. Large-scale gymnastic choreographies by students and a congress on the teaching of physical education competed for the interest of the media in the first weeks of September 1941. In short, the public exhibition of the posters was inscribed in a festive and patriotic context, in which the images acquired a specific semantic and emotional quality. While some of them reflected negative aspects of the Chilean educational reality, viewers would read them in an optimistic and celebratory mood, which made it possible for them to interpret the contrast between the past and the present in a positive way. In this sense, the context of the interpretation of the images was crucial for their effectiveness to communicate specific purposes and ideas. The positive press coverage of the exhibition confirms this assessment regarding the construction of a discursive climate in which images worked as vehicles of civic and progressive educational nationalism. The Exposición Retrospectiva was part of a specific cultural moment in the history of Chile. Through the binary oppositions that the anonymous authors of the posters posited between the past of Chilean education and its desired future, it is possible to glimpse enduring ideas, made visible by presenting, through simple images and graphs, what would be left behind as a historical burden. While all posters used visual oppositions, with the past on the left side of the image and

16 Bárbara Silva, “La construcción nacional durante el Frente Popular chileno: entre novedad y continuidad histórica,” Revista Tiempo Histórico 8, no. 14 (January–June 2017): 63.

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the future on the right, the graphical means they employed were quite different. Sometimes, the image was only secondary, supporting the meaning of the text. In other cases, the numbers and figures that allowed viewers to become aware of the difference between the past and 1941 were more important than either the words or the pictures. This is the case in one of the posters showing a continuous line of growth in the enrollment of female students in technical education (Fig. 1.1). The stylized silhouettes of female students support the growth curve of their inclusion in an educational area that had been traditionally dominated by men. Rather than condemning the past, the message focused on the continuous, uninterrupted growth in female enrollment, as symbolized by the cord held by the students. The posters’ visual repertoire and vivid execution reveal that they were not made exclusively by students of art. One of the things that educational authorities wanted to emphasize is that they were created by students and professors

Fig. 1.1: Poster from the Exposición Retrospectiva of 1941. Commenting that “The Chilean female youth responds in ever-rising numbers to the call of technical teaching,” the poster shows the increase from 20 female students in 1888 to 5,873 in 1941. Source: Photographic Collection of the Museo de la Educación Gabriela Mistral, Santiago, Chile.

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from different faculties of the University of Chile. Thus, it is possible to understand these posters (an amateur and secondary part of the whole exhibition) as a collective act, without a professional or fixed aesthetical canon to guide their preparation. It is evident that the graphic and artistic skills used to make the posters were not very sophisticated. Rather, the visual language is similar to that prevailing in advertising at the time, favoring simple, robust compositions, where the visual impact was ensured by the starkness of the figures and their messages. The differences among the posters make it possible to take a look at the diversity of stylistic resources used in their creation. In contrast to the simplicity of the poster shown in Fig. 1.1, the following poster (Fig. 1.2), juxtaposing a dilapidated classroom with a modern school, presented a complex composition, where interrelated images and texts are divided into scenes designed to demonstrate the difference between the past and the present. The main text contributes to the poster’s emotive proposal: to affect viewers emotionally and to draw their attention to the educational drama of impoverished childhood.

Fig. 1.2: Poster from the Exposición Retrospectiva of 1941. The main text reads: “The most serious problem of Chilean education: 600,000 children from suburban and rural environments demand to be included in the national culture.” Source: Photographic Collection of the Museo de la Educación Gabriela Mistral, Santiago, Chile.

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Since the posters shared visual codes with contemporary commercial advertisements, words played an essential role and were dialectically interlinked with images: in some posters, pictures merely accompanied written messages (with dramatic, imperative or emotional content), whereas in other posters, the images were designed to captivate the viewers’ full attention. Therefore, these kinds of visual devices were part both of a mass culture in which Chileans were getting used to reading – literacy rates were increasing as a result of the expansion of the school system and the urbanization process – and of an emerging visual alphabetization, which was one of the outcomes of globalization processes. Notwithstanding their familiarity with massive visual codes such as in advertising, all the posters shared a common characteristic regarding the combination of text and images: there was no room for irony or humor, since the posters were meant to be a pedagogical tool communicating a solemn message. Due to this hieratic nature, the posters were designed to be clear in their meaning and closed to any further interpretations. Their authors aimed to generate in the audience an emotional response along with a political commitment. We can also see this in the next example (Fig. 1.3):

Fig. 1.3: Poster from the Exposición Retrospectiva of 1941. The text reads: “The progress of a democratic country is directly related to the number of its schools. Each school that opens is a prison that closes.” Source: Photographic Collection of the Museo de la Educación Gabriela Mistral, Santiago, Chile.

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The image seeks to persuade viewers through the use of statistics, which is an essential visual element in the design of the poster. The text emphasizes a classic nineteenth-century argument about the social importance of education as a weapon against social ills such as crime. The use value of the Exposición Retrospectiva posters was meant to expire along with the exhibition in September 1941. However, the material life of images can sometimes take on a life of its own, diverging from the images’ original purposes. The afterlife of the original collection started when someone had the bright idea of photographing the posters – apparently in a hurry, because in some shots the posters are turned upside down, as can be seen in Fig. 1.2. These images then became part of the photographic collection of the Museo de la Educación Gabriela Mistral. In this way, and as time went by, the collection began to take on a new life – for example, as a source for learning more about the commemoration of 1941 or as material through which to analyze aesthetic patterns of the period. In sum, the posters became photographs and these, in turn, became part of a visual heritage collection currently housed in a museum of education.

Chile Ayer Hoy: The Past Depicted as Darkness Published in 1975 as a result of editorial efforts of the publisher Editora Nacional Gabriela Mistral, the book Chile Ayer Hoy was to “build an apologetic visual narrative on September 11 [the date of the 1973 Chilean coup d’état]. Its purpose was to serve as documentary evidence, through the dissemination of images of a past not fictionalized, but ‘objectively’ represented in the photographic images.”17 The book as a propaganda device is a combination of text and photography, with the latter taking precedence. The text is presented in three languages (Spanish, English, and French) and consists of short sentences with emotional content, which are not always accurately translated from Spanish into the other languages. Children and young people, represented mainly in their role as students, are dominant: the corpus of forty-one double-page spreads contrasting photos of yesterday and today includes eleven spreads showing students as protagonists – these spreads sat in the very center of the book and thus literally constituted the book’s visual core. Nevertheless, the book is not a visual story exclusively about education (as was the declared aim of the posters of the 1941 exhibition), but it tries, through the images, to capture a global feeling of chaos versus order in practically all dimensions of

17 Dalila Muñoz Lira, Operaciones visuales de la Editora Nacional Gabriela Mistral: fotografías para legitimar, 1973–1976 (Santiago: Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, 2014), 12.

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social life. A recent analysis of Chile Ayer Hoy accurately describes it as “[a] Manichean message, direct, simple, predictable, exemplary, even pedagogical, giving no space to other interpretations or readings other than those proposed by its authors.”18

Fig. 1.4: Cover page of Chile Ayer Hoy (Santiago: Editora Nacional Gabriela Mistral, 1975).

Knowing the production context of Chile Ayer Hoy is essential to properly decoding the set of photographs and texts contained in the book. After the coup d’état of September 1973, the civil-military dictatorship implemented systematic and nation-wide measures of collective intimidation and indoctrination, along with the persecution and physical annihilation of militant leftists.19 Under the Human Relations Directorate of the General Secretariat of Government, a Department of Psychology in 1973 and 1974 built the foundations for a massive psychological penetration campaign. Its purpose was to establish mechanisms that, through the widespread use of fear, would prevent any attempts to oppose

18 Horacio Fernández, ed., Una revisión al fotolibro chileno (Santiago: Fundación Sud Fotográfica, 2018), 142. 19 With regard to human rights violations, the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report determined, as official historical truth, in 1991 that 2,279 persons were killed in Chile during the dictatorship for political reasons (including 957 disappeared persons and 164 “victims of political violence”).

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the dictatorship. Therefore, it became “essential to evoke, or rather, reactivate the anguished and tragic moments before the Military Pronouncement” with a media campaign whose central objective was to “keep active the neuroticizing factors that traumatized the Chilean citizen during the U.P. [Unidad Popular] regime.”20 Testifying to the need to sustain a collective mood based on a state of emergency, a Department document warned in 1974 about the political danger resulting from the cessation of this induced sense of permanent alarm: “the ordinary citizen has quickly forgotten the dangerous circumstances that Marxism meant, and has decided to live a normal life under the shelter and protection of the Armed Forces. It is as if citizens did not want to accept that we are at war, despite the announcements of the official circles.”21 In order to achieve the above-mentioned goals, mass psychological intervention operations were to be carried out by various means. In the first years of the dictatorship, censorship and control of press, radio, and television content allowed the regime to disseminate ideas and images that sought to promote the social order and silence political dissent through fear. The authorities early on realized the role that images would play in this process, as can be seen from a document dated November 1973: “The masses are trained only to understand simple images.”22 This idea is relevant for the analysis of the images in Chile Ayer Hoy, because it exposes the complexity of the dictatorial communication policy. Indeed, getting to produce these “simple images” was, paradoxically, far from simple. The combination of the impact of the image and the effect of the text (emotional, brief questions) was to give rise to an unambiguous reading, leaving no room for interpretations outside the explicit meanings anticipated by the selection and juxtaposition of the photographs. In order to properly understand the photographs in the book Chile Ayer Hoy, it is necessary to consider their existence within a communication logic that was tied to the Cold War logic and thus even had transnational dimensions. As Cora Gamarnik has pointed out, the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone partly coordinated their communication strategies, which is evident in the thematic and aesthetic similarities of the propaganda of the regimes of Chile,

20 Freddy Timmermann, El Gran Terror: Miedo, emoción y discurso. Chile, 1973–1980 (Santiago: Ediciones Copygraph, 2015), 126. 21 Secretaría General de Gobierno, Dirección de Relaciones Humanas, Departamento de Psicología (1973–1974), “Campaña de Penetración Psicológica Masiva,” document quoted in La Nación, August 30, 2004. 22 Cora Gamarnik, “Fotografía y dictaduras: estrategias comparadas entre Chile, Uruguay y Argentina,” Nuevo Mundo/Mundos Nuevos, Images, mémoires et sons, June 10, 2012, http:// journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/63127.

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Argentina, and Uruguay.23 The Uruguayan press, for example, also applied the comparative axis of Chile Ayer Hoy, depicting the contrast between chaos and order (see Fig. 1.5). It is interesting to note the similarities despite the formal differences: in the Chilean case, it was a book publication, which meant less public exposure due to its cost; in the Uruguayan example, the images appeared in a newspaper supplement, which allowed wide circulation and impact. Although the photographs in each of these publications needed to be representative of their respective local realities (which would reinforce their “genuineness” by showing recognizable and concrete places, people, and events), they share certain principles of composition. Always on the left of the composition, there is dirt, violence, smoke, even somewhat unfocused images. In contrast, the images on the right side are peaceful, well-defined, bright, reassuring. In both the Chilean and the Uruguayan version, there is an evident visual contrast in the composition: the pages on the left always show photographs against a black background, corresponding to the past, while the images on the right, set against a white background, depict reassuring scenes of the present. Another relevant element in the composition of the book is its intention of naturalizing its content and images: it is a text that has no authorship. There is no identification or mention of the people who made the book, neither in the texts nor in the photo credits. An effect of solemnity emerges, “as if it [the book] were gestated by a magical act or by spontaneous generation.”24 Therefore, it could be argued that the anonymity of the images also gives them a sort of extra-temporal quality. This is especially evident in the case of the images designed to illustrate the visual atmosphere of a past built on chaos and fear. First, the lack of date and place reinforces the illusion that they show not just a moment in the past but the past as a whole. Thus, the disturbing photograph that appears on the left side of the book’s cover page (see Fig. 1.4) operates as a synthesis of an event that does not have a specific date but that is – according to the intentio auctoris – a faithful representation of a whole period (that of Popular Unity). On the other hand, the missing dates allow the images’ reuse as visual topoi for propaganda purposes. This would become evident, for example, in the context of the government’s campaign for the constitutional referendum in 1980, when newspapers such as El Mercurio and La Tercera used several of these images. Their frequent inclusion in other media making claims of authenticity (such 23 Gamarnik, “Fotografía y dictaduras.” 24 Lorena Berríos, “La resistencia de los espejos: fotógrafos en la dictadura y su influencia en la memoria de Chile (1973–1989)” (Licentiate thesis, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2007), 89.

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Fig. 1.5: Detail of “Uruguay: Ayer y Hoy,” supplement published by the newspaper El País on October 26, 1975. Reprinted from Gamarnik, “Fotografía y dictaduras,” https://journals. openedition.org/nuevomundo/docannexe/image/63127/img-4.jpg.

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as, for example, government television propaganda) gave these photographs a long life beyond the publication date of the book. In short, the photographic materiality allowed the reproducibility of the original message to be extended both temporally and geographically, as the images became part of media and propaganda campaigns until the very end of the dictatorial period. As mentioned before, Chile Ayer Hoy’s visual polarity was based on photographs of spooky episodes from a dark past framed in black and contrasting them with a new time of peace, order, and luminosity. In the case of education, the construction of the images of the present allows us to see an order that, from a critical point of view, represents a simulation. As can be seen in Fig. 1.6, for example, the photographs of the new times promised by the dictatorship were carefully staged, with students posing hieratically according to instructions surely given by official photographers.

Fig. 1.6: Chile. Ayer. Hoy, n.p. The spread shows the contrast between young people engaged in political activism (left, black/dark page as a symbol of the past) and studying (right, white/ bright page as attributes of the present and future). The English text reads: “yesterday: Communist brigades complying [sic] Moscow’s orders” (left page), and “today: Brotherhood and cooperation for progress” (right page).

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Final Remarks Just as the posters of the Exposición Retrospectiva in 1941 were, to a certain extent, elements of a national cultural policy (whose objective was to establish a model of integrative nationalism based on a mainly optimistic discourse associated with the idea of development), the photographs in the book Chile Ayer Hoy can also be understood as visual products in the service of a state purpose. There were, however, marked differences between the two: in the case of Chile Ayer Hoy, the alignment between its message and the government’s goals is more evident than in the 1941 exhibition posters. While ordinary students of the state-dependent public university created the posters based on some general and loose thematic guidelines, the publication of the photography book was a complex process involving a professional editorial team benefiting from the infrastructural remains of a highly ideological state-owned company (the Editora Nacional Quimantú publishing company created in 1971 by Popular Unity) and actively collaborating in disseminating the ideas and propaganda of the military regime. When analyzing both graphic productions, it is essential to highlight their structural differences. The 1941 posters were artistic and ephemeral images; their making did not follow unique and clear graphic patterns, even though they shared an aesthetic that gave them coherence as a whole. They were not created to be reproduced or to circulate beyond the confines of the exhibition. However, another visual technology (photography) gave them an afterlife that turned them into images of heritage and historical importance. There are other differences, too. Unlike the photos of 1975, the posters of 1941 were not a professional product. The exhibition posters worked only by displaying past and present together in the same poster. They always kept an optimistic tone, regarding the past as a burden that was, however, connected to the present and that could be overcome by tackling educational policy challenges. In contrast, the photographs in the 1975 book worked both together and separately, because of their visual efficacy at conveying a shocking emotional message; this is especially true of those photos regarding a chaotic past, a visual narrative that supported the whole story. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, images can facilitate the construction of emotional regimes by conditioning the perception and experience of those who are exposed to them. Taking into account the limitations of the impact of the selected posters and photographs – in the case of the 1941 exhibition, a group of posters accessible to the public, albeit for a limited period of time; in the case of the 1975 publication, a book whose precise circulation is not known –, it is nevertheless interesting to ask how each of these visual devices communicated a programmatic and, therefore, unambiguous vision of reality (especially with reference to education) and how they echoed an emotional or

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affective atmosphere. There are marked differences in the historical contexts in which the two visual sets emerged. While the students at the University of Chile explored the past and present of national education within a global framework of concern, fear, and danger (due to World War II), those negative emotions, however, did not undermine the optimistic mood that surrounded the integrative project promoted by the Popular Front government in the early 1940s. In contrast – and this is where the emotional element seems to have greater prominence – the 1975 situation was part of a massive historical trauma: the photographs served as reinforcement of an “emotionology” – loosely borrowing the term proposed by Stearns and Stearns – in which uncertainty/fear/violence on the one hand and security/tranquility/peace on the other hand were the opposite poles proposed to the reader.25 Thus, the book was an emotional proposal seeking to condition the experience of its readers in two ways: first, by rejecting the past as a whole (for example, the book’s depiction of education during Popular Unity as total chaos); second, by exhorting people to be obedient, passive, and to be led by the protective hand of an authoritarian and paternal state. Appealing to basic emotions, a kind of social pedagogy emerged from the images that ultimately sought to guarantee peace (as defined by official propaganda). Let me make a final observation that may be pertinent for the analysis of this type of visual collections, both generally and with regard to education. As images with a programmatic purpose, the posters and photographs analyzed here were part of their respective aesthetical and historical contexts. However, the later life of both sets of images adds another layer to their existence as communication tools. Hence, in addition to their emotional bona fide appeal (that is, the viewer believing in what he/she sees), images underwent their own semantic evolution thanks to their material afterlife and interpretative aggregations. The posters, through their inclusion in the nation’s patrimony in a museum, became assets to describe and diagnose Chilean education in the middle of the twentieth century. The photographs in Chile Ayer Hoy too gained other layers of meaning and plausible interpretations over time. Their original intention was to present above all a confusing, dark, and bleak past and to contrast it with an auspicious present and future, although the passage of time – and changing frameworks of

25 Peter and Carol Stearns define emotionology as “the attitudes or standards that a society, or a definable group within a society, maintains toward basic emotions and their appropriate expression; ways that institutions reflect and encourage these attitudes in human conduct, e.g., courtship practices as expressing the valuation of affect in marriage, or personnel workshops as reflecting the valuation of anger in job relationships.” Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (October 1985): 813.

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interpretation – have turned them into a kind of inverse testimony, as Horacio Fernandez has pointed out: “Chile Ayer Hoy is a paradoxical book. A product evidently at the service of the dictatorship and, at the same time, an elliptical memorial to its victims. It means the opposite of what it says, at least in the stubborn photos, which no one can tame.”26 By showing the past, even if it was to condemn it, those photographs ended up maintaining the past’s iconic existence, giving life to what they wanted to declare dead. The expression is not just metaphorical, as one of the people in the images of the past (a missing person) was in fact one of the victims of dictatorial persecution. In summary, analyzing the production and afterlife of images allows us to see them as open signs, allowing a greater variety of interpretations, readings, and meanings than the authors (may have) aspired to. As I have tried to show in this essay, the life of images takes twists and turns, leading them to serve unexpected purposes and reveal unimagined angles.

Bibliography Barr-Melej, Patrick. Reforming Chile: Cultural Politics, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Middle Class. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Berríos, Lorena. “La resistencia de los espejos: fotógrafos en la dictadura y su influencia en la memoria de Chile (1973–1989).” Licentiate thesis, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2007. Chile Ayer Hoy. Santiago: Editora Nacional Gabriela Mistral, 1975. Dussel, Inés. “The Visual Turn in the History of Education: Four Comments for a Historiographical Discussion.” In Rethinking the History of Education: Transnational Perspectives on Its Questions, Methods, and Knowledge, edited by Thomas S. Popkewitz, 29–43. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Dussel, Inés, and Karin Priem. “The Visual in Histories of Education: A Reappraisal.” Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 6 (2017): 641–49. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/ 10.1080/00309230.2017.1392582. Errázuriz, Luis Hernán, and Gonzalo Leiva Quijada. El golpe estético: Dictadura militar en Chile, 1973–1989. Santiago: Ocho Libros Editores, 2012. Fernández, Horacio, ed. Una revisión al fotolibro chileno. Santiago: Fundación Sud Fotográfica, 2018. Gamarnik, Cora. “Fotografía y dictaduras: estrategias comparadas entre Chile, Uruguay y Argentina.” Nuevo Mundo/Mundos Nuevos, Images, mémoires et sons. http://journals. openedition.org/nuevomundo/63127.

26 Fernández, Una revisión al fotolibro chileno, 14–15.

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Jiménez Osorio, Lily. “Una educación al servicio del país: la Exposición Retrospectiva de la Enseñanza de 1941 en contexto.” Colecciones Digitales, Subdirección de Investigación DIBAM, 2017. http://www.museodelaeducacion.cl/648/w3-article-81606.html. Liceo Experimental Manuel de Salas. Programa de Chilenidad. Resumen de las actividades en pro de la chilenidad en las distintas asignaturas. Santiago: Senda, 1941. Muñoz Lira, Dalila. Operaciones visuales de la Editora Nacional Gabriela Mistral: fotografías para legitimar. 1973–1976. Santiago: Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, 2014. Pineau, Pablo. “A modo de introducción. Estética escolar: manifiesto sobre la construcción de un concepto.” In Escolarizar lo sensible: Estudios sobre estética escolar (1870–1945), edited by Pablo Pineau, 21–35. Buenos Aires: Editorial Teseo, 2014. Popkewitz, Thomas S. “Styles of Reason: Historicism, Historicizing, and the History of Education.” In Rethinking the History of Education: Transnational Perspectives on Its Questions, Methods, and Knowledge, edited by Thomas S. Popkewitz, 1–26. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Reddy, William. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. https://doi.org/10.1017/ CBO9780511512001. Silva, Bárbara. “La construcción nacional durante el Frente Popular chileno: entre novedad y continuidad histórica.” Revista Tiempo Histórico 8, no. 14 (January–June 2017): 59–77. Stearns, Peter N., and Carol Z. Stearns. “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards.” American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (October 1985): 813–36. Timmermann, Freddy. El Gran Terror: Miedo, emoción y discurso. Chile, 1973–1980. Santiago: Ediciones Copygraph, 2015. Toro-Blanco, Pablo. “‘Como se quiere a la madre o a la bandera’: Notas sobre nacionalismo, ciudadanía y civilidad en la educación chilena (1910–1945).” In Nacionalismos e identidad nacional en Chile. Siglo XX. Vol. 1, edited by Gabriel Cid and Alejandro San Francisco, 133–58. Santiago: Ediciones Bicentenario, 2010. “Una cruzada de Chilenidad.” Informaciones de Chile. Órgano Oficial de la Dirección General de Informaciones y Extensión Cultural. August 1941.

Juliana Enrico

Chapter 2 Memories of Light in Apparitions of the Disappeared: Impressions on the Latin American Landscape by Visual Artist Gabriel Orge According to some commentators, we live in a time of an excess of images, where everything can and has to be made visible.1 If prior visual regimes worked through censorship or subtraction, digital visual culture operates through hyperabundance or excess. This shift is reconfiguring the relationship between the visible and the invisible, and images lose their quality as records of memory and become ephemeral, disposable goods – as can be seen, for example, in the rapid succession of social media posts.2 How, then, can images still work as carriers of memory in our digital times? How can images of the past be made visible in this ocean of pictures and go against the tide of oblivion and historical amnesia? I want to address these questions through an analysis of the work of the Argentinean visual artist Gabriel Orge, whose interventions in public space bring into the open images of the disappeared and the marginalized in Latin America. He calls these interventions apparitions, playing on and referring to the desaparacidos (disappeared people and bodies) during several South American dictatorships. Through these apparitions, or appearances, in urban or rural landscapes, Orge points to the need to stop and look at images of the disappeared so that they continue to live. His apparitions constitute a public pedagogy that plays with light and pictures to produce new memories. In the first section of this chapter, I will briefly outline the context of the struggles for memory in the Southern Cone as well as some theoretical assumptions

1 Georges Didi-Huberman, Clément Chéroux, and Javier Arnaldo, Cuando las imágenes tocan lo real (Madrid: Círculo de Bellas Artes, 2013). 2 Georges Didi-Huberman, La imagen superviviente: Historia del arte y tiempo de los fantasmas según Aby Warburg (Madrid: Abada Editores, 2009); Joan Fontcuberta, La cámara de Pandora: La fotografí@ después de la fotografí@ (Barcelona: Gustavo Gilli, 2010). Note: The author would like to thank Débora Samanta Nuñez for her collaboration in translating this essay from Spanish into English. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634945-003

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about pictures and visibilities, drawing mostly on the work of French theorist Roland Barthes. In the second and third sections, I will present some examples of the work done by Orge in Argentina and other South American countries and discuss how images can become acts of memory and nurture collective claims for justice.

Images and the Politics of Memory in South America Orge’s work needs to be considered within the broader context of Latin America’s recent historical past. As is well known, several dictatorial regimes seized power in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. In Argentina, where the repression was particularly harsh, the dictatorship carried out a systematic plan of state terrorism through genocide, kidnapping, and torture of thousands of people in clandestine centers of detention; most of the kidnapped never returned and are presumed dead.3 Neither legally dead nor alive, the spectral presence of the disappeared remains a significant figure not only in Argentina but throughout Latin America. Thus, making the disappeared (re-)appear, or at least visible, has been a persistent feature of the politics of memory in post-dictatorial Argentina.4 This was also the aim of one of the most significant artistic interventions during the dictatorship, initiated by three artists who invited people to put up 30,000 silhouettes of bodies in the streets of Buenos Aires as a symbol of the bodies that were still missing.5 During the trials of the perpetrators, still ongoing forty years later, the testimonies started with the slogan memoria, verdad y justicia (memory, truth, and justice), which became central for the emergence of a new human rights consciousness.6 As the military had destroyed most archives, the accounts

3 Pilar Calveiro, Poder y desaparición: Los campos de concentración en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Colihue, 2004). 4 I understand politics of memory as historical and cultural elaborations shared by a political community, as proposed by Elizabeth Jelin, Los trabajos de la memoria (Madrid: Siglo XX1, 2002). 5 Ana Longoni and Gustavo Bruzzone, eds., El siluetazo (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2008). 6 Emilio Crenzel, La historia política del Nunca Más: la memoria de las desapariciones en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Siglo XX1, 2008). The human rights report Nunca Más (Never Again), published by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) in 1986, is a key symbol of the repudiation and condemnation of state terrorism. The 50,000-page report contains the declarations and testimonies of survivors and relatives, as well as the field observations made during the trials in the centers of torture and disappearance.

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of the survivors and of relatives gained prominence; the stories of the children of the disappeared have been particularly poignant, and many of them have become painters, writers, and filmmakers.7 Despite the destruction of the majority of the records of the repression, some images have survived, and their public re-presentation has ignited intense debates about the ethics and limits of representation.8 Clearly, there is no ‘literal’ or ‘incarnated’ representation of what ‘is and is not here.’ What remains perhaps most forcefully alive in collective memory are snapshots of the kidnapped that their relatives had printed in black and white onto banners. These grainy pictures, mostly belonging to the bureaucratic genre of passport or ID photos, have turned into iconic symbols in human rights demonstrations, posters, and booklets. The faces of the disappeared have become a way to signal their singularity and bring back their stories. To understand how photographs of the disappeared work in this particular context, it is relevant to look to the work of the French theorist Roland Barthes. For Barthes, a photograph reveals a trace of the past that makes a particular appearance in the present.9 Photography is about more than just the power of representation, because it imprints an image of time, which in the case of the disappeared has a spectral quality. In fact, for Barthes this spectral quality can

7 Several films of the 1990s portray or recreate these experiences from the perspectives of the children of the disappeared, in the context of the emergence of the H.I.J.O.S. movement (Hijas e Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio; Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence). See Leonor Arfuch, La vida narrada: Memoria, subjetividad y política (Córdoba: Eduvim, 2008); Juliana Enrico, “Lenguajes y memorias de paisajes desiertos: Imágenes de violencias de estado de la Argentina reciente en el filme Las Aguas del Olvido de Jonathan Perel,” in Cine y memoria: Narrativas audiovisuales sobre el pasado, ed. Ximena Triquell and Tamara Liponetzky (Córdoba: Ed. Facultad de Artes UNC, 2018), 65–82. On the contemporary debate about the concept of postmemory in intergenerational life experiences and transmissions, see Marianne Hirsch, La generación de la posmemoria: Escritura y cultura visual después del Holocausto (Madrid: PanCrítica, 2015). 8 Luis Ignacio García and Ana Longoni, “Imágenes invisibles: acerca de las fotos de desaparecidos,” in Instantáneas de la memoria: Fotografía y dictadura en Argentina y América Latina, ed. Jordana Blejmar, Natalia Fortuny, and Luis I. García (Buenos Aires: Libraria, 2013), 25–43. 9 See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). The appearance of the photographic device constitutes, in Barthes’ phrase, a “disturbance to civilization” in the genealogy of what could be called a history of looking. The image of the subject – shuttered – means a dis-location or dissociation from the “conscience of identity” before the experience of recognition/un-recognition of our image. And it also references our face, since the photographic technique artificially crops something about the truth of the body, which continues its course of life naturally, confirming “the un-repeatable” of a more complex temporal and subjective experience. See Barthes, Camera Lucida, 5.

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be claimed for any photograph as it should avoid “becoming Death,”10 and where the “looking” turns it into that which is living11 displaying and updating its multiplicity and its value to the world. This duality is always present: affirming the reality of a specific past, photography re-inscribes it in other times and contexts. As regards the relationship between photography and memory, Barthes argues that the effect that a photograph produces on the viewer is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to affirm that what one sees “has indeed existed.”12 Consequently, the photograph has an unappealable testimonial and documentary value; that is to say, from a phenomenological point of view, the photograph’s power of authentication exceeds its power of representation.13 The greatest power of the photograph (its “noeme”) resides in its “evidential” force, which bears “not on the object but on time.”14 This is very visible in the snapshots of the disappeared: they bring back a time in which the disappeared were fully present, alive, and their grainy appearance marks that gap between that time and our time. This evidential nature belongs to the field of the photographic studium, that is to say, to a “describable” and “transmissible” order in the context of a certain cultural field. Yet it is also important to search for the punctum of photography: punctum refers to that which stings, which stabs you in the heart, thus opening up a sensitive field connected to sensations and emotions.15 Through the punctum of pictures, the senses and the possible significances are spread through stories, and social and subjective memories are loaded with lived experiences that re-create the past. As will be seen in the next section, Orge’s interventions play with the dead/ alive duality of photographs and appeal both to what is transmissible (studium)

10 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 14. 11 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 79. The author adds that “the photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funeral immobility, at the very heart of the moving world. . . The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object. . .” (Barthes, Camera Lucida, 5–6). In sum, life and death. 12 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 82. 13 Derrida’s work is also important to understand the debates on representation. In his essay Cómo no hablar (How to avoid speaking), he claims that language needs to account for what is not and could never be translated into any materiality: an impossible gap and trace, which exceeds the forms of thought and language. See Jacques Derrida, Cómo no hablar y otros textos, trans. Patricio Peñalver (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1989). 14 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 89. 15 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 29. See also Julia Kristeva et al., (El) trabajo de la metáfora: Identificación/Interpretación (Barcelona: Gedisa, 1994).

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as the referential quality of the faces of the disappeared and to a particular punctum through their projection onto urban and rural landscapes, turning them into collective actions in the present that “stab you in the heart.” His apparitions aim to generate awareness and to build a cultural and collective memory that confronts the cruelty of the kidnapping and disappearance of people, at a moment in time when other horrors are taking place.

The Disappeared on the Path to Apparition: The Historical and Memorial Intervention of Photography Drawing on these theoretical reflections, this chapter analyzes a series of interventions entitled Apareciendo (2014, in progress) by the visual artist Gabriel Orge.16 The aim of the series is to produce an act of collective political memory through performative interventions in both natural and urban Latin American landscapes, with the aim of ‘reviving’ the dead and ‘materializing’ the disappeared.17 Orge began his series of photographs with those of the disappeared and then moved on to include other victims of exclusion and violence, such as indigenous communities from Southern and Northern Argentina, victims of femicide, and victims of police violence, projecting their portraits in public space with the aid of digital technologies. Orge says that the title of the series, Apareciendo/Appearing, “implies a verb form that suggests an action that is permanently developing and that proposes an aesthetic event, a poetics of memory, as a gesture of resistance against oblivion.”18 16 Gabriel Orge (Bell Ville, Córdoba, 1967) is a photographer, visual artist, and teacher who lives in Córdoba, Argentina. Together with Rodrigo Fierro, Agustina Triquell, and Álvaro Figueroa, he has coordinated the photographic experimentation workshop “Manifesto Alegría,” which was initiated during the post-2001 Argentinian crisis. Exploring themes around the instant and duration, Orge’s photography manifests a slow and stopped temporality, and it is necessary to look thoroughly into the depths and outlines of the exposed elements. 17 Orge’s interventions have been shown in several museums, for example at the Museo Provincial de Fotografia Palacio Dionisi in Córdoba in March 2018. They have been referred to as among the most important works of post-memorial art in South America. See Laura Fandiño, “Estética de la espectralidad y memoria: Sobre la serie Apareciendo, de Gabriel Orge,” in Espectralidad y Memoria en la Obra de Gabriel Orge, Cuadernos del ICPA-GZ N° 1, ed. Adriana Almada (Asunción: Instituto Cultural Paraguayo-Alemán – Goethe-Zentrum, 2016), 6–22. 18 Gabriel Orge, “Coincidiendo,” in Almada, Espectralidad y memoria en la obra de Gabriel Orge, 5. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are the author’s.

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For Orge, the intervention is both ephemeral, having immediate effects on the spectators throughout the process of projection, and durable – the intervention is photographed, which makes it possible to keep a record of it. At the same time, the works of art are able to circulate immediately on social media as well as through news reports and various graphic media. They thus become spreadable, recordable, and traceable both on physical and digital supports. It is also important to highlight that the projections are viewed by diverse audiences, so every appropriation, register, comment, or profanation of Orge’s work is traversed by a logic of multiple authorship, displaced and ruptured as regards copyright, forms of authorship, and quotations from the artistic, literary, and academic communities.19 The work is open-ended, making it dialogical, intertextual, trans-textual, and open to re-interventions in public space, and it is anchored in the present, engaging with urgent discussions about serious political issues and addressing long-standing historical conflicts that cut across languages, imaginaries, peoples, cultures, histories, and memories.

Making Julio Reappear I will begin by briefly analyzing Orge’s projection of a photograph of Jorge Julio López – taken by the photographer Helen Zout20 – onto a building in the city of Córdoba.21 Jorge Julio López is a construction worker who disappeared during

19 See “Siete nuevas muestras fotográficas en el Museo Dionisi,” Prensa Gobierno de Córdoba, http://prensa.cba.gov.ar/cultura-y-espectaculos/siete-nuevas-muestras-fotograficas-en-el-museodionisi/. 20 Helen Zout was born in Carcarañá, Santa Fe (1957) and currently lives and works in La Plata (Buenos Aires). She is a Swiss-Argentinian photographer, researcher, and teacher. In 1989 she received a scholarship from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Argentina and, in 2002, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Her photographs “Desapariciones” can be seen on her website: http://www.helenzout.com.ar/desapariciones-3.html. 21 See Verónica Molas, “Premian al Cordobés Gabriel Orge por una impactante obra sobre Julio López,” La Voz del Interior, May 30, 2015, https://vos.lavoz.com.ar/artes/premian-alcordobes-gabriel-orge-por-una-impactante-obra-sobre-julio-lopez. The first projection of the series took place on September 18, 2014, on the eighth anniversary of his second disappearance in 2006. An important technical-poetic detail of the urban intervention is that the projection started in daylight, gradually “revealing” the image and making it clearer as it got darker. Then, Orge makes a loop with the two iconic photographs by Helen Zout, which merge, appearing and disappearing. Another important detail is that Orge, together with the Manifiesto Alegría, registers the reactions of passersby, trying to raise awareness about the disappearance of Julio López among the population. Some recognize López, but others mistake the image for the

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the dictatorship of 1976–1979, then was released and sadly disappeared again in 2006, under a democratic government, because he was a key witness in the trial of a high-ranking military officer accused of human rights violations.22 It is important to mention that López not only gave an oral testimony but also made drawings and sketches, retelling his story by visual and graphic means.23 In dialogue with Zout’s series, Orge works with these emblematic portraits that have acquired great historical and political value. The beautiful and ghostly photographs by Zout were widely circulated in the social media.24 Against this background, Orge displaces and re-creates the authorship by appropriating a cultural impression and turning it into an homage and gesture of remembering disappearances and political violence in democracy. As a consequence, his artistic intervention also acquires a formative, educational, and exemplary purpose, as it takes an ethically important element of local culture and makes it ‘travel’ through public spaces and circulate as a collective image. Jorge Julio López represents this impossible exception of being “doubly disappeared” and is today considered the main political disappeared of Argentina’s recent democracy. For this reason, his image has become iconic for the Argentinean people. After having digitized two photographs by Zout, Orge projected them from a great distance onto a building in the neighborhood of Cofico, in the city of Córdoba, with the purpose of raising historical awareness and inviting the community to keep memory alive. (Figs. 2.1 and 2.2).

figure of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, president of Argentina from 1868–1874, or a “big brother” that controls the city. 22 See Natalia Fortuny, “Dos veces Julio: Sobre algunas memorias del pasado reciente en la Argentina,” Kamchatka: Revista de análisis cultural 6 (2015): 741–59; Natalia García, “El caso ‘Vigil’: Territorio de la historia, las memorias y la justicia,” in Gregorio Weinberg: Escritos en su honor, ed. Gabriela Ossenbach Sauter et. al. (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2017), 99–132. 23 In an interview published by the newspaper Página/12 one month after the disappearance of López, Helen Zout said: “I realized that each victim channeled their suffering in different ways and that is what I wanted to capture in my work. Some of them could not express it through words, others chose to write, some transmitted their pain through their eyes, their silences. . . Julio chose to draw and write.” “Las huellas que la dictadura dejó en López,” October 15, 2006, https://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-74508-2006-10-15.html,. 24 One of the two iconic portraits of Jorge Julio López by Zout (2000) can be seen in the series “Huellas de las desapariciones durante la última dictadura military argentina” at http://www. helenzout.com.ar/desapariciones-4.html. Zout donated this image to the Museo de la Memoria de Rosario (Santa Fe, Argentina).

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Figs. 2.1 and 2.2: Urban projections carried out in Córdoba by Gabriel Orge after the second disappearance of Jorge Julio López (using photographs by Helen Zout).

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Fig. 2.3: Gabriel Orge, Making López Appear in the Ctalamochita River, based on a work by Helen Zout, from the series Apareciendo (2014). Digital photograph, direct shot, Giclée printing on barite paper, 80 × 120 cm.

Then he carried out another projection in his hometown, on the Ctalamochita River, near Bell Ville, with all the emotional load that carries this type of sensitive spatiality and recollection (Fig. 2.3). Through this real-time projection onto a landscape of his childhood, making the image of Julio reappear, through light, among the living natural environment of the river and the trees, Orge’s projection is a material register of this apparition, constructing an ephemeral intervention on a starry night, blending moonlight and artificial light, but is then made durable through photography.25 The way that Orge framed the portrait, projecting it onto the trees and onto the landscape of the Ctalamochita River, has a unique visual and sensory impact (punctum). We see López right at the moment when he is about to drown, his face halfway submerged between air and water, and his mouth below the water. It looks like he is on the verge of drowning or rather, being drowned. The image

25 The photograph of the projection received the Primer Premio Adquisición del Salón Nacional de las Artes in 2015.

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that reappears through Orge’s work thus is the image that shows López, minutes before losing consciousness, followed by the death of his perception of meaning and time – that is, at the very instant when his life remains suspended, put on hold, and undefinable: neither dead nor alive. In the face of the undecidable status of ‘disappeared,’ Orge looks at López “appearing” and the verb itself, as does the image, suspends time in a continuum that survives the sinister temporality of life-death.26 The image of López – projected onto the foliage and reflected in the river – guards and awaits his return, ‘alive.’ Orge carries out at least five types of visual and memorial interventions on a historically valuable and iconic source image: 1) He digitizes and thus re-writes the iconic photograph by Helen Zout. 2) He projects the photograph onto the natural and urban landscape, while filming and photographing the process. 3) He stages the projection with a participating public that intervenes in the (co-) authorship and reception of the photographic projection in ephemeral, ritual, and culturally inflected ways. This also includes capturing the projection with a camera, with the goal to build an archive and a sense of temporal duration as an element of cultural and political value. 4) His work is then subject to montages in museums and other exhibition spaces. 5) Finally, the open and massive circulation of all these instances of production and archiving, including video-graphic and textual post-productions, on social media and other supports, opens up the interventions to new discursivities and extensive social debates that inscribe the process and results of Apareciendo in very different narrative spaces. It should be added that there exists at least a sixth type of artistic intervention, which consists of the pedagogical staging of the entire process in the annual “Manifiesto Alegría” seminar and workshop directed by Orge, where photographers, artists, scientists, social researchers, and the interested public engage in further elaboration and collective analysis. For example, Apareciendo was one of the themes and experimental works discussed in the workshop on “Photography, Memory and Territory,” coordinated by Gabriel Orge and Clara Johnston between September and October 2017. In addition, Orge regularly organizes guided tours of his museum exhibitions.

26 Jacques Derrida, Dar la muerte (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2006).

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Apareciendo in Other Localities: Images Clamoring for Justice Over the years, Apareciendo has changed its themes and locations. Orge has also displayed portraits of those disappeared in other Latin-American dictatorships, for example the disappeared of the Atacama desert in Chile or those who disappeared during the dictatorship in Paraguay, searching different archives to find the source materials for his images. Moments of “synchro-destiny” took place in Atacama and in Paraguay.27 During the night trips that were organized for the intervention, there was a full moon in the Atacama Desert. The intensity of the moonlight in an absolutely desolate and inhospitable landscape made it difficult to project and photograph the projection in real time. The memory evoked by the projected photograph was, as it were, intervened by the radiant moonlight (see Fig. 2.4). This brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s observations on light, revelation, and the profane illumination that passes through the body, the moment at which “light puts at risk the presence of the spirit”28 in the construction of thought images, where search and hope could be identified with a kind of ‘awakening’ of historical conscience. In this intervention, Orge engages in a dialogue with the beautiful documentary film Nostalgia de la luz by Patricio Guzmán. 29 According to Orge, it was

27 Orge calls these events “coincidences in space and time.” In the introduction to Cuadernos del ICPA–GZ N° 1 (which opens with an image of his intervention in the Atacama Desert in Chile), he writes: “This coincidence in space and time could be a fortituous event produced by chance and circumstances, or it could be the consequence of a strong insistence on what we believe is just and necessary.” Orge, “Coincidiendo,” 5. The notebook ends with another statement by Orge on the back cover: “. . . apparitions start in a tenuous manner. The darker it gets, the more visible they become.” 28 Walter Benjamin, Sobre el amor y temas afines: Un problema europeo. Fragmentos y esquemas, trans. María Belforte (Buenos Aires: Gorla, 2015), 60. In the afterword, translator María Belforte writes: “La luz, la luna, la esperanza y una historia de amor en tres etapas” (The light, the moon, hope and a love story in three stages.). 29 Guzmán’s films generally deal with the dictatorship of Pinochet, which made him go into exile. In Guzmán’s words, Nostalgia de la luz focuses on contrasts: “In Chile, three thousand meters above sea, the astronomers from different parts of the world get together at the Atacama Desert to observe the stars. Here, the transparence of the sky allows the edges of the universe to be seen. Below, the dryness of the ground preserves the human rests intact forever: mummies, explorers, miners, natives and bones of the political prisoners of the dictatorship. While the astronomers seek extra-terrestrial life, a group of women remove stones in search of their loved ones.” In another interview, conducted before the economic failure of the movie (although it was an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival in 2010 and won a number of national and international awards, such as Best European Documentary – Prix Arte), Guzmán

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Fig. 2.4: Gabriel Orge, Apareciendo a los prisioneros de Calama (Making the Calama prisoners appear), Atacama Desert, Chile, 2017, from the series Apareciendo.

difficult to trace the photograph of the Atacama disappeared, which he finally found at the Espacio de la Memoria in Santiago de Chile.30 It shows the prisoners in jail before being executed and buried clandestinely in this desert. While

said: “I got to think that the film had no value because it had not been approved by any channel, none! . . . I nearly abandoned it. The problem is that the film has a metaphysical side, a mystical or spiritual side, an astronomic side, an ethnographic and a political side. . . how to explain that human bones are similar to certain steroids? How to explain that the calcium in our bones is the same as the calcium in certain steroids? How to explain that the calcium in our bones is the same as the calcium in the stars? How to explain that the newly born stars are formed with our atoms after we are dead? How to explain that Chile is the main astronomic center in the world and that 60 percent of the murders during the dictatorship have not been resolved? How is it possible that Chilean astronomers look at the stars that are millions of light years away in the past but children cannot read in school-texts what happened in Chile 30 years ago? How to explain the innumerable buried bodies by the military that were unburied and thrown into the sea? How to explain that the work a woman does with her hands in the desert is similar to that done by an astronomer?” See the trailer of “Nostalgia de la luz” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= jg1yxJuBhLY. 30 He made statements to this effect in the workshop on “Photography, Memory and Territory” and in interviews conducted by the author during the writing of this text.

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conducting archival research and interviews to produce this work, Orge also met Violeta Berríos, one of the protagonists of Guzmán’s documentary and the partner of Mario Argüelles Toro who was among those executed during the so-called Caravan of Death (see Fig. 2.5). Violeta was and still is one of the key figures in the efforts to find the human bones along hundreds of kilometers of desert. For over forty years, she has walked tirelessly, searching for bones in the dead landscape, with the cosmic memory of the sky above and the almost invisible details of the unfathomable landscape of the arid and silent Atacama below her feet.

Fig. 2.5: Part of the process, Apareciendo, Museo Palacio Dionisi, 2018, photograph © Juliana Enrico. The panel shows Violeta Berríos, the historical photographs of the prisoners of Calama, and the projection in the Atacama Desert.

In September 2016, Orge traveled to Paraguay to attend the photography festival El ojo salvaje (The savage eye) at the Museo del Barro and hold a workshop called “The Poetics of Memory.” At the time the bones of two disappeared during the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner were identified,31 and their names were made public for the first time: Miguel Ángel Soler, former General Secretary of the Communist

31 The identification of the remains was done by the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (EAAF; Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team) in Paraguay.

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Party of Paraguay,32 and socialist activist Rafaella Giuliana Filipazzi, known as Giuliana.33 A historical milestone, this identification caused a great commotion – so much so that Orge and his workshop assistants, with the support of the GoetheInstitut, decided to project the images of Rafaella Filipazzi and Miguel Ángel Soler onto two buildings in the city center of Asunción (see Figs. 2.6 and 2.7).34 Here the “synchro-destiny” – the idea that coincidences may not be so coincidental, after all – combines the desire for justice (in the face of the indescribable horror produced by the dictatorships of our Latin-American South) with the production of new politics of memory. In the meeting between the photograph and what it shows, and the viewer who aims to decipher the image or is emotionally absorbed by it, a crystal of memory is formed. The last work I want to analyze in this chapter is the projection of a picture of Elena Quinteros in Montevideo (Fig. 2.8). Quinteros was a teacher and a political activist disappeared during the last Uruguayan dictatorship. Elena was taken from her home in 1976, a building that was then stolen by military members and is still considered army property. Orge’s performative action consisted in projecting the image of Elena, ghostly and unredeemed, upon the façade of her house, “with the military members inside it.”35 As Orge himself noted in a TV interview, 32 Soler was kidnapped in 1975 in Asunción. According to different sources, he was tortured and sawed apart alive while Stroessner himself is said to have listened to his screams through the telephone (Orge himself provided this information at the seminars). Comrades of the Communist Party of Paraguay wrote in his memory, after his bones were identified, “Certain men never die. . . they are planted.” A poem dedicated to Miguel Ángel Soler reads: “Dying is not the problem, but living with certain wisdom; sentinel of slogans, sentry of a new era. Cell for punishment, two meters by two meters and a half. Such a small place, with a red sun in the center!” See http://www.resumenlatinoamericano.org/2016/08/31/paraguay-un-grito-a-lamemoria-hoy-recuerdan-a-desaparecidos/. 33 Rafaella Giuliana Filipazzi, an Italian-Argentinian resident of Buenos Aires, was kidnapped in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1977, together with her partner, and then moved to Paraguay. For more information, see https://www.gub.uy/secretaria-derechos-humanos-pasado-reciente/co municacion/publicaciones/ficha-perteneciente-filipazzi-rossini-rafaela-giuliana-0. 34 Gabriel Orge mentioned that there were photographs of Miguel Ángel available but not of Rafaella. It was only after he received the photograph of a photograph of Rafaella via WhatsApp from one of her relatives, that he was able to project the two photographs together. The projection went viral on social media, and a large number of people gathered at the public space. An excellent post-production of the video recording (of the “intervention and collective register”) by the Instituto Cultural Paraguayo-Alemán – Goethe-Zentrum (ICPA-GZ) can be seen on YouTube at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjCjC1v3HRg&feature=youtu.be&t=16. See also the post-production publication Espectralidad y Memoria en la Obra de Gabriel Orge, edited by Adriana Almada. 35 Intervention carried out by Orge in June 2018, at the Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo in Montevideo. See “Desaparecidos,” official account of the Relatives of Mothers and Detained disappeared in Uruguay, the report by La Diaria, https://twitter.com/famidesa/status/

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Fig. 2.6: Projection of the portraits of Miguel Ángel Soler and Rafaella Filipazzi, Asunción, Paraguay, September 2016.

“The action went viral on the Internet and was taken up by other media, instigating a discussion that continues to circulate through Uruguayan society.”36

1009883375417507840. On the Twitter account by the plastic artist and former political detainee Juan Ángel Urruzola, the image is followed by a text about the reparation of historical memory; see https://twitter.com/jurruzola/status/1009549750398484480. 36 See the interview with Gabriel Orge by the Uruguayan TV channel Portal TNU at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAhVukwDI1U. When asked why he projected Elena as part of his series Apareciendo, he answered: “. . . because she was an emblematic case, because she was a teacher, an educator, a woman tortured and disappeared. . . because the armed forces violated an international pact when they got into the Venezuelan Embassy and took her. . . and

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Fig. 2.7: Part of the process, Apareciendo, Museo Palacio Dionisi, 2018. Silvia Soler looking at the image of her father, Miguel Ángel Soler, projected onto the building. Photograph © Juliana Enrico.

Via a public art intervention and viral image, Elena thus returned home. “In your eyes, Elena, are the eyes of the others,” sings the Uruguayan murga band Falta y Resto.37 And the troubadour Daniel Viglietti dedicated his poem and song “Tiza y bastón” (Chalk and cane) to Elena and her mother Tota Quinteros, both “mothers of Latin America,” “founders of memory,” teachers that “dreamt of changing life, starting with the children.”38 “Today a new school is

because my mother is a teacher.” He continued: “The project consists in making appear what has been disappeared by violent action. . . in activating memory to reflect and activate the common history we have in Latin America to avoid its repetition.” This is another instance of the synchro-destiny uniting several dimensions of memory, inscribing identities and collective paths. 37 See “Alerta,” a beautiful and popular claim song by the murga Falta y Respeto, paying homage to Elena, “the Uruguayan teacher, mother of so many children, the one who disappeared. . .” “We will find you alive.” The song is available on YouTube at https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=-RPx-T036sc. 38 The song, played on a cuatro venezolano, a traditional Venezuelan musical instrument, tells Elena’s and Tota’s story: Elena tried to avoid kidnapping and torture through a stratagem: offering to meet military officers near the Venezuelan Embassy to give them a contact, she managed to jump over the embassy’s wall and take refuge at the embassy. “Venezuelan asylum, Bolivar opened his arms,” sings Viglietti. The military then entered the embassy by force and took Elena, violating international military treaties. Elena’s mother Tota searched for her

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Fig. 2.8: Gabriel Orge, Apareciendo a Elena Quinteros (Making Elena Quinteros appear). Urban intervention carried out by Gabriel Orge in Montevideo (June 2018) on the façade of Elena Quinteros’ confiscated house.

born, children name it after her. . .”, “the chalk of Miss Elena sings, the children raise their hands and put away the sorrow”/“Be careful with these mothers, they are from Latin America,” Viglietti sings, reaching out across Latin American borders.

Concluding Remarks Orge’s interventions claim that in the history of our shared life as a community, it becomes necessary to look, simply and intensely, without pause, until tears stream down our faces because the looking hurts. Through his interventions, he wants to put a stop to the rapid consumption of images and force the viewer to slow down and pay attention to particular pictures that denote absences and silences.

daughter until she “died without finding her.” The song is available on YouTube at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvFJx1Qa8n4.

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Orge makes use of the various technological possibilities offered by digital photography. Nowadays the editing – or post-production, cropping, mixing, and (re-)montage – of digital images and their multimedia distribution, typical of the massive flow of information and images, makes possible their hyperreproduction, alteration, and re-appropriation on the Internet and social networks.39 As mentioned in the introduction, these possibilities might work as technologies of amnesia and of forgetting. Yet Orge puts them to work in a different way, where the projection and reproduction of the images (as light beams and not on paper support) in a multiplicity of scenarios and on different surfaces and textures make the images visible again, giving them their full weight. Orge’s interventions can also be seen in light of Aby Warburg’s notion of “survival” (Nachleben), or the “surviving image,” underlining the importance of rigorously selecting those moments that need to be remembered as a cultural reservoir of humanity.40 Images have a cultural and memorial dimension that has to be carefully accounted for in the ways in which they are circulated and exhibited. For Orge, the surviving images (such as the one of the Chilean prisoners) have to be made visible again through their projection onto particular landscapes that add new meanings to these pictures. In his carefully chosen scenarios, people’s faces and bodies return to where they were stolen from, where they were effaced. Therefore “reapparitions” – as his projections make them reappear, make them alive again. Orge insists on performances that constitute collective acts of looking, both at the moment of their live projection and as part of museum exhibits or on social media. His apparitions intend to create awareness and nurture a cultural and collective memory that confronts the cruelty of violent regimes. Orge’s visual interventions aim to supersede the notion of spectacle; they aim to become performative acts of justice – poetic or visual justice – but also justice in that they point to the open wounds of disappearances and confiscations. It is a very painful history, yet there is a sense in which looking together hurts less; communal acts of memory bring about a certain justice that can have calming effects. Orge’s memories made of light allow us to look until the light on the horizon changes, and it is as if all the lost souls could return to their homes, here, in their lands, our lands.

39 Joan Fontcuberta, La furia de las imágenes: Notas sobre la postfotografía (Barcelona: Ed. Galaxia Gutenberg, 2016). 40 Didi-Huberman, La imagen superviviente.

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Bibliography Almada, Adriana, ed. Espectralidad y memoria en la obra de Gabriel Orge: Cuadernos del ICPA-GZ N° 1. Asunción, Paraguay: Instituto Cultural Paraguayo-Alemán Goethe Zentrum, 2016. Arfuch, Leonor. La vida narrada: Memoria, subjetividad y política. Córdoba: Eduvim, 2018. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. Sobre el amor y temas afines: Un problema europeo. Translated by María Belforte. Buenos Aires: Ed. Gorla, 2015. Crenzel, Emilio. La historia política del Nunca Más: la memoria de las desapariciones en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. Cómo no hablar y otros textos. Translated by Patricio Peñalver. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1989. Derrida, Jacques. Dar la muerte. Buenos Aires: Ed. Paidós, 2006. Didi-Huberman, Georges. La imagen superviviente: Historia del arte y tiempo de los fantasmas según Aby Warburg. Madrid: Abada Editores, 2009. Didi-Huberman, Georges, Clément Chéroux, and Javier Arnaldo. Cuando las imágenes tocan lo real. Madrid: Ed. Círculo de Bellas Artes, 2013. Enrico, Juliana. “Lenguajes y memorias de paisajes desiertos: Imágenes de violencias de estado de la Argentina reciente en el filme Las Aguas del Olvido de Jonathan Perel.” In Cine y memoria: Narrativas audiovisuales sobre el pasado, edited by Ximena Triquell and Tamara Liponetzky, 65–82. Córdoba: Ed. Faculty of Arts-Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, 2018. Fandiño, Laura. “Estética de la espectralidad y memoria: Sobre la serie Apareciendo, de Gabriel Orge.” In Almada, Espectralidad y memoria en la obra de Gabriel Orge, 6–22. Fontcuberta, Joan. La cámara de Pandora: La fotografí@ después de la fotografí@. Barcelona: Gustavo Gilli, 2010. Fontcuberta, Joan. La furia de las imágenes: Notas sobre la postfotografía. Barcelona: Ed. Galaxia Gutenberg, 2016. Fortuny, Natalia. “Dos veces Julio: Sobre algunas memorias fotográficas del pasado reciente en la Argentina.” Kamchatka: Revista de análisis cultural 6 (2015): 741–59. DOI: https:// ojs.uv.es/index.php/kamchatka/article/view/7199. García, Luis Ignacio, and Ana Longoni. “Imágenes invisibles: acerca de las fotos de desaparecidos.” In Instantáneas de la memoria: Fotografía y dictadura en Argentina y América Latina, edited by Jordana Blejmar, Natalia Fortuny, and Luis I. García, 25–43. Buenos Aires: Libraria, 2013. García, Natalia. “El caso ‘Vigil’: Territorio de la historia, las memorias y la justicia.” In Gregorio Weinberg: Escritos en su honor, edited by Gabriela Ossenbach Sauter et. al., 99–132. Buenos Aires: Ed. CLACSO – Red Weinberg, 2017. Hirsch, Marianne. La generación de la posmemoria: Escritura y cultura visual después del Holocausto. Madrid: PanCrítica, 2015. Jelin, Elizabeth. Los trabajos de la memoria. Madrid: Ed. Siglo XXI, 2002. Kristeva, Julia, Octave Mannoni, Edmond Ortigues, Monique Schneider, Geneviève Haag. (El) trabajo de la metáfora: Identificación/Interpretación. Barcelona: Ed. Gedisa, 1994. Orge, Gabriel. “Coincidiendo.” In Almada, Espectralidad y memoria en la obra de Gabriel Orge, 5.

Eulàlia Collelldemont, Núria Padrós, and Raquel Cercós

Chapter 3 Images That Portray, Challenge, and Refuse: Visual Content and Education in Francoist Spain, 1939–1975 The political turbulences that affected Spain throughout the twentieth century were marked by a discursive radicalism in education. Different ideologies brought forth different educational agendas that influenced not only how the population should be educated but also how it should live. These agendas were expressed through movements, speeches, and propaganda, among other educational practices. They were so incessant that the recent history of Spain can be read through an analysis of its educational institutions. The historical sources help us understand the logic behind these discourses and the differences between the ideologies at play: democratic, authoritarian, and anarchist. They can help us to see, for example, how social inequalities affected access to schools because of the overrepresentation, in newspapers, newsreels, or professional journals, of elitist schools, while the common school and the schools in the slums were little or not at all represented. In this essay, we present our research on the question of how social inequalities were fought against or upheld by different educational policies in twentiethcentury Spain. As sources, we have used both documentaries produced by the Francoist regime and documentaries produced against the Francoist regime, contrasting their representations of schools with historical information based on written documents or oral history. By comparing the filmic representations and the actual policies, we can see the gap between reality and fiction. Using visual sources, such as documentaries, and analyzing one specific dimension, such as the visual representation of social inequalities, provides an ideal opportunity to explore the differences not only between reality and fiction but also among the different official (government) proposals on education. Working with a set of audiovisual materials makes it possible to reveal the trends (in the representation of the ideal

Note: The research for this essay was funded by ARAEF (Análisis de las representaciones audiovisuales de la educación en documentales y noticiarios durante el franquismo), Programa Estatal de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad, en el marco del Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica y Técnica y de Innovación 2013–2016 (Ref. EDU2017-89646-R, AEI/FEDER, UE). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634945-004

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versus the reality) and patterns (of exclusionary policies based on class, gender, and culture) in the history of Spanish education in the twentieth century. For example, the documentaries made during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship (1923–1931)1 argued that the opening of a few privately funded schools was enough to educate the population – as can be seen in the films Construcción del Parque Escolar y visita del General Primo de Rivera a la Ciudad de Carlet (Construction of the school park and the visit of General Primo de Rivera to the city of Carlet, 1926),2 Inauguración del grupo escolar Maria Quintana en Mequinenza (Inauguration of the Maria Quintana de Mequinenza Sister Schools, 1927),3 and Benedicció del Grup Escolar i Bandera del sometent (Benediction of the School and the Flag of Sometent, 1928),4 or in films showing visions of a city’s child care system, such as Valencia, Protectora de la Infancia (Valencia, protectress of childhood, 1928)5 and Expedición a Guinea (Expedition to Guinea, 1930).6 But it was not until the Second Republic (1931–1936) that actual policies to promote access to education were developed. The films made during Rivera’s dictatorship contrast starkly with the documentaries made during the Second Republic, where the focus was on didactic innovation and the need to improve the lives of children – as can be seen in Canet de Mar (produced between 1931 and 1936),7 Colonia Escolar Vilamar, Calafell estiu del 1932 (Vilamar School Camp, Calafell summer

1 For a list of the documentaries produced in Spain between 1914 and 1940, see RADAE, “Documento en proceso: Listado de films sobre temática educativa del período comprendido entre 1914 y 1940,” https://www.uvic.cat/sites/default/files/documento-en-proceso-registro-films. pdf. Please note: Some documentaries can be viewed online, and we have listed the URL where this is the case; others can only be viewed in situ at the film archives that house a copy. 2 s/d, Construcción del Parque Escolar y visita del General Primo de Rivera a la Ciudad de Carlet (Valencia, 1926). Documentary retrieved from the Filmoteca Valenciana at https://vimeo.com/ 92720054. 3 Antonio de Pádua Tramullas, Inauguración del grupo escolar Maria Quintana en Mequinenza (Zaragoza: Casa Tramullas, 1927). Documentary viewed at the Filmoteca Española. “Grup escolar” refers to state schools with separate buildings for girls and boys. 4 s/d, Benedicció del Grup Escolar i Bandera del sometent (Barcelona, 1928). Documentary viewed at the Filmoteca de Catalunya. 5 Maximiliano Thous, Valencia, Protectora de la Infancia (Valencia: Producción Artística Cinematográfica Española PACE, 1928). Documentary retrieved from the Filmoteca de Valencia at https://vimeo.com/110196495. 6 Expedición a Guinea (1930). Documentary retrieved from the Filmoteca Española at https:// www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/archivo-historico/expedicion-guinea-espanola/2917617/. 7 Canet de Mar (Cultura Films – Noticiario Canet de Mar, 1931–1936). Documentary viewed at the Filmoteca de Catalunya.

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1932; 1932),8 and Segell Pro-Infància (Children’s seal, 1934).9 However, as different studies have shown, the problem of mass schooling could not yet be solved because of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).10 Notwithstanding the difficulties imposed by the conflict, the CENU (Consell de l’Escola Nova Unificada, Unified Council for the New School) decree was enacted by the republican government in Catalonia and schooling was made accessible to a larger population through the creation of new schools. This effort is documented in the 1938 film Spanish ABC11 and was also a subject of the war propaganda documentaries España al día – Nouvelles d’Espagne: Education. Barcelone (Spain at day – News from Spain: Education. Barcelona),12 El Frente y la Retaguardia (The front and the rear-guard),13 Un periódico mural (A mural newspaper),14 and Noticiario de Laya Films. N. 3 (Newsreels Laya Films, no. 3),15 all from 1937. Later on, during Franco’s regime,16 access to schools decreased again, in spite of the enactment of the 1945 Primary Education Act that made schooling mandatory for all.17 The statistics and studies on actual schooling indicate worrying numbers regarding non-schooling and illiteracy, mainly in rural areas

8 Xavier Güell, Colònia Escolar Vilamar: Calafell estiu del 1932 (1932). Documentary viewed at the Filmoteca de Catalunya. 9 Segell Pro-infància (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1934). Documentary viewed at the Filmoteca de Catalunya. See also Avelina Miquel Lara, Bernat Sureda Garcia, and Francisca Comas Rubí, “Social and Educational Modernisation in Spain: The Work of Segell Pro Infància in Catalonia (1933–1938),” Paedagogica Historica 54, no. 4 (2018): 410–32. 10 Enriqueta Fontquerni and Mariona Ribalta, L’ensenyament a Catalunya durant la guerra civil: el CENU (Barcelona: Barcanova, 1982); Juan Manuel Fernández-Soria, “Workers’ Institutes: Envisioned Community, Living Community,” Paedagogica Historica 51, no. 4 (2015): 418–33; Antonio Viñao, “Politics, Education and Pedagogy: Ruptures, Continuities and Discontinuities (Spain 1936–1939),” Paedagogica Historica 51, no. 4 (2015): 405–17. 11 Sidney Cole and Thorold Dickinson, Spanish ABC (Progressive Film Institute, 1938). 12 s/d, España al día – Nouvelles d’Espagne: Education. Barcelone (Barcelona: Film Popular – Laya Films, 1937), documentary viewed at the Filmoteca Española. 13 Joaquín Giner, El Frente y la Retaguardia (Barcelona: SIE, 1937), documentary viewed at the Filmoteca Española. 14 Manuel Ordóñez, Un periódico mural (Barcelona: Ediciones Antifascistas Films, 1937), documentary retrieved from the Filmoteca Española at https://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/ar chivo-historico/periodico-mural/2833334/. 15 Noticiario de Laya Films. N.3 (Laya Films, 1937), documentary viewed at the Filmoteca Española. 16 For a registry of the different documentaries produced during the Dictatorship, see RADAE, “Registro de los reportajes y noticias en los que aparece representada la educación (1940–1975),” https://www.uvic.cat/sites/default/files/registro_repnot.pdf. 17 Ley de 17 de julio de 1945 sobre Educación Primaria, https://www.boe.es/datos/pdfs/BOE// 1945/199/A00385-00416.pdf.

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and in urban areas created by internal migration.18 It is no accident that the documentaries of this period once again insist, as they did under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, on the visibility of elite schools. They mainly projected images of the inauguration of such facilities and of ecclesiastical authorities strolling through classrooms full of religious panels and symbols but without children – as we can see in some of the official documentaries made by the producer Noticiarios y Documentales,19 such as NO-DO 364B (1949),20 NO-DO 459B (1951),21 and NO-DO 553B (1953).22 In fact, it was not until 1970 that, with the enactment of the General Education Law, child schooling was significantly expanded. However, the official documentaries regarding the General Education Law reinforced the message that the state and the population were both responsible for meeting the challenge of schooling all children (see, for example, NO-DO 1414A23 and NO-DO 1414B24 from 1970). This discourse, as we shall see below, was countered by underground documentaries – for example, España 68 (Spain 68, 1968) by Helena

18 Antonio Viñao, “La educación en el franquismo (1936–1975),” Educar em Revista 51 (January–March 2014): 19–35, see esp. 32. 19 On the history of NO-DO productions, see Vicente Sánchez-Biosca and Rafael R. Tranche, NO-DO: El tiempo y la memoria (Madrid: Cátedra/Filmoteca Española, 2018). It needs to be pointed out that, from 1943, when NO-DO was established, until 1976, every cinema in Spain was required to screen the NO-DO documentaries. 20 NO-DO, no. 364B: Valencia. El ministro de educación nacional en tierras del Turia. Inauguración del Grupo Escolar Teodoro Llorente y del Campo de la Ciudad Universitaria (December 26, 1949). Documentary retrieved from the Filmoteca Española-RTVE at http://www.rtve.es/filmo teca/no-do/not-364/1468088/. 21 NO-DO, no. 459B: Alcalá de Henares. La nueva residencia del colegio municipal Nuestra Señora de la Paloma. Joaquin Ruiz Gimenez Cortes, ministro de educación preside el acto inaugural. Exhibición gimnástica de los niños (October 22, 1951). Documentary retrieved from the Filmoteca Española-RTVE at http://www.rtve.es/filmoteca/no-do/not-459/1469492/. 22 NO-DO, no. 553B: Franco en Burgos. El generalísimo inaugura la nueva fábrica de papelmoneda. Un nuevo Grupo Escuela que albergará a un millar de alumnos (August 10, 1953). Documentary retrieved from the Filmoteca Española-RTVE at http://www.rtve.es/filmoteca/no-do /not-553/1487703/. 23 NO-DO no. 1414A: Reportajes. Año internacional de educación. España presenta a las Cortes un nuevo pla. “El Libro Blanco” (February 9, 1970). Documentary retrieved from the Filmoteca Española-RTVE at http://www.rtve.es/filmoteca/no-do/not-1414/1486753/. 24 NO-DO no. 1414B: Informaciones y reportajes: el reto de nuestro tiempo. Franco inaugura una exposición de enseñanza. Aspectos del “Libro Blanco” (February 9, 1970). Documentary retrieved from the Filmoteca Española-RTVE at http://www.rtve.es/filmoteca/no-do/not-1414/ 1486749/.

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Lumbreras25 – and independent documentaries, such as Escola d’Estiu (1967), Escola i societat (School and society, 1970)26 and Educar (To educate, 1970)27 by Antoni Cuadrench, an amateur filmmaker who recorded the school realities that never appeared on the NO-DOs.28 After a “quasi-archaeological” research29 into a set of school images of the poverty-stricken areas of Barcelona, we began by viewing the documentaries about this subject (focusing particularly on the films produced between the 1950s and the 1970s), paying special attention to the brief moments showing the school areas. In these fleeting images, which sometimes merely serve as background scenery, we can see the vestiges of “invisible cities” like the cities of poverty that emerged and grew exponentially during the Francoist regime. They belong to a reality that stubbornly refused to disappear, despite the many attempts by local and state governments to erase it. Giving voice to the people who live(d) in these silenced neighborhoods is what stimulated our studies, which is why we agree with Italo Calvino: It is pointless to decide whether Zenobia will be classified among the happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities in these two species, but rather in another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.30

Ultimately, it is in the process of seeing the documentaries as a set (that is, screening and analyzing them as a group) that we can observe evocative details of both the neglect of the government and the resistance of the communities. Once this work was finished, we decided to put different “research boxes” on a map of Barcelona (see Fig. 3.1), in order to understand the geography of the invisible neighborhoods of Barcelona during Francoism.

25 Helena Lumbreras, España 68: El hoy es malo, pero el mañana es mío (Terzo Canale-Partido Comunista Italiano PCI, 1968). Documentary viewed at the Filmoteca de Catalunya. 26 Antoni Cuadrench, Escola i societat: L’Escola d’Estiu de Rosa Sensat (Barcelona, Associació de Mestres Rosa Sensat, 1970). Documentary retrieved from the Filmoteca de Catalunya at https://vimeo.com/31012533. Cuadrench made several films about the Teacher’s School Rosa Sensat, emphasizing the shortcomings of both the school system and its facilities. 27 Antoni Cuadrench, Educar (Barcelona, Associació de Mestres Rosa Sensat, 1970). Documentary viewed at the Filmoteca de Catalunya. 28 Antoni Cuadrench’s documentaries about education – Escola d’Estiu (1967), Educar (1970), and Escola i societat (1970) – were the most widely broadcast among professionals. The films were made in opposition to the Francoist films. See also interview with Josep Casanovas, March 9, 2019, https://www.uvic.cat/sites/default/files/cuadrench5_final2.mp3. 29 The phrase was coined by Ian Grosvenor, in a conversation that took place on September 3, 2019, underlining the process of revealing the different layers of history through the old images. 30 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (London: Vintage Books, 1997), 30.

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Fig. 3.1: Map of Barcelona with research boxes.

NO-DOs are symbolized by black boxes, showing the housing estates and the construction of new schools; the grey boxes represent slum schools that can be seen in clandestine documentaries (that is, documentaries made despite the official censorship and state repression). The red box (see Fig. 3.1, top left) contained information about all the secondary sources that we used to gain a better understanding of the specific histories of the institutions and neighborhoods. As you can see in Figs. 3.2 and 3.3, each black box had a screenshot of the school on top and contained documents such as old maps, newspaper clippings, photographs, documents issued by the schools, as well as written testimonies and autobiographical writings by people living in these neighborhoods. This kind of visual documentation has allowed us to make the invisible visible – at least retrospectively, revealing several instances of a past expunged from the official reports; a past that hides the negligence of the government’s educational system. As we can see in the clandestine documentaries mentioned earlier, this negligence was fought by the children, families, and teachers with the intention of making schools a common and shared space. During the process of analyzing the documentaries there also emerged different patterns of action from both authorities and citizens. In the following, we will present these patterns,

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Figs. 3.2 and 3.3: Research boxes.

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using case studies of particular neighborhoods, which can be seen as representative of other neighborhoods, too.

Pattern 1 – The Propaganda of Progress vs. the Reality of Improvisation NO-DO no. 1337A, Nuevos polígonos de viviendas en Barcelona: En Bellvitge, Besós y Montbau (New housing estates in Barcelona: in Bellvitge, Besós, and Montbau, 1968), shows the houses that were built during the final stages of Francoism, presenting them as a great investment for the benefit of the population, when, in fact, the Bellvitge flats were built in a flood zone, La Marina.31 When we compare this information with various city and street maps, it becomes obvious that the real motivation behind the construction of the housing estates was their proximity to several factories and centers of economic production.32 The voice-over in the newsreel specifies the number of houses built (around 2,000) and explains that, once finished, the project would house around 70,000 people in an area of 70 hectares – a number that “coincidentally” matched the number of people living in the shanty neighborhoods.33 Finally, the newsreel also refers to the services provided to the neighborhood, such as playgrounds and a “magnificent nursery,” but in reality only one kindergarten was built for the entire population. As a matter of fact, it was only through the effort of the community that proper school areas could be

31 NO-DO no. 1337A: Nuevos polígonos de viviendas en Barcelona: En Bellvitge, Besós y Montbau (August 19, 1968). Documentary retrieved from the Filmoteca Española-RTVE at http://www. rtve.es/filmoteca/no-do/not-1337/1486391/. 32 Historian Martí Marín has pointed out the paradox that existed in the migratory phenomenon from the rural to the urban areas of the country during Francoism: newspapers, for example, called for raids in the new settlements – especially shantytowns – seeing them as the main cause of social and hygienic problems, when it was actually the state’s economic policies that encouraged the creation of the shantytowns. See Martí Marín, “La immigració a Barcelona, de la postguerra al desarrollo: Suburbialització, dictadura i conflicte,” in Barcelona malgrat el franquisme: La SEAT, la ciutat i la represa sense democràcia, ed. Sebastiàn Balfour (Barcelona: MUHBA, 2012), 115. 33 Rogelio Duocastella, comp., Los suburbios 1957: compendio de las ponencias y coloquios desarrollados durante la “Semana,” seguido de gráficos y estadísticas, quoted in Mercè Tatjer, “El barraquisme a Barcelona al segle XX,” in Barraquisme, la ciutat (im)possible: els barris de Can Valero, el Carmel i la Perona a la Barcelona del segle XX, ed. Xavi Camino et al. (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Cultura i Mitjans de Comunicació, 2012), 57–58.

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provided to the residents. This precarious situation was analyzed by the geographer Miguel Solana: . . . the Ministry of Education set in motion the Urgent Schooling Plan for L’Hospitalet, which a year later allowed the inauguration of the National Europa and Bernat Metge schools, and, in 1974, of the Pare Enric d’Ossó nursery school. However, the shortage of schools continued, so in the following month new provisional classrooms were opened in attics . . . . About halfway through the decade (1975) La Marina was opened, the fourth public school in Bellvitge, along with the full operation of the Bellvitge Hospital. The following decade saw the consolidation of the facilities, after long-standing demands from the neighbors, but also as a result of community activism.34

As we have seen, the documentaries showed only a part of the reality, misrepresenting the process and the reasons for the construction of the houses and schools. Nevertheless, the very fact that these schools were shown in the film was highly relevant, especially if we think of the lack of representation of the schools in poor areas during the first period of Francoism (1939–1956). The images showed an incipient concern for all children –which was linked to the slogan “Auxilio Social protege a la infancia” (Auxilio Social protects childhood).35

Pattern 2 – Denial: The Selective Invisibility of Landscapes While the Montjuic mountain was repeatedly shown in the NO-DOs made during Francoism, areas such as Can Tunis were never shown. The exhibition El barraquisme a la Barcelona del segle XX (Shantyism in twentieth-century Barcelona),

34 Miguel Solana, “Ciutat i vulnerabilitat social: diagnosi i propostes d’intervenció en els barris de Bellvitge/Gornal” (working paper, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2019), 106–107. 35 Established in 1936, the organization Auxilio Social (Social Assistance) became part of the Ministry of the Interior on May 17, 1940. Its task was to provide assistance to children and mothers in terms of home, food, and vital education; schools were not part of its responsibility. See Laura Sánchez Blanco, “Auxilio Social y la educación de los pobres: del franquismo a la democracia,” Foro de Educación 10 (2008): 133–66; Ángela Cenarro, “El Auxilio Social de Falange (1936–1940): entre la guerra total y el ‘Nuevo Estado’ franquista,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 91, nos. 1–2 (2014): 43–59. Various studies have remarked on the extreme authoritarianism and despotism prevalent in the orphanages; see also the film trilogy by Montse Armengou and Ricard Belis, Trilogia sobre la infantesa com a víctima del Franquisme, consisting of Els internats de la por (2015), Els nens perduts del franquisme (2002), and Torneu-me el fill (2012), retrieved from https://www.ccma.cat/tv3/alacarta/trilogia-sobre-la-infantesa-com-a-victima-del-franquisme /els-internats-de-la-por/coleccio/2190/5510334/.

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created in 2011 by the Museu d’Historia de Barcelona (MUHBA), displayed the following information: The immigration of the 1950s and the 1960s turned Montjuic into the most populated shantytown of Barcelona. By 1957, over 30,000 people lived in 6,090 shanties. On the western slope of the mountain, the districts of Tres Pins, Can Valero, les Banderes, Damunt la Fossa, and other smaller concentrations formed one continuous core. On the northern slope of the town were the villages of Poblesec and Maricel and, on the sea side, stood Can Tunis and El Morrot.36

Needless to say, overcrowding and the lack of public services were notorious.37 Completely neglected by the authorities, the neighborhoods of the mountain constantly saw their image tied to social decline and insecurity, leading in turn to social prejudice towards them. An example of this prejudice can be found in an autobiographical article written by the teacher Basilio González. Looking back at his career, he explained that, upon his arrival in Montjuic in 1966, he was surprised by the children’s intellectual capabilities, since it was commonly assumed that they were not capable of studying. He also emphasized that these children were not only denied access to schools that took care of their basic education but that they, even if they were allowed to go to school, would suffer immediate marginalization. “There are groups that are not part of society; what is more, they move away from it in giant strides,” he wrote, noting that the situation needed to be remedied.38 This comment is evocative of Escola i societat, the 1970 Cuadrench documentary that proposes education as a means to fight or prevent social exclusion, as is apparent in its opening monologue: “Looking at these teachers, we cannot help but wonder if pedagogical or social efforts to improve education are enough for the worthy development of the person. It is necessary to counteract the often negative constraints and incongruities that the child faces during his [sic] growth and during his [sic] study years.”39

36 Alonso Carnicer, Sara Grimal, and Mercè Tatjer, Guia d’història urbana del MUHBA: Barraques/BCN (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2011), http://www.bcn.cat/museuhistoriaciu tat/docs/BARRAQUES_b.pdf. 37 Alonso Carnicer and Sara Grimal, Barraques, la ciutat oblidada (Barcelona: CCMA, 2009), https://www.ccma.cat/tv3/alacarta/programa/titol-video/video/2333059/. 38 Basilio González, “Escola de Secundària Xavó-Xaví Can Tunis (SO de Barcelona),” Perspectiva Escolar 349 (2010): 31–36, quotation on 31. 39 Cuadrench, Escola i societat, https://vimeo.com/31012533.

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Pattern 3 – Destruction and Invasion as Cleansing Options The existence of the Somorrostro neighborhood was another notorious case of denial of the Franco regime. This denial was based on the premise that that which is not shown does not exist. Originally a fishing neighborhood built in the mid-nineteenth century, Somorrostro was populated during the post-war period, including by gypsies that would later become known thanks to the flamenco dancer Carmen Amaya.40 The area had no special provisions or basic infrastructure: in the documentary Pecats capitals: Gula (Mortal sins: gluttony), the director Joan Gallifa pointed out that “la Carmen and la Pilar would be terrified. It was a huge neighborhood, without lighting or sewers, and with a neverending queue in front of the only source of drinking water.”41 In the early 1950s, a monk from the order of San Juan Bosco, appointed to take care of the children’s population, complained about the following: “In Somorrostro there are MANY children. And there was NOT A SINGLE SCHOOL. What else should be said? These abandoned, hungry, naked children, with no trace of morals, are the prime source of crime, the best seeds for prisons, brothels, hospitals.”42 This information was confirmed by a study carried out by the Jesuit sociologist Rogelio Duocastella, head of a Catholic study center, during “La semana del Suburbio” (suburbia week) in 1957. According to a map presented in this study of the area known as ‘Sector V’ and corresponding to Somorrostro, 73 percent of the children living there had no schooling (see Fig. 3.4).43 According to our research, one of the nearest schools was the Grupo Escolar Lepanto, which opened near Barcelona’s seafront promenade in 1959. Although it was not very far from the neighborhood, its inhabitants could not attend due to a systemic culture of rejection and criminalization of poverty. The fact that none of the children of Somorrostro were registered in the census made their

40 Carmen Amaya (1913–1963), one of the most famous flamenco dancers who also acted in several films, was born in Somorrostro. 41 Joan Gallifa, Pecats capitals: Gula (Barcelona: CCMA, 2006). Joan Gallifa is a director and writer best known for his TV series Els diaris de Pascal (2008), Històries de Catalunya (2003) and 300 (2014). “La Carmen” and “La Pilar” refer to two Catholic activists working in Somorrostro in the 1960s. 42 [Parroquia San Félix Africano,] La asistencia social en el Somorrostro: Reflejo de problemas y soluciones a través de la Catequesis “San Juan Bosco” en el ejercicio 1950–1951 (Barcelona, 1951), emphasis in the original, https://www.slideshare.net/EnricHMarch/obra-de-asistenciasocial-parroquia-san-flix-africano-somorrostro-1951. 43 Duocastella, Los suburbios 1957, 102.

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Fig. 3.4: Map of “Suburbs: housings, schools and health centers” in Duocastella, Los suburbios 1957, 102.

schooling even more difficult, adding a bureaucratic hurdle to the cultural and social barriers already in place. One wonders how the people who lived near the neighborhood responded to this reality, but we must not forget that this was a non-visible issue in public debate. According to Enrich March, the settlement was hidden from sight by the buildings and the tracks of the MZA railroad, which, along with industrial facilities such as the gas factories of La Catalana and Lebon, the mosaic, alcohol, and lubricants factories, and L’Hospital d’Infecciosos, created a barrier between the shantytown and any curious eyes.44 Even the official city maps at the time represented Somorrostro as a beach (see Fig. 3.5):

44 Enrich March, ed., Somorrostro: Mirades Literàries (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2018), 10.

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Fig. 3.5: Servicio del Plano de la Ciudad (city map of Barcelona), 50 x 67 cm, scale: 1:20,000 (Barcelona: ICGC, RM.6570, 1947).

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This invisibility is also recalled by Ruís de Larios in a La Vanguardia article published on July, 6, 1935: No guide of the city speaks about the picturesque Somorrostro. In the Barcelonian nomenclature, Somorrostro is merely mentioned as a beach. . . . It is curious that hundreds of citizens do not officially exist. . . . The neighborhood of Somorrostro – just a few steps away from the Citadel and a few meters from Barcelona – has a purely phantasmagorical existence.45

Starting in the 1960s, the situation in the Somorrostro shanties became public knowledge through journalistic and photographic reports, with visitors interested in improving the lives of the locals. But the government would not pay attention until June 25, 1966, when all houses were destroyed (because of the Naval Week, which featured a visit by Franco), and the inhabitants were relocated to Badalona, or more specifically the neighborhood of Sant Roc. According to some sources, this process had begun even earlier: The construction of the Passeig Marítim (1956–1972), as well as several emergency situations including floods (1963) and landslides, forced the Somorrostro locals to move quickly towards other temporary spaces and shantytowns. Likewise, the opening of the García Morato Avenue after 1959 – today known as the Drassanes Avenue – left many without housing, which forced them to urgently relocate to the Estadio de Montjuic, where they remained for many years, in some cases until 1967.46

Pattern 4 – Shaping the Landscape According to Social Class Between 1957 and 1975, Franco’s regime promoted the construction of new housing. The housing estates were designed for families where the men worked either in factories or in the construction industry while the women took care of all domestic tasks. The look of these neigborhoods was a reflection of this homogeneity: interminable successions of functionally organized and aesthetically standardized apartment blocks that were thought of as dormitories for the working classes. Actually, living in the southeast of Besòs was not voluntary but mandatory – the newcomer families were placed there without having a say in the matter. If they had had a choice, they would hardly have selected a place so far from their

45 Ruís de Larios, “Una playa barcelonesa: las barracas del Somorrostro,” La Vanguardia, July, 6, 1935, 7. 46 Camino et al., “Vida i quotidianitat als barris de barraques,” 86.

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jobs and their favorite leisure areas.47 It is fundamental that we consider the construction of the housing estates as state propaganda designed to showcase the Franco regime’s achievements in providing housing and quality schooling to the population.48 In reality, as was pointed out by Antonio Viñao, it served to conceal the government’s endemic inability to fulfil its school construction plans.49 In 1967, around 80 percent of the child population of the Besòs neighborhood were affected by a lack of schools.50 The adjacent shantytown of La Bota had one school, one kindergarten, one medical center, and a gypsy crafts collective since 1962, thanks to the efforts of Father Francesc Botey, who was not only one of the driving forces of the district’s development but also taught the pedagogy of Paulo Freire in his classes.51 The inconsistencies of the system cannot be ignored, however. They are also illustrated by some archival photographs we have collected. In one of them – as can also be seen on the map in Fig. 3.6 – you can see that the shacks of Camp de la Bota and the Besòs Housing Estate were located next to each other, but that did not mean that the inhabitants of the shacks were relocated to the new facilities.52

Pattern 5 – Fighting the Hegemony of Political, Economic, and Civil Power On May 27, 1952, Barcelona hosted the 35th International Eucharistic Congress, with most of the events taking place on the new Pius XII Square on Generalísimo Franco Avenue (today Diagonal Avenue). Prior to this event, all shacks in

47 Miguel Guerra, “Una mirada reflexiva al desarrollo urbano del polígono Sudoeste del Besòs,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Architecture and Urbanism 5 (2016): 122–35. 48 Josep Casanovas and Eulàlia Collelldemont, “El Ministro de Educación en la escuela: El noticiario franquista NO-DO y las construcciones escolares en España,” Revista Linhas XXI, 47 (2020): 45–72. 49 Eulàlia Collelldemont, “Antonio Viñao Frago: El plan quinquenal de construcciones escolares de 1957–1961,” Conceptual Challenges: Propaganda, Ideologies and Education (blog), UVic-VCC, September 7, 2018, https://mon.uvic.cat/araef-conceptual-challenges/2018/09/07/ antonio-vinao-frago-el-plan-quinquenal-de-construcciones-escolares-de-1957-1961/. 50 Rosa Domenech, Vivencias sociopolíticas y trabajo social: Mi granito de arena (Barcelona: Impuls a l’Acció Social, 2013). 51 Interview with Josep Maria Monferrer, Presencia, September 21, 2012. 52 Museu d’història de la immigració de Catalunya (MhiC), “Ruta Urbana: Immigració i creixement de la ciutat (1952–1975),” 4, http://www.mhic.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/RutaUrbana.pdf.

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Fig. 3.6: “Plànol de Barcelona i situació del barri al Sud-Oest del riu Besòs,” 2013, in Museu d’història de la immigració de Catalunya, “Ruta Urbana,” 4.

the area had to be eliminated in order to restore the positive image of the area. The same year, the City Council of Barcelona ordered the construction of 900 “ultra-cheap” housing estates in the neighborhood of Verdum, under the sponsorship of the civil government.53 The group of 41 state housing blocks contained 65 apartments at 19.58 square meters, 763 apartments at 20.28 square meters, 65 apartments at 29.26 square meters, and 8 apartments at 35 to 50 square meters.54 The architect was the same who designed the Burgos penitentiary, hence the fact that their peculiar interior is reminiscent of corridors connecting prison cells. The houses were also popularly known as “casitas de papel” (paper houses).55 Two common areas, consisting of a closed-in porch with four

53 The houses were called “las casas del Gobernador” in reference to the public support for their construction. 54 Ricard Fernández, “Els moviments socials a Nou Barris,” Arxiu històric del Barri de Verdum Blog, September 21, 2013, http://arxiuhistoric.blogspot.com/2013/10/els-moviments-socialsnou-barris.html. 55 See Antonio Alcantra, “[Documental] ‘Las Casitas de papel: La història del barri de Verdun – 9 Barris,” Educacio transformadoro, September 9, 2014, https://educaciotransformadora.com/ 2014/09/09/documental-las-casitas-de-papel-la-historia-del-barri-de-verdun-9-barris/.

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large water pools (two for soaking, two for washing), were used by the tenants to do their laundry. In the mid-1960s, Verdum was a neighborhood of 50,000 residents, or approx. 10,000 families. There were neither appropriate policies nor a budget to attend to this population. Many of the residents were immigrants from Andalusia and Galicia, and most of them worked in the industrial and construction fields. Their economic power was very poor, and the children registered very low levels of schooling, with the job market starting to recruit at age twelve. Images and testimonies also revealed the precariousness of the educational infrastructure56 – even with a pedagogical program specifically designed for these circumstances, such as the one promoted by Maria Antonia Casals in the Ton i Guida School, which opened in 1962 in the shacks made available by Father Juncà.57 This center stood as a testament to how the neighbors’ efforts managed to alleviate the government’s efforts (or lack thereof), as can also be seen in this blog post: In 1962, the Ton i Guida School opened, a center whose construction was possible thanks to the efforts of parents and sensitive people, and characterized by a pedagogical system that suppressed uniforms, was open to all social classes, and promoted the Catalan language and culture. Also during this decade, the former students of a religious school opened the Los Enanitos nursery, located in the Favència Way, between Almagro and Artesania streets, which was at the center of a prominent local struggle against its disappearance. In 1970, the Mio Cid School was inaugurated, in Casals i Cuberó Street; in 1972 the construction of a professional training school began; and in 1975 a group of people from the neighborhood unveiled the Freire School for Adults, located inside the facilities of the San Sebastián Parish.58

The photographs and oral testimonies spoke of the hastiness and precariousness of the situation. Ginés Cuesta, a photographer, stated that poverty must not be degraded and that it can always be wrapped in dignity and even happiness, noting that he was a street child simply because there was no place for him at home: “I do not remember our home being pretty. . . . I never had a space at home. . . . I could never do anything at home.”59

56 See Àngel Alsina and Joan Soler, eds., Maria Antònia Canals: El compromís amb la renovació de l’escola (Vic: EUMO, 2005). 57 Valentí Teixidor, La casa de xocolata: Records d’un alumne de Ton i Guida 1962–1973 (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2012). 58 Fernández, “Els moviments socials a Nou Barris.”. 59 La Ciudad Imaginaria, “Ginés Cuesta,” Vimeo video, 14:10, http://www.laciudadimagina ria.com/entrevistas/5_gines-cuesta.

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Pattern 6 – Incipient Community Alliances to Fight the Powers That Be The Tramuntana School, located in the Carmel district of Barcelona, is another example of the citizens’ fight for education. The school was built in response to demonstrations and demands by the “Grupo de Enseñanza” (teaching group) of the Asociación de Vecinos del Carmelo.60 The arguments for the demonstrations were that, despite constant protests, there was no public school in the Carmel district, as illustrated by the following map from the Association of Neighbors of Carmel’s 1973 report regarding the neighborhood’s school situation and petition to the city council for the immediate construction of national schools. Faced with this desperate situation, a group of teachers, along with a number of residents, in 1968 decided to develop a school project – a pluralistic, secular, mixed school with a clear objective: to provide the children of the shantytown with (educational) opportunities. We can see as much in the following excerpt from a school document – a manifesto asking for the collaboration and understanding of the community concerning the school situation – that can be found at the Contemporary Municipal Archive of Barcelona (AMCB): The document you have in your hands is a very brief summary of what the Tramuntana School is. A school that belongs to those who fight, so that the problem of children without schooling is solved. Our hope is that some of these children are relieved from this injustice. . . . The population of this neighborhood is overwhelmingly composed of immigrants. A large part of these families live in shanties (Francisco Alegre, Los Cañones, etc.) and their economic options are minimal.61

During the first years the school was funded by both the families themselves and external sponsors, such as Càritas. This scarcely covered the salaries of the teachers, however. In the early 1970s, the Franco government decided to subsidize the first two years of primary education, but the parents, teachers, and administrators of the Tramuntana School decided, collectively, that all parents would pay an identical fee in order to cover the costs of those courses without state financing. At the same time, Franco’s regime advertised the construction of schools in another district of Barcelona called Nou Barris. As we can see in NO-DO 1363B

60 “Informe de la Asociación de Vecinos del Carmelo sobre la situación escolar del barrio y petición al Ayuntamiento para la inmediata construcción de colegios nacionales,” L’Arxiu Municipal Contemporani de Barcelona (AMCB), Box K140. 61 Documents and records regarding the Tramuntana School are available at L’Arxiu Municipal Contemporani de Barcelona, Box K140.

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from 1969, these schools were built in a hurry, and the aesthetics of schools such as the Calderón de la Barca School and the Elisenda of Montcada School were directly reminiscent of factories.62 Meanwhile, in another neighborhood of the Torre Baró district, there still was no school, which is why in 1967 the Falangist Chancellor and president of the Municipal Board of Education, Montserrat Tey, opted for an interim solution and bought twelve streetcars from Barcelona Trams. These appear in Helena Lumbreras’ previously mentioned documentary España 68, which portrays the system’s failure adequately to provide for the population.63 Eventually, the new Font dels Eucaliptus School facility was inaugurated in 1971, signaling the end of the use of streetcars as school premises.

Final Thoughts on Working with Research Boxes Based on our work of tracing the vestiges of schooling in the poor neighborhoods of Barcelona, we would like to argue that audio-visual sources, even the official ones that wished to silence or throw a veil over urban landscapes, can be a portal to the past of these invisible neighborhoods. The images as well as the voices provide clues to and make visible lives that often go undocumented in other sources. As an example, the surprising image of the streetcars used as school premises captured in España 68 marked the beginning of our inquiry into the history of the schools in poor neighborhoods – a history that is not usually to be found in academic courses and textbooks about the history of education in Spain. For us, this was such a significant detail that it allowed us to add further depth to the history told in texts and to understand, from the point of view of the people who lived in the neigborhood, the lack of attention to child poverty evident at the time. While there certainly exists a social movement that upholds the memory of poverty in Spain, as we can see from the cited documentaries and references, there is still a lack of research on this subject in the field of history of education in Spain.

62 NO-DO no. 1363B: Nuevos grupos escolares en Barcelona: Autoservicio en las escuelas públicas (February 17, 1969). Documentary retrieved from the Filmoteca Española-RTVE at http:// www.rtve.es/filmoteca/no-do/not-1363/1487036/. 63 The story of the trams can be found in “Els tramvies-escola de Torre Baró,” Blog de l’Arxiu Històric de Roquete-Nou Barris, August 20, 2012, http://arxiuhistoric.blogspot.com/2012/08/ els-tramvies-escola-de-torre-baro.html. Recent news regarding the subject can be found in “Foto-efemèride: 50 anys dels ‘Escuelones’ de Torre Baró,” NouBarris.Net (blog), February 12, 2017, http://www.noubarris.net/web40/?p=68970.

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In the past, the uncritical treatment accorded to the shacks and school spaces in the newsreels was an example of how this impoverished existence was tolerated and/or denied representation in official propaganda. But today, the critical analysis of the NO-DOs can provide insights into the government’s actions. We can trace the government’s actions as well as inaction when it came to schooling for all children. For example, their images of the school facilities in the neighborhoods of Bellvitge, Besòs, and Montbau, which were presented as proof of the government’s policies, today can be seen as evidence of the government’s neglicence. The voice-over of the documentary emphasizes the construction of the schools. When compared with other documents and pictures, however, it becomes evident that these schools were actually shoddily built buildings. What we can see is the result of a long history of inattention and neglect. Due to their improvised nature, the buildings created new problems. Precisely, what emerged from this research was not the success but the broken promise of the provision of services. It is from the examples analyzed – the suburbs of Bellvitge, Besós, Montjuïc, Somorrostro, Camp de la Bota, Verdum, and Carmel – that we were able to organize all sources in order to rewrite the narrative. Combining different digitized sources enabled us to collect and compare evidence and thus reconstruct a more complete and complex history of children’s education. The multiplicity of sources – visual, oral, documentary, and memorial – allowed us to understand some of the official mechanisms of cleansing and sanitizing during and after the Franco regime, which were largely based on the denial of unsuccessful projects and efforts. After all, the concerns about how Spain made the transition to a democratic state between 1975 and 1982, based on the slogan of “forget the past and start as if from zero,” have again moved to the center of political debates. The polemic has re-emerged on the news today to evoke the times of upheaval, as a rebuke to more radical ideological discourses. Certainly, the de-contextualization of a single image enables its manipulation and possible hijacking of our memory. In both research and teaching, the mass digitization of images can facilitate this process. But it can also enable us to contextualize images with greater ease and give us an opportunity to create different series of images according to chronology, authorship, subject matter, etc. In fact, we want to argue that putting these reproduced images back into their context is what ultimately enables us to establish a dialogue with and through them.

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Bibliography Films Armengou, Montse, and Ricard Belis. Trilogia sobre la infantesa com a víctima del Franquisme: Els internats de la por (2015), Els nens perduts del franquisme (2002), and Torneu-me el fill (2012). https://www.ccma.cat/tv3/alacarta/trilogia-sobre-la-infantesa-com-a-victimadel-franquisme/els-internats-de-la-por/coleccio/2190/5510334/ Benedicció del Grup Escolar i Bandera del Sometent. Barcelona, 1928. Filmoteca de Catalunya. Canet de Mar. Cultura Films – Noticiario Canet de Mar, 1931–1936. Filmoteca de Catalunya. Carnicer, Alonso, and Sara Grimal. Barraques, la ciutat oblidada. Barcelona: CCMA, 2009. https://www.ccma.cat/tv3/alacarta/programa/titol-video/video/2333059/. Cole, Sidney, and Thorold Dickinson. Spanish ABC. Progressive Film Institute, 1938. Construcción del Parque Escolar y visita del General Primo de Rivera a la Ciudad de Carlet. Valencia, 1926. Filmoteca Valenciana. https://vimeo.com/92720054. Cuadrench, Antoni. Educar. Barcelona: Associació de Mestres Rosa Sensat, 1970. Filmoteca de Catalunya. Cuadrench, Antoni. Escola d’Estiu. Barcelona: Associació de Mestres Rosa Sensat, 1967. Filmoteca de Catalunya. Cuadrench, Antoni. Escola i societat: L’Escola d’estiu de Rosa Sensat. Barcelona: Associació de Mestres Rosa Sensat, 1970. Filmoteca de Catalunya. https://vimeo.com/31012533. España al día – Nouvelles d’Espagne: Education. Barcelone. Barcelona: Film Popular – Laya Films, 1937. Filmoteca Española. Expedición a Guinea. 1930. Filmoteca Española. https://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/archivohistorico/expedicion-guinea-espanola/2917617/. Gallifa, Joan. Pecats capitals: Gula. Barcelona: CCMA, 2006. Giner, Joaquín. El Frente y la retaguardia. Barcelona: SIE, 1937. Filmoteca Española. Güell, Xavier. Colònia Escolar Vilamar. Calafell estiu del 1932. 1932. Filmoteca de Catalunya. Lumbreras, Helena. España 68: El hoy es malo, pero el mañana es mío. Terzo Canale-Partido Comunista Italiano PCI, 1968. Filmoteca de Catalunya. NO-DO no. 364B: Valencia. El ministro de educación nacional en tierras del Turia. Inauguración del Grupo Escolar Teodoro Llorente y del Campo de la Ciudad Universitaria (December 26, 1949). http://www.rtve.es/filmoteca/no-do/not-364/1468088/. NO-DO no. 459B: Alcalá de Henares. La nueva residencia del colegio municipal Nuestra Señora de la Paloma. Joaquin Ruiz Gimenez Cortes, ministro de educación preside el acto inaugural. Exhibición gimnástica de los niños (October 22, 1951). http://www.rtve.es/fil moteca/no-do/not-459/1469492/. NO-DO no. 553B: Franco en Burgos. El generalísimo inaugura la nueva fábrica de papelmoneda. Un nuevo Grupo Escuela que albergará a un millar de alumnos (August 10, 1953). http://www.rtve.es/filmoteca/no-do/not-553/1487703/. NO-DO no. 1337A: Nuevos polígonos de viviendas en Barcelona. En Bellvitge, Besós y Montbau (August 19, 1968). http://www.rtve.es/filmoteca/no-do/not-1337/1486391/. NO-DO no. 1363B: Nuevos grupos escolares en Barcelona. Autoservicio en las escuelas públicas (February 17, 1969). http://www.rtve.es/filmoteca/no-do/not-1363/1487036/.

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NO-DO no. 1414A: Reportajes. Año internacional de educación. España presenta a las Cortes un nuevo pla. “El Libro Blanco” (February 9, 1970). http://www.rtve.es/filmoteca/no-do/not1414/1486753/. NO-DO no. 1414B: Informaciones y reportajes: el reto de nuestro tiempo. Franco inaugura una exposición de enseñanza. Aspectos del “Libro Blanco” (February 9, 1970). http://www.rtve.es/filmoteca/no-do/not-1414/1486749/. Noticiario de Laya Films. N. 3. Laya Films, 1937. Filmoteca Española. Ordóñez, Manuel. Un periódico mural. Barcelona: Ediciones Antifascistas Films, 1937. Filmoteca Española. https://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/archivo-historico/periodicomural/2833334/. Segell Pro-infància. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1934. Filmoteca de Catalunya. Thous, Maximiliano. Valencia, Protectora de la Infancia. Valencia: Producción Artística Cinematográfica Española PACE, 1928. Filmoteca de Valencia. https://vimeo.com/110196495. Tramullas, Antonio de Pádua. Inauguración del grupo escolar Maria Quintana en Mequinenza. Zaragoza: Casa Tramullas, 1927. Filmoteca Española.

Archival Sources School documents (miscellaneous), Box K140. L’Arxiu Municipal Contemporani de Barcelona.

Primary Sources Ley 14/1970, de 4 de agosto, General de Educación y Financiamiento de la Reforma Educativa. https://www.boe.es/boe/dias/1970/08/06/pdfs/A12525-12546.pdf. Ley de 17 de julio de 1945 sobre Educación Primaria. https://www.boe.es/datos/pdfs/BOE// 1945/199/A00385-00416.pdf.

Secondary Sources Alcantra, Antonio. “[Documental] ‘Las Casitas de papel: La història del barri de Verdun – 9 Barris.” Educacio transformadoro, September 9, 2014. https://educaciotransformadora. com/2014/09/09/documental-las-casitas-de-papel-la-historia-del-barri-de-verdun-9barris/. Alsina, Àngel, and Joan Soler, eds. Maria Antònia Canals: El compromís amb la renovació de l’escola. Vic: EUMO, 2005. Blanco, Laura Sánchez. “Auxilio Social y la educación de los pobres: del franquismo a la democracia.” Foro de Educación 10 (2008): 133–66. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver. London: Vintage Books, 1997. Camino, Xavi, Òscar Casasayas, Pilar Díaz, Maximiliano Díaz, and Flora Muñoz. “Vida i quotidianitat als barris de barraques.” In Camino et al., Barraquisme, la ciutat (im) possible, 81–122.

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Camino, Xavi, Òscar Casasayas, Pilar Díaz, Maximiliano Díaz, Cristina Larrea, Flora Muñoz, and Mercè Tatjer, eds. Barraquisme, la ciutat (im)possible: els barris de Can Valero, el Carmel i la Perona a la Barcelona del segle XX. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Cultura i Mitjans de Comunicació, 2012. Carnicer, Alonsoc, Sara Grimal, and Mercè Tatjer. Guia d’història urbana del MUHBA: Barraques/BCN. Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2011. http://www.bcn.cat/museu historiaciutat/docs/BARRAQUES_b.pdf. Casanovas, Josep, and Eulàlia Collelldemont. “El Ministro de Educación en la escuela: El noticiario franquista NO-DO y las construcciones escolares en España.” Revista Linhas XXI, 47 (2020): 45–72. Cenarro, Ángela. “El Auxilio Social de Falange (1936–1940): entre la guerra total y el ‘Nuevo Estado’ franquista.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 91, nos. 1–2 (2014): 43–59. Collelldemont, Eulàlia. “Antonio Viñao Frago: El plan quinquenal de construcciones escolares de 1957–1961.” Conceptual Challenges: Propaganda, Ideologies and Education (blog), UVic-VCC, September 7, 2018. https://mon.uvic.cat/araef-conceptual-challenges/2018/ 09/07/antonio-vinao-frago-el-plan-quinquenal-de-construcciones-escolares-de-19571961/. De Andrés Creus, Laura. Barraques: La lluita dels invisibles. Badalona: Ara Llibres, 2011. Domenech, Rosa. Vivencias sociopolíticas y trabajo social. Mi granito de arena. Barcelona: Impuls a l’Acció Social, 2013. Duocastella, Rogellio, comp. Los suburbios 1957: compendio de las ponencias y coloquios desarrollados durante la “Semana,” seguido de gráficos y estadísticas. Barcelona: Gráficas Levante, 1947. “Els tramvies-escola de Torre Baró.” Blog de l’Arxiu Històric de Roquete-Nou Barris. August 20, 2012. http://arxiuhistoric.blogspot.com/2012/08/els-tramvies-escola-de-torre-baro. html. Fernández, Ricard. “Els moviments socials a Nou Barris.” Arxiu històric del Barri de Verdum Blog, September 21, 2013. http://arxiuhistoric.blogspot.com/2013/10/els-movimentssocials-nou-barris.html. Fernández-Soria, Juan Manuel. “Workers’ Institutes: Envisioned Community, Living Community.” Paedagogica Historica 51, no. 4 (2015): 418–33. Fontquerni, Enriqueta, and Mariona Ribalta. L’ensenyament a Catalunya durant la guerra civil: el CENU. Barcelona: Barcanova, 1982. “Foto-efemèride: 50 anys dels ‘Escuelones’ de Torre Baró.” NouBarris.Net (blog), February 12, 2017. http://www.noubarris.net/web40/?p=68970. González, Basilio. “Escola de Secundària Xavó-Xaví Can Tunis (SO de Barcelona).” Perspectiva Escolar 349 (2010): 31–36. Guerra, Miguel. “Una mirada reflexiva al desarrollo urbano del polígono Sudoeste del Besòs.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Architecture and Urbanism 5 (2016): 122–35. La Ciudad Imaginaria. “Ginés Cuesta.” Vimeo video, 2015. 14:10. http://www.laciudadimagina ria.com/entrevistas/5_gines-cuesta. Lara, Avelina Miquel, Bernat Sureda Garcia, and Francisca Comas Rubí. “Social and Educational Modernisation in Spain: The Work of Segell Pro Infància in Catalonia (1933–1938).” Paedagogica Historica 54 no. 4 (2018): 410–32. Larios, Ruís de. “Una playa barcelonesa: las barracas del Somorrostro.” La Vanguardia, July, 6, 1935, 7.

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March, Enrich, ed. Somorrostro: Mirades Literàries. Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2018. Marín, Martí. “La immigració a Barcelona, de la postguerra al desarrollo: Suburbialització, dictadura i conflicte.” In Barcelona malgrat el franquisme: La SEAT, la ciutat i la represa sense democràcia, edited by Sebastiàn Balfour, 109–29. Barcelona: MUHBA, 2012. RADAE. “Documento en proceso: Listado de films sobre temática educativa del período comprendido entre 1914 y 1940.” https://www.uvic.cat/sites/default/files/documento-en -proceso-registro-films.pdf. RADAE. “Registro de los reportajes y noticias en los que aparece representada la educación (1940–1975).” https://www.uvic.cat/sites/default/files/registro_repnot.pdf. Sánchez-Biosca, Vicente, and Rafael R. Tranche. NO-DO: El tiempo y la memoria. Madrid: Cátedra/Filmoteca Española, 2018. Servicio del Plano de la Ciudad. Barcelona: ICGC, 1947. Solana, Miguel. “Ciutat i vulnerabilitat social: diagnosi i propostes d’intervenció en els barris de Bellvitge/Gornal.” Working paper, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2019. Tatjer, Mercè. “El barraquisme a Barcelona al segle XX.” In Camino et al., Barraquisme, la ciutat (im)possible, 57–80. Teixidor, Valentí. La casa de xocolata: Records d’un alumne de Ton i Guida 1962–1973. Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2012. Viñao Frago, Antonio. “La educación en el franquismo (1936–1975).” Educar em Revista 51 (January–March 2014): 19–35. Viñao [Frago], Antonio. “Politics, Education and Pedagogy: Ruptures, Continuities and Discontinuities (Spain 1936–1939).” Paedagogica Historica 51, no. 4 (2015): 405–17.

Daniel Friedrich and Nicolás Arata

Chapter 4 “And Now, Who Will Defend Us?”: Heroes, Salvation, and Counter-Narratives in the Television Show El Chapulín Colorado Introduction The frontiers of the history of education have expanded in the past decades, incorporating new subjects and objects of interest, sources of analysis, and research methodologies. Those who dedicate themselves to historicizing educational processes have begun to open up to establishing dialogues with other fields of knowledge including post-colonial studies, gender studies, migratory studies, and – as is the case with this book – visual culture studies. One of the reasons for this phenomenon can be glimpsed in the need for telling new stories, discovering new sources, or taking a fresh look at previously visited subjects. But there is another reason, too: shifting the focus of attention away from schools, which have dominated the field of history of education since its inception, and towards phenomena and cultural objects that have contributed to shaping schooling and its inhabitants may produce different kinds of knowledge and theories that would have been unthinkable otherwise. This piece is inscribed within that search for novel approaches. Aiming to connect cultural history and education history, it engages with a popular culture phenomenon to reflect upon the archetypal figure of the hero and its connections to the historical production of the school’s and the teacher’s social mission. Taking a look at the television character known as Chapulín Colorado (literally translated as “red grasshopper”) offers the possibility of reflecting upon a set of interlocking issues and problems that have historically been at the core of the field: What is the role of the hero in the history of education? Why, where, and how do we look for salvation? The cultural consumption that took place during our porteño (i.e., from the city of Buenos Aires) childhoods as the country transitioned towards democracy, the ways in which a set of characters and expressions contributed to our shaping of an idea of heroism in Latin America, and

Note: The authors would like to thank Alejandra Alvarez (Teachers College, Columbia University) for her initial translation of this essay from Spanish. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634945-005

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the imprints that those characters left behind in the education of our sensibilities were never separate from the history of education. El Chapulín, together with other characters such as Astérix, El Chavo del 8, and Mafalda, populated porteño middle-class childhoods. The consumption of narratives – either through television or comics – allowed us to imagine the adventures of a group of indestructible Gauls confronted with the Roman Empire, the wonderings of a curious child (Chavo) in a colorful Mexico, or the playfulness of rebellious Mafalda, daughter of a society that debated with itself whether it should fight for its political rights or enjoy the advantages granted by a new middle-class existence. The cultural industry that placed these characters in kiosks and on screens significantly shaped our vocabularies, attitudes, values, feelings, and ways of transitioning through childhood that co-existed with the dismantlement of Argentinian societal authoritarianism following the last civic-military dictatorship (1976–1983). We assume that the modes of attachment to these characters and stories vary in relationship to the contexts in which they are received. While el Chavo in Mexico had more than a few detractors, he could count on an army of loyal followers in the Southern cone of Latin America. The characters and gags created by Roberto Gómez Bolaños – aka Chespirito, the mind and body behind El Chavo del 8, El Chapulín Colorado, and many others – do not escape (and in many cases, even reinforce) gender, generational, and class inequalities of the societies that produced and consumed them. But they also shed light on the situations, roles, and dynamics that a society allows itself to laugh at. In previous work we proposed an approach to the study of re-presentations of Latin American childhoods through a focus on Latin American comics and children’s TV shows.1 We argued that the characters inhabiting those worlds function as cultural ambassadors that, through their stories, communicate to territories near and far imaginaries on how children in the continent live their first years. These narratives – elaborated by adults – provide a more complex picture of children’s experiences and issues by addressing multiple dimensions such as family ties, the role of childhood in social change, strategies for adapting to social, private, and public conviviality practices, and ways of appropriating public space and participating in the labor force. However, the possibility of using comics and TV shows as sources has not been widely explored in the study of the history of education in Latin America. The visual regimes (that is, 1 Nicolás Arata and Daniel Friedrich, “Schooling, Pedagogical Imaginaries, and Latin American Childhoods in El Chavo del 8,” in Resonances of El Chavo del Ocho in Latin American Childhood, Schooling, and Societies, ed. Daniel Friedrich and Erica Colmenares (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 19–34.

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what is seen and what is made invisible, what comes into focus and what remains in the background) that emerged from the articulations between school systems and pedagogical discourses2 have attached to them, in turn, what Dussel terms “rights to gaze” (“derechos de mirada”).3 In other words, aesthetic considerations and judgments are not just about the qualities of the objects being assessed but a result of the construction of subjective sensibilities through education and other processes that leave the questions about who gets to see what always open to dispute.4 The question then, as stated by Dussel, regards the tensions between the visual cultures produced by modern institutions (such as the school) and those assembled by mass media.5 In this article, our purpose is to approach El Chapulín Colorado as a complex cultural product that is part of our education as Latin Americans of a particular generation born in the late 1970s. We will attempt to highlight the ways in which El Chapulín Colorado opened up the possibility to elaborate alternative narratives around the figure of the hero to those proposed by school, including the historical positioning of teachers as saviors. The show was produced in Mexico starting in 1970, achieving unprecedented levels of popularity in Latin America, as it spread throughout the continent and beyond making use of the new technologies available at the time.6 Still today, almost half a century after its debut, the show continues to air reruns on TV, and is popular on YouTube and other digital platforms. One of the themes of modern schooling has been the conformation of the pantheon of national heroes. The civic and military virtues of the nation’s forefathers were directly related to the formation of the nation and the state, always exceptional in its great deeds and destiny (this is by no means an exclusive trait of the United States). Esteban Echeverría, an Argentinian writer, a reference figure for the “Generation of ’37” and a spokesperson for romanticism in the region, claimed that patriotism required revering the “great men,” since the glory radiating from their actions represented a nation’s “enlightenment and

2 Katya Mandoki, Estética cotidiana y juegos de la cultura: Prosaica I, 2nd ed. (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2008). 3 Inés Dussel, “Escuela y cultura de la imagen: los nuevos desafíos,” Nómadas 30 (April 2009): 180–93, quotation on 181. 4 María Silvia Serra, “Education, Aesthetic and Visual Regime in the Configuration of the Argentine Educational System,” Revista Colombiana de Educación 63 (2012): 19–31. 5 Dussel, “Escuela y cultura de la imagen.” 6 Carlos Aguasaco, ¡No contaban con mi astucia! México: Parodia, nación y sujeto en la serie de El Chapulín Colorado (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2014).

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progress” as well as “intellectual and material wealth.”7 At the same time, the destinies of those who gave their lives for the nation are connected to the figure of the teacher to the extent that teachers – in the origins of the educational system – were summoned to culturally redeem their students. The teachersavior, producer of patriotic citizens and of illuminated minds, would elevate the nation from its barbarism (the assumed state of nature for natives and mestizos in colonized Latin America) and guide the maybe-future-citizens by the hand towards a better future, in its role as a messianic superhero. The ideal of the teacher as educational hero is, therefore, not very distant from the construction of the superhuman figure of popular culture. In fact, the history of education as a field emerges as linked to the production of these narratives constructing the teacher as an apostle of lay knowledge who devotes his life to freeing the masses from illiteracy.8 But apostleship does not come out of nowhere nor does it descend from the heavens; it is built through day-to-day rituals, powerful state narratives, and discourses that circulate through schools and outside formal institutions, and are adopted, adapted, and/or resisted by those who inhabit them. Besides the rituals legitimating the national heroes that have been widely analyzed by historians of education, what other tools and sensibilities are mobilized to promote the genres of speech, forms of expression, and societal values that the nation represents and desires? And which practices are involved in their production, circulation, and appropriation by the spectators/students? These curricular questions – inasmuch as they refer to the central questions in the field of curriculum studies: Whose knowledge counts? What counts as knowledge? How is knowledge produced and reproduced inside and outside of schools? – demand from us that we look at the cultural and social pedagogies that exist beyond the four walls of schools. In the following, we will first approach the figure of the superhero with the aim of highlighting its modern traits as it originated in North America. Next, we will present the case of Chapulín Colorado as a transgressive figure that interrupts this archetype and proposes a counter-narrative. Finally, we will think about how this counter-narrative may contribute to telling different stories about teachers and their work.

7 Léon Pomer, La construcción de los héroes: imaginario y nación (Buenos Aires: Editorial Leviatán, 2005). 8 Ian Hunter, Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); see also Thomas S. Popkewitz, Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform: Science, Education, and Making Society by Making the Child (New York: Routledge, 2008).

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Super-Heroic Genealogy The modern superhero was born with the first appearance of Superman in 1938.9 While there are numerous predecessors (from the heroes of diverse mythologies to the mysterious avenger known as “The Shadow” in early 1930s pulp novels), the figure of an individual with powers and abilities well above those of the average human being, with an identity that allowed him (more rarely, her) to blend in with humans – and that provided the reader with a figure to identify with – but willing to dress up in colors to fight for certain ideals was a new concept.10 Superman emerges, on the one hand, to fight the villain par excellence: Hitler.11 On the other hand, his creators – two young Jewish men from the North-American Midwest – channeled their concerns for the effects of the Great Depression through a character dedicated to social justice, defending, for example, the tenants from their exploitative land-owners: If the dystopian nightmare visions of the age foresaw a dehumanized, mechanized world, Superman offered another possibility: an image of a fiercely human tomorrow that delivered the spectacle of triumphant individualism exercising its sovereignty over the implacable forces of industrial oppression. It’s no surprise he was a big hit with the oppressed. He was as resolutely lowbrow, as pro-poor, as any savior born in a pigsty.12

In his treatise about the superhero, Supergods, Grant Morrison, one of the most prominent contemporary comic writers, states the parallels between Superman and Jesus. Both must make sacrifices when sent among mortals.13 In Superman’s case, he sacrifices his principles. The socialist utopian hero would very soon turn into an icon of the market and a valued commodity.14 Thus, the first more mundane adventures and the subsequent faux-military Hitler-punching interventions made way for a hero fighting cosmic villains and helping the police keep order in Metropolis, while the figure as such became omnipresent through merchandising and the media. The success of Superman rapidly boosted

9 Grant Morrison, Supergods (New York: Random House Digital, Inc., 2011). 10 See Morrsion, Supergods. 11 Glen Weldon, Superman: The Unauthorized Biography (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013). 12 Morrison, Supergods, 7. 13 Morrison, Supergods, 16. 14 Ian Gordon, Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017).

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a boom in superhero comics, selling millions of copies that were sent in shiploads to the soldiers at the European and Asian fronts.15 But every model invites adaptation, variation, and adoption. In the 1960s, Marvel introduced the fallible superhero who is in perpetual doubt and thus seems to be “more human.” Under Stan Lee’s indelible lead, figures such as Spider-Man, the X-Men, or Hulk reinvented the archetype, making reader identification more complex and sophisticated, and their success transformed the industry. Nevertheless, Marvel heroes continue to share one thing with the more traditional heroes: their effectiveness. The superhero always solves the problem and triumphs at the end of the story. This capacity for solving problems would be interrupted by the frail, red hero of the South.

The History of Chapulín The narratives of superheroes projecting North American cultural patterns to spectators and readers circulated profusely during our childhoods. Yet, they were not the only discourses circulating. During our schooling, other characters whose personalities were quite far from those heroic archetypes, contributed to constructing other sensibilities regarding heroism, justice, and courage: characters that we felt were closer to us because they shared our cultural background and language, because they exposed the mismatching and misunderstandings of our cultures, but also because they allowed us to channel our desire for change and because they did so through a powerful resource that most other heroes, in their self-importance, utterly lacked: humor. Chapulín Colorado (see Fig 4.1) appeared for the first time on Mexican television on November 11, 1970. Created by comedian and writer Roberto Gómez Bolaños aka Chespirito for the sketch show Los Supergenios de la Mesa Cuadrada (The super geniuses of the square table), Chapulin quickly became the most popular character of the show, resulting in his own show consisting of more than 250 sketches until its end in 1979.16 The character’s success grew as the series expanded across the entire continent and beyond, to the United States and Europe, becoming a global phenomenon. Chapulín Colorado reached the status of Latin

15 Matthew Freeman, “Up, Up and Across: Superman, the Second World War and the Historical Development of Transmedia Storytelling,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 35, no. 2 (2015): 215–39. 16 Aguasaco, ¡No contaban con mi astucia!, 57–58. The character would continue to appear in the Chespirito series (1980–1995).

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American icon halfway through the 1970s with an audience of more than 350 million viewers worldwide and popular reruns to this day.17 The word “Chapulín” comes from Náhuatl and designates a kind of local grasshopper that has been incorporated into the typical Mexican diet. The success of Chapulín Colorado was facilitated by the fact that the 1970s were an auspicious period for the dissemination of national and local media products throughout Latin America. Cultural consumption in Latin America, which in the decades previous to the Chespirito strip was dominated by North American and European productions, started to tip towards local icons and expressions, going hand in hand with populist-nationalist tendencies.18 Bolaños himself acknowledged the nationalist impetus behind the creation of his character, which he connected to Spanish literary figures: “Cervantes wrote the Quijote as a parody of chivalric novels and, with all due respect, I made Chapulín a Latin American anti-hero in response to the Supermen and Batmen that were invading us from the North.”19 What makes Chapulín so special? Chapulín has a unique aesthetic presence within the genre he parodies. While the musculature of his northern peers challenges the imagination of the most steroidal body-builder, Chapulín presents himself as a fragile and small subject dressed in red full-body tights, sneakers, and yellow shorts, with the tights sporting his logo on his chest: a heart framing the letters “CH.” On his head, the antenitas de vinil, or “little vinyl antennae,” dangle with each movement. His equipment does not seem to improve his odds: his little vinyl antennae allow him to perceive nearby danger, and he usually carries his chipote chillón, or “howling hammer,” a plastic mallet with which he punishes evil-doers. The chiquitolina (“small-ina”) pills allow him to shrink himself to the size of an insect (making use of astonishingly creative visual effects, given the continent’s technological limitations at the time), while the paralyzing buzzer gives him the power to “freeze.” Chapulín does not possess any special powers of his own, nor the money that works so efficiently for Batman. Chapulín is not especially smart, nor has he trained during his younger

17 See Daniel Friedrich and Erica Colmenares, eds., Resonances of El Chavo del Ocho in Latin American Childhood, Schooling, and Societies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017); for a “thicker” description of the context for the emergence of Chespitiro’s TV, see Ernesto Treviño Ronzón, “Figures of Mexican State, Society, and Subject in Chespirito’s TV,” in Friedrich and Colmenares, Resonances of El Chavo del Ocho, 131–44. 18 See Aguasaco, ¡No contaban con mi astucia! 19 “Chespirito, 70 Años,” editorial, El Tiempo, June 19, 2000, https://www.eltiempo.com/ar chivo/documento/MAM-1236713.

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Fig. 4.1: Chapulín Colorado. Image retrieved from Eric Valenzuela, “Beware the Red Grasshopper: el Chapulin Colorado,” Hispanic LA, https://hispanicla.com/beware-the-red-grasshopper-elchapulin-colorado-9572.

years with expert assassins or detectives. His desire to help frequently collides with his fears and insecurities. The creature created by Bolaños could be any of us, if only we were not ashamed to wear red tights and antennae. What distinguishes Chapulín from North American superheroes? In an interview Bolaños gave in 1987, when Chapulín was an icon recognized by millions of viewers, he said: [Superman, He-Man] are not heroes. Chapulín Colorado is a hero, this is serious. Heroism is not about lacking fear but about overcoming it. Those who have no fear – Batman, Superman – are all-powerful and cannot be afraid. Chapulín Colorado is scared off his wits, he is clumsy, weak, foolish, etc., and aware of these deficiencies he confronts the issue. He is a hero . . . and loses, [which is] another characteristic of heroes, and heroes lose

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many times. After a while their ideas triumph, but the hero . . . . How many victims of executions do we know?20

Media scholar Angela Ndalianis takes aim at the Social Darwinist aspects that are often associated with the traditional superhero: the superior being (human or not) that takes on the responsibility to protect the weak who otherwise would suffer extinction in the face of great threats.21 Chapulín does not follow the same logic, nor its inverse. Chapulín is neither superior nor inferior, neither more nor less intelligent, strong or brave. His ability to save or protect remains ambiguous throughout his television career, making comparisons and binary simplifications difficult, a matter which we will return to throughout the essay. Unlike the heroes of the North – who after some struggles always save the day – Chapulín offered a tale based on calling on a vernacular hero to resolve everyday conflicts which he did not do much about other than make them worse. The misadventures of Chapulín revealed other resources more relevant than brute force: the wit to “flip the problem,” perseverance, and laughter as a way of resisting in the face of adversity.

“And now, who will defend me?”22 The summoning ritual repeats itself in every episode. Someone finds themselves in trouble. It frequently is a woman, occasionally a man. The troubles can be related to some criminal getting their way, a mystery to solve, or more mundane troubles such as a lost pet. The victim stares directly into the camera and cries out: “And now, who will defend me?” That look aimed towards the viewer, in a close-up that connects the victim’s expression with the complicity of the observer, generates the intimacy of a daily shared ritual. It was that cry for help that indicated to viewers that the expected routine was about to begin. The cry for help summons the figure of Chapulín Colorado, who, after his dramatic – and frequently clumsy and accident-prone – entry, states “Me!,” generally followed by “You weren’t counting on my cleverness!” (“¡No contaban con mi astucia!”)

20 “La Noticia Rebelde” (Buenos Aires: ATC, 1987), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= OkTUAt85hZ0. 21 Angela Ndalianis, “Comic Book Superheroes: An Introduction,” in The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, ed. Angela Ndalianis (New York: Routledge, 2009), 3–15. 22 The headings for the following sections represent an assortment of Chapulín’s most famous catchphrases, which are difficult to translate. The original here states: “Y ahora, ¿quién podrá defenderme?”

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The character’s sudden entrance reflects some of its unique characteristics. Chapulín, unlike mainstream comic-book characters, has no origin. While everyone recognizes him, it is not clear why this is the case. He is a quasi-folk hero who, moreover, appears in different times and spaces (certain sketches place him in a mythical Far West or encountering imaginary pirates, while others place him in contemporary towns without a name). His awkward arrival corresponds to his confusing slogan. If Superman was faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive, Chapulín is “more agile than a turtle / stronger than a mouse / nobler than lettuce / His shield is a heart.”23 Superman and Batman are imposing figures thanks to their physique, while the small and thin body of Chapulín makes the victims that summon him experience a mixture of hope and doubt. After overcoming the misunderstandings that arise while trying to explain to Chapulín the situation which led to his summoning, he often tries to flee the scene to escape the possibility of being exposed to danger. But those who summon him push him to act and to place himself in the role of a hero.

“My little vinyl antennae detect the presence of the enemy” The enemy that Chapulín faces is a person lacking the heart that characterizes the hero. The enemies are almost always men that threaten either women or weaker men not smart or strong enough to help themselves. The central trait of the villain depends on the actor who plays the character and on his physicality. Carlos Villagrán uses his histrionic acting style for exaggerated caricatures of evil men with maniacal laughter, while Rubén Aguirre uses his size as a physical threat and Ramón Valdez challenges Chapulín with his intelligence. Glen Weldon argues that the most effective villains are those who somehow embody the hero’s counterpart: the super-powerful alien Superman is confronted by the all-too-human Lex Luthor; the orderly and methodical Batman is challenged by the chaotic and unpredictable Joker.24 For many of these characters, it can be argued that the hero can only be as good as his enemies: without Luthor there would be no Superman, without Joker there would be no Batman. Chapulín, once again, defies these analyses. His enemies are not his opposites, physically,

23 This slogan – “Más ágil que una tortuga / Más fuerte que un ratón / Más ágil que una lechuga / Su escudo es un corazón” in the original – was repeated in the intro to each episode. 24 Weldon, Superman, 38.

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intellectually, or morally. In fact, his enemies almost never reappear in the series, nor are they particularly well-defined. There are no long sagas, no relationships between the hero and his enemy over a longer period of time, no shared mythologies. Chapulín’s enemy is always a minor, hyper-local character. Chapulín’s enemy is whoever is present at the time and place when someone calls: “And now, who will defend me?” As we pointed out in our previous analysis of El Chavo del Ocho, in Gómez Bolaños’ characters one cannot observe the passage of time, nor progress in the narratives, and thus the characters’ relationships do not evolve.25 On the one hand, this means that Chapulín’s enemies do not develop antagonisms with Chapulín nor do they learn from past mistakes. The permanent contingency of the confrontations is what makes them always new to those who live them. On the other hand, this means that there is no need for the audience to learn about a previous story and no need to recapitulate the story, as the relationship between Chapulín and his enemies (who are practically interchangeable) is based upon the intimacy associated with routine, since we already know everything there is to know from the moment the victim stares into the camera and calls for help. The enemy does not contribute to defining Chapulín; on the contrary, the irrelevance of time, development, and progress are what defines not so much the hero but our relationship to him.

“You weren’t counting on my cleverness!” One of the strategies employed by Chapulín to confront the situations that he must solve consists of narrating stories. As a contemporary Aesop, Chapulín narrates a tale to communicate his teachings, even if the lesson is not always clear or effective. For a hero that despises force and prefers wit and good intentions, his most powerful (and most well-known) weapon is verbal resources. “Follow me if you are good!” (“¡Síganme los buenos!”), “All of my movements are coldly calculated” (“Todos mis movimientos están fríamente calculados”), “They take advantage of my nobility” (“Se aprovechan de mi nobleza”), and “I suspected it from the start” (“Lo sospeché desde un principio”) are his most celebrated expressions. The Latin American hero knows that he cannot count on his strength and therefore must appeal to his wit. In that sense, Chapulín does not represent an

25 Arata and Friedrich, “Schooling, Pedagogical Imaginaries, and Latin American Childhoods in El Chavo del 8,” 29–31.

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embodiment of the Western hero but of those that do not feel protected by the state, that see themselves as defenseless and that cannot but summon to the scene a figure they identify with. As opposed to Superman, who always solves the issues by himself, Chapulín invariably involves those who summoned him in the resolution of the conflicts. There is, thus, a notion of a collective hero that – despite flaws and mistakes – stages a collegial overcoming of the problem. The trilogy of films based on Batman, directed by Christopher Nolan, is crisscrossed by a central tension between the hero that one needs and the one that one deserves. While the Dark Knight fights against the corruption that defines Gotham City, the questions about the relationship between an ideal and a reality, between an action and a reaction, bring him face to face with a conflict much more complex than the latest trap set up by the Joker. Meanwhile, Chapulín, by moving away from the role of the hero as an individual solving the situation because of his individual feats or his power, is never implicated in the process that generated the problem that called for his intervention, as Batman was. In a 1988 interview, the Mexican writer Carlos Monsiváis described Chapulín as a source of inspiration for the emergence of collective heroes, such as Super Barrio, a masked fighter dressed in red like Chapulín, who presided over the protests in lower-class neighborhoods, siding with those who faced evictions following the earthquake that shook Mexico City in 1985.26 Similarly to Chapulín, every time that a home eviction occurred, Super Barrio presented himself at the scene. His figure – a synthesis of the popular lucha libre and the character created by Chespirito – embodies the hero that the people [el pueblo] “claimed”: not one who tries to save the world from an alien threat but one who is able to channel and foreground demands for housing through collective organization and civic representation.

“I suspected it from the start” One of the few recurring characters in the series, and one of the most interesting, is Super Sam (played by Ramón Valdez, see Fig. 4.2), appearing for the first time in 1973.27 With the top hat and the goatee characteristic of the North-American

26 Ricardo Bedoya-Wilson and Isaac León-Frías, “Cultura popular y cultura masiva en el México contemporáneo: conversación con Carlos Monsiváis,” Diálogos de la Comunicación 19 (1988), http://repositorio.ulima.edu.pe/handle/ulima/7050. 27 “El Chapulín Colorado – De los metiches líbranos, Señor,” YouTube video, 13:59, August 6, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tThKyRiPjFA.

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icon, he is dressed up as Superman as a parody of the DC Comics hero. His slogan is “Time is money, oh yeah!” (in English), he always carries a sack of money, and he speaks Spanish with a strong faux-American accent. When a character asks about him, another responds: “He’s like Chapulín, but with a bank account.”

Fig. 4.2: Chapulín facing Super Sam. Still image, retrieved from “El Chapulin Colorado – El retorno de Super Sam,” YouTube video, 22:17, June 18, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=cUMEiYsF1EQ&t=662s.

Super Sam inverts the genre’s expectations about canon and the circulation of knowledge. To think of Chapulín only as a by-product of the North American hero would imply a certain relationship of subordination. Nevertheless, within the series, everyone seems to know who Chapulín Colorado is – “the hero of Latin America” (el héroe de Latinoamérica)28 – while almost no one recognizes Super Sam. In fact, the victims often prefer to be aided by Chapulín, because he is “one of our own” and “better the devil you know . . . .”29 Chapulín tells Super Sam on many occasions that no one needs Super Sam because “here, we don’t want imported heroes.” Super Sam copies some idioms from Chapulín, but in English. When Chapulín explains that no one has a weapon as powerful as the “Chipote Chillón,” Super Sam replies that he has something more powerful: 28 “El Chapulín Colorado – Todos caben en un cuartito sabiéndolos acomodar,” YouTube video, 7:53, May 19, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPxCxwYNF84. 29 “El Chapulín Colorado – El retorno de Super Sam,” YouTube video, 22:17, June 18, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUMEiYsF1EQ&t=662s.

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“Bat-Dollars.”30 This exchange is followed by a battle between the two characters, in which Super Sam uses his sack of money as a blunt object, imitating the use of Chapulín’s plastic mallet. In North American comics of the time, the few Latin American heroes were often characterized by offensive stereotypes.31 During the 1970s, it is difficult to find examples of Latin American superheroes in Marvel or DC comics, with the exception of characters that appeared in single issues. Towards the end of the decade, the popular DC cartoon Super Friends introduced El Dorado with links to “the ancient Aztecs and the Mexican jungle,” and Fire, a Brazilian superheroine who would afterwards make the leap to the world of comics representing a voluptuous and “fiery” figure. During the 1980s, Vibe, a Latino hero with extremely stereotypical dialogues, joined the Justice League (during his first appearance he exclaims “I’m what’s happening, pescado! Didn’t chu [sic!] hear the word?”32 While the American comic book industry insufficiently and inadequately played the representation game, Super Sam is often the object of laughter and ridicule by Chapulín, who mocks his English and his mannerisms. The character of Super Sam is evidence of the fact that Chapulín cannot be analyzed only as a parody of the concept of the North American superhero. The relationship between center and periphery is insufficient to understand the production and circulation of meanings taking place around this Latin American popular culture node.33 While it is a valid question whether the existence of Chapulín would even be possible without the precedent of the American comic strip, at the same time, Chapulín inverts his relationship to this genealogy by producing new ways of understanding the notions of leading character, hero, and power. In an interesting coda to this section, Marvel Comics in 2017 introduced the Red Locust, a Latin American superheroine as a clear homage to Chapulín Colorado.34

30 “El Chapulín Colorado – Historia de una vieja mina abandonada . . .,” YouTube video, 22:01, February 5, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv2SRioKOXU. 31 Frederick Luis Aldama, Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017). 32 See “Justice League of America Annual [vol.] 1 [no.] 2 [1984],” DC Database, https://dc.fan dom.com/wiki/Justice_League_of_America_Annual_Vol_1_2. Luckily since the 2000s, there has been somewhat of a reversal of this tendency towards stereotypes, with more sophisticated and complex characters such as Ms. America Chavez (Marvel) or Blue Beetle (DC); see Aldama, Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. 33 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 34 “Fernanda Rodriguez (Earth-616),” Marvel Database, http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Fernanda_ Rodriguez_(Earth-616).

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“Anyone can make one mistake . . . . Anyone can make 500 mistakes” Each sketch closes with the resolution of the situation that had brought Chapulín to the scene, even though not in the way that superhero comic books often wrap up. Here, the hero does not use his powers or abilities to defeat the villains or take them to prison before returning to his secret identity. In most episodes, the situation often resolves itself either by accident, with Chapulín defeating the villain, finding the lost object, or helping the victim without realizing it, or it is the victim – who had summoned Chapulín – who tires of waiting for the messiah and solves the problem him or herself. A significant amount of sketches end with Chapulín staring perplexed into the camera, without having a clear idea of how the situation got solved, or that he had even come out victorious, and with the supposed victim staring him down with a mix of resignation, frustration, and sympathy. The lack of a satisfactory “traditional” resolution raises a series of questions. In the first place, what does it mean to be a hero if one is ineffective? The figure of the hero is inherently associated with being able to solve a problem that a “normal” person cannot deal with. Summoning the hero is a declaration of impotence, of incapacity. In fact, given their dependence on Batman or Superman, Gotham City police or Metropolis Police would seem to be absolutely ineffective. In most representations of teachers in popular culture, the narrative of the teacher-hero is supported by the idea that the protagonist is different from the rest of his/her peers and able to solve or at least confront in a unique way the limitations or challenges imposed by “the system.” A big part of the teacher-hero’s power lies in being recognized by those who have been saved to be the key figure in their salvation (see, e.g., School of Rock, The Dead Poets Society, Lean on Me). Popular culture is plagued with inefficient teachers that perpetuate the status quo instead of interrupting it. In fact, it is them who allow the teacher-hero to make his/her triumphant entrance. In parallel, the inefficient teacher (and/or school) are the ones that lead towards decentering “traditional classrooms” in narratives in which change or salvation occurs outside of the four classroom walls (e.g., The Breakfast Club). The inefficient teacher cannot be the teacher-hero. Inefficient pedagogy cannot be that which saves us. Nevertheless, Chapulín continues to be regarded as a hero by those in need, day after day, despite his incapacity to solve the problems for whose solution he has been summoned. As an audience, we cannot know how the people in the stories learned about Chapulín as a hero to be called, as this takes place before the cameras are turned on. Perhaps it is communicated that, after Chapulín’s

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appearance, and no matter who takes action, the problem does get solved. We can imagine, as well, that within the context in which Chapulín performs, alternatives are limited – police often appear either as inefficient or corrupt, and the state structure is almost inexistent. As the victims say on numerous occasions, “better the devil you know” (“mejor malo conocido”). As we mentioned previously, everyone knows Chapulín when he makes his entrance, and his figure is recognized alongside phrases like “the hero of Latin America,” but the diffuse temporality of the show does not make it clear what is known about him or why his continued inefficacy does not result in people’s lack of faith. It is precisely that faith that establishes the connection between the hero, his summoning, and the confusing resolution of the conflict in question. In most of the episodes, Chapulín acts as a talisman. His effectiveness does not lie in his actions but in his mere presence, and in the faith that he induces by making his appearance. Chapulín reminds the victims that there is always a way out even if it is unpredictable, accidental, and random. Chapulín connects with an audience that recognizes that nothing fully repeats itself despite the appearance of routine and same-ness, in that each iteration of “the same” (the same actors, the same call for help, the same accidental entrance, the same catchphrases) contains the potential for accident and contingency, that is, the potentiality of the event. What makes this potentiality possible is, paradoxically, the lack of learning and progress inherent in the show’s atemporality. As we pointed out previously in reference to el Chavo del Ocho, the other great creation of Gomez Bolaños, in Chapulín Colorado, too, time does not pass.35 There are no references from one episode to the next that would allow us to think that the characters are developing or learning, just as actions have no consequences from one sketch to the next. If Chapulín has no origin, then he has no future either. Chapulín does not become better or more effective, which suspends the idea of potential and the logics of learning, at the same time that intimacy and the routine of the known are reinforced. The paradox lies in the fact that Chapulín operates as a talisman when he finds himself in the middle of the tension between the repetition of the same and the possibility of the unpredictable event, of the accidental resolution. If Chapulín does not learn, it is impossible to trace a line of progress that could anticipate his actions. The event becomes possible by negating progress.

35 See Arata and Friedrich, “Schooling, Pedagogical Imaginaries, and Latin American Childhoods in El Chavo del 8.”

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Chapulín and Heroic Histories in the Field of Curriculum Studies Conceptualizing Chapulín as a talisman, as an ineffective hero that is yet continuously summoned, as a character trapped between atemporality, repetition, and the potentiality of the event brings us to wonder about heroic, anti-heroic, and talismanic theories in the field of education. Let’s consider, for example, the case of the enormous popularity of Ralph Tyler, who, seventy years after having published his best-known piece, is still one of the most influential curricularists of modern western education.36 The lesson plan proposed by the Tyler Rationale37 is an almost omnipresent artifact in the modern classroom, and the idea that good planning is the essence of good lessons is at the heart of practically every teacher assessmentcentered reform.38 Nevertheless, it is not at all clear that the Tyler Rationale’s popularity in the classroom corresponds to its effectiveness or to a particular utopian vision of the school’s potential in relationship to social change.39 Classroom planning is a familiar and routine element in teachers’ everyday life, rather than one of those core discussions related to addressing the structural issues of schooling and society. The lesson plan is more concerned with the efficient and correct functioning of an already established machinery than with the need to rethink or reimagine the school as an educational institution. We can imagine teachers standing in front of a difficult class, looking out and thinking: “And now, who will defend me?” What appears is not the ghost of Freire to teach them how to emancipate students. Neither is it the figure of Dewey instructing them on the principles of progressive education towards a more democratic society. Instead, what materializes is a solid lesson plan: a familiar element that allows the teacher to breathe a sigh of relief, grateful for the appearance of the talisman and the comfort it elicits, its presence promising that tomorrow will be another day. Those of us that were and/or continue to be

36 See Florian Waldow, “From Taylor to Tyler to No Child Left Behind: Legitimating Educational Standards,” Prospects 45, no. 1 (2015): 49–62. The piece referred to is Ralph Winfred Tyler, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950). 37 Herbert M. Kliebard, “The Tyler Rationale,” The School Review 78, no. 2 (1970): 259–72. See also Herbert M. Kliebard, “The Tyler Rationale Revisited,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 27, no. 1 (1995): 81–88. 38 Katherine Ledwell and Celia Oyler, “Unstandardized Responses to a ‘Standardized’ Test: The EdTPA as Gatekeeper and Curriculum Change Agent,” Journal of Teacher Education 67, no. 2 (2016): 120–34. 39 While Tyler’s work has had enormous influence in the lives of teachers, his name is not as well known as the undisputed heroes in the field, such as Paulo Freire or John Dewey.

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teachers are aware of the fact that planning does not solve much, that the class rarely follows the expected road. Nevertheless, the familiarity that comes with having a lesson plan at hand as support for our actions, the effects of which are nevertheless always unpredictable, points to the enormous popularity of the Tyler Rationale and the talismanic power of its technologies. This brings us to thinking about how some tensions always present in our field – between theory and practice, between the teacher as an intellectual and the teacher as a technician, between the idea of education as reproduction or as liberation, etc. – can be read in this key. The idea, and popularity, of talismans embodied here in the figure of Chapulín help raise questions about the values and role models that we often try to promote when we work in teacher education or with schools. These role models are often perceived as traditional superheroes, as messiahs that come to the rescue from the outside, promising effectiveness and a solution based on their inherent (explicatory, pedagogical, emancipatory) capacities, their pedigree, their vision of the future, and the authority of those who bring them in. “Super Paulo” [Freire] promises to solve the tensions that teachers feel between their desire for a better future and the day-to-day reality, providing indisputable assertions in relationship to social justice and the emancipating power of education, placing the teacher at the center of institutional and social change. Whether these promises are faithful to Freire’s texts and intentions or not, the part they play in innumerable teacher education programs is based on the hopes that teacher educators place on Freire and his ideas as an alternative to the present. These hopes are often frustrated by the tendency of student teachers, teacher educators, and many researchers and scholars to distrust the heroic power of the savior, placing their hopes and trust instead in the idea of what is “practical,” which often coincides with what is known or “what works.” Yet although the idea that recipes and practical silver bullets are ever effective is unconvincing even for those who claim to need them, the practical how-to operates as the talisman, its mere presence acting as a calming agent in the face of the anxieties generated by the unpredictability of the classroom.

Heroes Without Pedestals “To know a society you have to know what it laughs about,” stated the great Mexican chronicler Carlos Monsiváis.40 And if this statement directs our attention to what a figure such as Chapulín Colorado can teach us, as Latin Americans, about 40 Juan Villoro, El género Monsiváis (Mexico City: Secretaría de Cultura, 2017).

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ourselves, we want to paraphrase it by stating that to know a society, one also needs to know how it’s educated. Those of us who were shaped in the democratic reopening of public schools after the dictatorships in Latin America lived alongside discourses and national hero presentations forged in apologetic molds. The presentation of school heroes, according to the Argentinian writer Agustín Álvarez, suffered the “grave South-American illness par excellence . . . rampant personajismo.”41 The field of educational history is not exempt from this trend, given the role granted to some role models that embody the values and the struggles that are positioned as representing our values and struggles. Our analysis invites the reader to shift the focus of analysis, to use Chapulín as a tool or lens to start unraveling some of the binaries that configure the field, such as the binary between savior and saved or between hero and victim, between what is effective and what is ineffective. Perhaps, going back to Monsiváis’s phrase and our paraphrasing of it, the relationship between humor, heroism, and education should be taken more seriously. Laughter, especially when it is aimed at oneself, is fundamental to the process of deconstructing the messianic impulses that lead to the production of (super-)heroes. It is his ability to laugh at himself that dismantles, or at least suspends, the possibility for Chapulín to be effective, at least in the traditional sense of solving, by himself, the situation at hand. What possibilities would open up to us if we were to laugh side by side with such esteemed heroes as Freire or Dewey?42 If we realized, with a measure of humor, that by placing these educational heroes on a pedestal, we have, ironically, put a distance between them and the problems they were dealing with in their work? If we shared a good laugh with the educators about the illusory hope that the lesson plan will save us from a hard or chaotic lesson? What paths would open up if we historicized the ways in which teachers have long been laughing about the struggles to control, plan, and anticipate that which nevertheless will always be the unpredictable event of educating?

41 Pomer, La construcción de los héroes, 165. 42 Tyson Edward Lewis, “Paulo Freire’s Last Laugh: Rethinking Critical Pedagogy’s Funny Bone through Jacques Rancière,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 42, nos. 5–6 (2010): 635–48.

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Bibliography Aguasaco, Carlos. ¡No contaban con mi astucia! México: Parodia, nación y sujeto en la serie de El Chapulín Colorado. 1st ed. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2014. Aldama, Frederick Luis. Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017. Arata, Nicolás, and Daniel Friedrich. “Schooling, Pedagogical Imaginaries, and Latin American Childhoods in El Chavo del 8.” In Resonances of El Chavo del Ocho in Latin American Childhood, Schooling, and Societies, edited by Daniel Friedrich and Erica Colmenares, 19–34. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Bedoya-Wilson, Ricardo, and Isaac León-Frías. “Cultura popular y cultura masiva en el México contemporáneo: conversación con Carlos Monsiváis.” Diálogos de la Comunicación 19 (1988). http://repositorio.ulima.edu.pe/handle/ulima/7050. “Chespirito, 70 Años.” Editorial. El Tiempo, June 19, 2000. https://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/ documento/MAM-1236713. Dussel, Inés. “Escuela y cultura de la imagen: los nuevos desafíos.” Nómadas 30 (April 2009): 180–93. Freeman, Matthew. “Up, Up and Across: Superman, the Second World War and the Historical Development of Transmedia Storytelling.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 35, no. 2 (2015): 215–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/01439685.2014.941564. Friedrich, Daniel, and Erica Colmenares, eds. Resonances of El Chavo del Ocho in Latin American Childhood, Schooling, and Societies. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Gordon, Ian. Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017. Hunter, Ian. Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Kliebard, Herbert M. “The Tyler Rationale.” The School Review 78, no. 2 (1970): 259–72. Kliebard, Herbert M. “The Tyler Rationale Revisited.” Journal of Curriculum Studies 27, no. 1 (1995): 81–88. “La Noticia Rebelde.” Buenos Aires: ATC, 1987. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= OkTUAt85hZ0. Ledwell, Katherine, and Celia Oyler. “Unstandardized Responses to a ‘Standardized’ Test: The EdTPA as Gatekeeper and Curriculum Change Agent.” Journal of Teacher Education 67, no. 2 (2016): 120–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487115624739. Lewis, Tyson Edward. “Paulo Freire’s Last Laugh: Rethinking Critical Pedagogy’s Funny Bone through Jacques Rancière.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 42, nos. 5–6 (2010): 635–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2010.00690.x. Mandoki, Katya. Estética cotidiana y juegos de la cultura: Prosaica I. 2nd ed. Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2008. Morrison, Grant. Supergods. New York: Random House Digital, Inc., 2011. Ndalianis, Angela. “Comic Book Superheroes: An Introduction.” In The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, edited by Angela Ndalianis, 3–15. New York: Routledge, 2009. Pomer, León. La construcción de los héroes: imaginario y nación. Buenos Aires: Editorial Leviatán, 2005. Popkewitz, Thomas S. Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform: Science, Education, and Making Society by Making the Child. New York: Routledge, 2008.

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Serra, María Silvia. “Education, Aesthetic and Visual Regime in the Configuration of the Argentine Educational System.” Revista Colombiana de Educación 63 (2012): 19–31. Treviño Ronzón, Ernesto. “Figures of Mexican State, Society, and Subject in Chespirito’s TV.” In Resonances of El Chavo del Ocho in Latin American Childhood, Schooling, and Societies, edited by Daniel Friedrich and Erica Colmenares, 131–44. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Tyler, Ralph Winfred. Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950. Villoro, Juan. El género Monsiváis. Mexico City: Secretaría de Cultura, 2017. Waldow, Florian. “From Taylor to Tyler to No Child Left Behind: Legitimating Educational Standards.” Prospects 45, no. 1 (2015): 49–62. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-014-9334-x. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Weldon, Glen. Superman: The Unauthorized Biography. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013.

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Chapter 5 Sports, Politics, and Aesthetics: Educating Bodies and Sensibilities through Cinema in Peronist Argentina Introduction Escuela de campeones (School of champions) premiered in Argentina on December 19, 1950. Directed by Ralph Pappier, the film is about what can be seen as part of the “sportization process” of Argentinean football, showing the difficulties experienced by those who wanted to introduce sports into the school curriculum.1 Based on the real-life story of the Scottish teacher Alexander Watson Hutton, the film shows the obstacles he faced from the moment he arrived in Buenos Aires in 1885, attempting to introduce new and modern pedagogical methods at the elitist and conservative Saint Andrew’s School.2 Winner of the Cóndor de Plata Award for Best Film in 1951, the film focuses on Watson Hutton’s persistent attempts to make football part of the school curriculum in parallel with the legitimation and popularization of this sport in Argentinean history.3

1 Ralph Pappier, dir., Escuela de campeones (Buenos Aires: Inter-Hausi, 1950). The full movie is available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wWf6hg0ypI&t=2107s. “Sportization process” is Norbert Elias’s term; see Norbert Elias, “An Essay on Sport and Violence,” in Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process, ed. Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 150–74. 2 Alexander Watson Hutton was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on June 10, 1853, receiving a Master of Arts degree from the University of Edinburgh. He was the headteacher at the Buenos Aires English High School until 1910. He died in Buenos Aires on March 9, 1936. For more information about the Buenos Aires English High School and its connection to Argentinean sports, we recommend to read Victor Lupo, Historia política del deporte argentino (1610–2002) (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2004), 3 The Cóndor de Plata Award has been given by the Asociación de Cronistas Cinematográficos de la Argentina (ACCA; Argentine Film Critics Association) since 1943, honoring the national film productions in various categories. In 1951, it was awarded to Escuela de campeones in the category Best Movie, to Pappier for Best Director, and to Carlos Orlando and Homero Manzi for Best Original Fiction Screenplay. It was also nominated for the award in the categories Best Direction of Photography (Alberto Etchebehere) and Best Supporting Actor (Pedro Quartucci); see La Nación, February 1, 1951, 6. The film also won Best Set Design for the work of Abel López Chas by the Argentine Academy of Cinematography Arts and Sciences, which existed from 1941 to 1955. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634945-006

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Escuela de campeones is relevant not only because of the importance of football for Argentinean national identity, but also because it premiered at a crucial political moment in Argentinean history – that is, during the administration of Juan Domingo Perón. The decade between 1946 and 1955 was probably the most intense political period in Argentinean history, resulting in a series of social and cultural transformations that are the subject of debate even today. In those years, through the centralization of the state apparatus, a formerly silenced population emerged as a new political and cultural voice, influenced by the government’s intentions of refounding the republic, baptized by the Perón administration as “la Nueva Argentina” (new Argentina).4 In this context, the government not only made cultural offerings accessible to different sectors of the population, but also widened the definition of what was considered “culture”: mass circulation magazines, radio, films, fashion, or sports were now seen as cultural expressions and artifacts. As the arts were thus redefined, cinema too dealt with new themes and addressed new issues and concerns. In this context, telling a story from the history of football gained broad interest. Escuela de campeones largely summarizes the Peronist rhetoric about the importance of sports for the “New Argentina,” as a resource used by the government for its own ends and purposes. As witness to an era, the film can be thought of as part of a transmission chain that contributes to our present-day ways of seeing and understanding the past. However, the perspectives put into play in the film allow us to analyze the complex construction of the past, where an unorthodox language for historians – fictional cinema – coexists with the Peronist version of the history. The title of the film works in two ways, one literal and the other metaphorical. On the one hand, a prestigious educational institution such as the Buenos Aires English High School was the actual space where football was introduced in Argentina, and its football team consisted of Amateur League champions for eleven years, until 1911 when the entire team retired. On the other hand, football is presented in the film as a device to build virtues such as healthy competition, courage, camaraderie, solidarity, playing by the rules, and respecting authority and peers, as well as an important tool for individual and collective physical development. How does the transmission of the past work when it is reconstructed through images? How does cinema work as a witness to a story that originally took place

4 Claudia Soria, Paola Cortés Rocca, and Gustavo Dieleke, eds., Políticas del sentimiento: El peronismo y la construcción de la Argentina moderna (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2010).

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Fig. 5.1: Escuela de campeones movie poster. Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina.

in 1885, that was narrated in a particular form in 1950, and that can be seen in a particular way in the present? What does cinematographic language bring to the record of the past? What meanings of history, pedagogy, and sports are communicated through images, languages (spoken and filmed), and narration modes? How are form and content intertwined in the transmission of ideas through cinema? And in the writing of history? Following the proposal of Paul Warmington, Angelo Van Gorp, and Ian Grosvenor to think about cinematography as a source and as an object of study, and taking into account the so-called “visual turn” in the history of education, this paper aims to analyze Escuela de campeones as a filmic text, and to challenge the aesthetic and political representations that it brings into play.5 This essay aims

5 Paul Warmington, Angelo Van Gorp, and Ian Grosvenor, “Education in Motion: Uses of Documentary Film in Educational Research,” Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 4 (2011): 457–72, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00309230.2011.588239. For the visual turn, see Inés Dussel, “Historia de la educación y giro visual: Cuatro comentarios para una discusión historiográfica,” in Narrar historias de la educación: Afanes de un oficio, ed. María Esther Aguirre Lora (Mexico City: Ediciones del ISSUE-UNAM, 2015), 451–84.

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not only to contribute to our understanding of how education, sports, and movies were articulated in a given historical period; it also aims to contribute to the debate about the conceptualization and use of images in educational history. In this context, our analysis of this particular film can be useful to address the questions we are asking today, seventy years later, about the link between aesthetic education and Peronism. Finally, this chapter is part of a series of investigations carried out by the authors that inquire into the relationship between cinematography, its pedagogical uses, and the education of bodies and sensibilities.6

Sports and Moral Education through the Lens of the Camera Escuela de campeones includes a (historically fictitious) encounter between Watson Hutton (played by Jorge Rigaud) and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (played by Enrique Muiño), former president of the Republic from 1868 to 1874 and the main promoter of schooling in nineteenth-century Argentina. In this scene, Watson Hutton asks Sarmiento, at the time Superintendent General of Education, to endorse the inclusion of sports teaching as part of the school curriculum. The meeting ends with Sarmiento expressing what can be seen as a pedagogical position on sports and schools: “My advice, mister: teach. Even if it is through kicking, punching, pushing, but teach.”7 This dialogue synthesizes the key message of the film: an alliance between school and sports as a way to educate bodies and sensibilities.

6 See María Silvia Serra, Cine, escuela y discurso pedagógico: articulaciones, inclusiones y objeciones en el siglo XX (Buenos Aires: Teseo, 2011); María Silvia Serra, “Guerras y enemigos en la educación de las masas a través del cine: Argentina, 1910–1935,” paper presented at the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) 36: “Education, War and Peace,” Institute of Education, London, July 23–26, 2014; María Silvia Serra, “Sensibilidad escolar y régimen visual en la configuración del sistema educativo argentino,” in Escolarizar lo sensible: estudios sobre estética escolar (1870–1945), ed. Pablo Pineau et al. (Buenos Aires: Teseo, 2014), 135–58; Eduardo Galak, “Educar (con) la mirada: Discursos políticos y sentidos estéticos sobre la cultura física en noticieros cinematográficos,” in Gregorio Weinberg: escritos en su honor, ed. Gabriela Ossenbach Sauter (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2017), 55–74; Eduardo Galak and Iván Orbuch, “Cine, educación y cine educativo en el primer peronismo: El caso del Departamento de Radioenseñanza y Cinematografía Escolar,” Cine Documental 16 (2017): 49–75. 7 In the film Watson Hutton is addressed as mister, in English, which seems to refer to the fact that he came from the Anglo-Saxon world but also seems to be a way of showing respect informally. Unless otherwise noted, all translation are the authors’.

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Escuela de campeones begins with a group of adult men, former players, gathered in 1950 to reminisce about the old times – that is, the late-nineteenthcentury “present” in which most of the film takes place. They remember the beginnings of the Alumni Club and the difficulties of Alexander Watson Hutton’s trip from Scotland to Argentina. At the very beginning of the film, Watson Hutton’s colleagues in Scotland bid him farewell as he sets out on his adventure. On the boat, he meets his wife-to-be, Margaret Budge, and when he arrives in Buenos Aires in 1881, he is received by an Anglican priest named Smith and members of his community. Watson Hutton is assigned to teach at Saint Andrew’s School, a traditional religious school. Soon the priest and the community resist “Mister” Watson Hutton’s interpretation of teaching as well as his interest in introducing students to football, and therefore he and his wife in 1885 found their own school, the Buenos Aires English High School. The motto of their school is servabo fidem, meaning “I shall keep faith” in Latin. This declaration of principles, which functions as the Watson Huttons’ mandate for schooling practices, makes explicit that all education, in the end, is moral education – in this case, a moral education based on Catholicism. In his (fictional) conversation with Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Watson Hutton asks the superintendent to support his new school endeavor. Watson Hutton says that he wants to teach more than a hundred young people, both in the classroom and through football – a sport that is progressively finding enthusiasts in various institutions, and in which tournaments are being organized. In 1900 the school is invited to be part of the Argentine Association Football League, the first Argentine football championship.8 Since the players are told that the team cannot carry the name of an educational institution, they choose the name “Alumni Club” as an homage to the Buenos Aires English High School. They win ten out of twelve tournaments until 1911 when all team members retire, since new regulations stipulate that they, as students, are no longer allowed to participate. The film gives an account of everything they experienced during this period. A particularly noteworthy event is the fatal accident of a player in a football match and the subsequent loss of support from the community – which is only reversed after the renowned poet Guido Spano and other leading figures support the team publicly.9 The film ends in 1950, with a toast

8 The Argentine Association Football League is the forerunner of the current Asociación de Fútbol Argentino (Argentine Football Association). In fact, Alexander Watson Hutton was its first president, from 1893. 9 Carlos Guido Spano (1827–1918) was an Argentinean romantic poet who held several official positions, including director of the Archivo General de la Nación, Argentina’s national archives, and member of the National Council of Education.

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made by the former players of the Alumni Club to Alexander Watson Hutton, the father of football in Argentina. The film is a reconstruction of the history of football in Argentina before Peronism. In this sense, the flashbacks, as a filmic device, make it possible to show that the importance of this sport in this country is a consequence of a progressive past. It is important to realize, however, that the film reconstructs latenineteenth-century Buenos Aires society from a Peronist point of view. On the one hand, it is worth noting the arrival of British educators to teach, supposedly, the children of the British community in Argentina. When attendance is taken or the students are called by their surnames, the latter are always English, a gesture that is appreciated by Sarmiento when he says, “I admire gringos like you that have something in their hearts.”10 On the other hand, Alexander Watson Hutton and Margaret Budge, from the very moment they disembark from the ship, cross paths with immigrants from different countries of origins, all with ordinary jobs – police officers, sailors, newspaper owners, water carriers, etc. – and clear foreign accents, unlike the British immigrants portrayed in the film. The film also shows two black-skinned women in a public park, carrying jars on their heads, and a black-skinned butler who serves Sarmiento a glass on a platter during his conversation with Watson Hutton. While the film thus presents the complexity of immigration in late-nineteenth-century Argentinean society, it also shows controversial hierarchies between ethnic groups and nationalities. Escuela de campeones was directed by Ralph Pappier, a Chinese who arrived in Argentina as a child and began his artistic career as a set designer in the La Pampa Films studio. There, he was part of a team that produced a significant number of films, rising to fame for his participation as a stage designer in La guerra gaucha (The Gaucho War, 1942), directed by Lucas Demare. Produced and distributed by the now extinct company Inti-Huasi, Escuela de campeones was written by Ernesto Escobar Bavio, Carlos Alberto Orlando, and Homero Manzi. The fact that Manzi, popularly recognized as an author of tango lyrics, also worked as a screenwriter suggests a fertile relationship between cinema, tango, and Peronism.11 10 Gringos is a slang term for foreigners, especially Anglo-American foreigners. Sarmiento admired Anglo-American culture, as can be seen in his invitation to American teachers to be part of the Argentinean project of normal schools. See Rafael Gagliano, “Educación, historia y utopía,” Cuadernos de Pedagogía 1 (1997): 33–40. 11 Cinema, tango, and Peronism were closely linked in those years and represented a way to connect cultural practices and popular traditions with a political ideology. Homero Manzi wrote the lyrics for classics such as “Malena” (with Lucio Demare, 1941) and “Sur” (with Aníbal Troilo, 1948). Other famous tango music composers, such as Enrique Santos Discépolo and Cátulo Castillo, also directed films in this period; see Soria, Cortés Rocca, and Dieleke, Políticas del sentimiento, 17.

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Manzi had been co-writer of La guerra gaucha and co-director, with Pappier, of other films. Manzi and Pappier, as well as other directors, writers, and artists of the same generation, used cinema as a tool to elaborate a mythology that the audience could adopt as their own, developing themes with strong emotional content. According to the film critic Fernando Martín Peña, Escuela de campeones has a strong relationship with Peronist ideas, especially the emphasis on popular culture. In fact, Peña sees it as a sort of “testamentary work,” since it anticipates the “agony of the leader’s partner [Maria Eva Duarte de (“Evita”) Péron], who until the end worries about ‘her’ club boys, the children she never had.”12

Escuela de campeones and Peronist Public Policies on Sports Despite its fictional nature, Escuela de campeones allows us to reflect on the history of a progressively legitimized socio-cultural practice such as sports, and at the same time to understand how educating bodies served to form subjectivities in line with the pedagogical positions of the time. To this end, we propose to approach the motion picture from three possible axes of reading: a) the educational speeches, confronting an old pedagogy reluctant to change with a new way of schooling, featuring modern methods, practices, knowledge, and discourses; b) the progressive conceptualization of sports, in this case football, as a potential pedagogical device to transmit moral, civic, and social values; and c) the construction of a particular Peronist aesthetics, as a way to interpret the past but also to renew the present – not only to tell an aesthetic story, but fundamentally to narrate politics in a specific way. As for the first axis, it needs to be emphasized that Watson Hutton’s educational proposal is presented as contrary to classical pedagogical techniques, such as were used at the traditional Saint Andrew’s School. The Buenos Aires English High School’s modernized proposal aims mainly at changing the teaching methods: the didactic material, the curriculum, the places used for education, and so on. However, Watson Hutton, in the film, suggests that education should transcend school walls – in effect, innovation is fundamentally based on teaching for life, the education of values that takes place not only in the classroom but also in other areas: in the family, in one’s religious community, or on the football field.

12 Fernando Martín Peña, Cien años de cine argentino (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2012), 106.

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This can be clearly seen in Escuela de campeones. For example, in one of the first scenes, when Watson Hutton has just arrived in Buenos Aires, he is welcomed at the harbor by the head teachers of Saint Andrew’s School who, according to the film’s portrayal, do not hide their distrust, expressing both suspicion of the Scottish teacher and skepticism about his new didactic methods. In the carriage that takes them from the harbor to the school, one of the headmistresses asks him what his golf clubs are for, to which Watson Hutton replies that they serve to educate. When, a little bit later, the vehicle shakes and the golf clubs fall on top of the lady, she says contemptuously: “Here you are, sir, your library.” This scene as well as several gestures of the priest in different passages of the film suggests the use of physical violence as a teaching method. Contrary to this position, Watson Hutton, in his many speeches, argues the need to replace those old pedagogical ideas, invoking a sense of compassion and sympathy towards the students. This becomes visible in the scene where, accompanied by Priest Smith, he visits Saint Andrew’s School for the first time: not only is their carriage greeted by a shower of pebbles and mud but, upon entering the classroom, he is also welcomed by a satirical drawing of himself on the blackboard. Priest Smith sends the student who had made the drawing into the corner, making him wear the classic donkey-ears hat.13 However, the student is immediately excused by Watson Hutton, who tells the class that the real problem was the poor quality of the stick figure but that they should not worry about it since they were going to learn in class how to make a better drawing of their teacher. The sequence ends with the student apologizing to Watson Hutton, who dismisses him with a sympathetic smile, and with the new teacher tearing the paper donkey ears into pieces and throwing them into the fireplace. One could thus argue that he is burning this old educational method and instead enlightening with new ideas. It is also possible to interpret this scene as indicating the importance that Peronism gives to childhood, as a central subject of policies aimed at pedagogical renewal.14 It is also worth thinking about the role of Margaret Budge in the film, and about the role of women in general in the history of schools in Argentina. Assigned as a co-teacher to the new teacher, Miss Margaret is the man’s partenaire yet at the same time fulfils a stereotypically feminine role in the pedagogical couple: as companion, confidant, counselor, she is kind to the students and courteous

13 In Argentina the donkey ears are associated with a punishment to humiliate students who do not know something, dressing them symbolically as an ignorant animal. 14 Sandra Carli, Niñez, pedagogía y política: Transformaciones de los discursos acerca de la infancia en la historia de la educación argentina entre 1880 y 1955 (Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2002).

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Fig. 5.2: Frame from Escuela de campeones.

to Watson Hutton. In this sense, the role played by actress Silvana Roth emphasizes the two dominant moral mandates for women in late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth-century Argentina: wife and mother. In other words, beyond the love story between Alexander Watson Hutton and Margaret Budge that sustains the narrative of the film, the film makes it possible to interpret the role of women in the turn-of-the-century schools as an oppositional figure to priests and other male educators, sometimes passive and sometimes active in the schooling of students – closer to the historical image of the teachers as second mothers. The second axis for reading the film is to understand sports as a pedagogical instrument for teaching not only ways of doing, but mainly ways of being.15 Indeed, the history of Argentinean physical education shows that until the 1930s there was strong governmental resistance to introduce sports practices into the school curriculum.16 Until 1938, the official gymnastics method for all educational establishments, the Sistema Argentino de Educación Física (Argentinean System of Physical Education), which established regulations for gymnastics

15 For an elaboration of this idea, see Eduardo Galak, “Training the Eye: Sportisation and Aestheticization Processes of the Earliest Olympic Games,” paper presented at the conference “Deporte en el proceso de estetización: Sentidos estéticos y políticos en las imágenes en movimiento de los Juegos Olímpicos,” Universidad Técnica de Ambato, Ecuador, June 2019. 16 Ángela Aisenstein and Pablo Scharagrodsky, Tras las huellas de la Educación Física Escolar Argentina: Cuerpo, género y pedagogía, 1880–1950 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Prometeo, 2006).

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and games, excluded sports from schools.17 However, during the first Perón government in the 1940s, sports was introduced into the school curriculum and consequently widely disseminated. This pedagogization of sport practice involved the definition of sports as a pedagogical tool for the transmission of values such as solidarity and sacrifice, as well as playing by the rules and respecting peers and authority.18 Escuela de campeones is therefore a good example of what Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning have defined as “sportization process,” arguing that the modern institutionalization of sports is analogous to a civilizing process.19 Hence, it is not surprising that the film starts with an intertitle that reads as follows: “Alumni, the old and glorious Alumni, was born in the Buenos Aires English High School. Its red and white insignia was the symbol of fair play and loyal courage.” A clear moral meaning is thus ascribed not only to the importance of teaching sports in school but also to the filming, montage, and projection of images about it. It is also important to note that the concept propagated by this intertitle – the idea of fair play – is more typical of 1950 than of 1880. And it is no less important to note that Oscar Ivanissevich, Minister of Education from 1948 until 1950, as well as Rector of the University of Buenos Aires from 1946 until 1949 and Evita Duarte’s personal doctor, played as center forward for the Buenos Aires English High School in 1906. But undoubtedly the most eloquent scene in this regard is the aforementioned meeting between Alexander Watson Hutton and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Although we do not have any information about whether this conversation or this meeting actually took place, it is interesting to think about the ways of regulating violence in sports and the way this was perceived: “Even if it is through kicking, punching, pushing, but teach.” As Elias and Dunning postulate, the sportization process can be thought of as a civilizing process, and that implies the possibility of making pedagogical use of regulated violence.20

17 Eduardo Galak, “Del dicho al hecho (y viceversa): El largo trecho de la construcción del campo de la formación profesional de la Educación Física en Argentina. Legalidades, legitimidades, discursos y prácticas en la institucionalización de su oficio entre finales del siglo xix y el primer tercio del XX” (PhD diss., Universidad Nacional de La Plata, 2012). 18 Eduardo Galak, Educar los cuerpos al servicio de la política: Cultura física, higienismo y raza en Argentina y Brasil (Buenos Aires: Ediciones UNDAV-Biblos, 2016). 19 See Elias, “An Essay on Sports and Violence.” 20 Elias, “An Essay on Sports and Violence.”

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Interpretations and Receptions After its premiere on December 19, 1950, Escuela de campeones ran for a period of six weeks at the Broadway cinema in the city of Buenos Aires and received positive reviews in Clarín and La Prensa, the country’s two most important newspapers.21 Although the film seems not to have had a massive audience, the story it tells was also narrated in another visual medium: Aventuras, a weekly magazine “for men and women” whose main idea was to tell fictional stories as comics. Aventuras came out every Monday with a number of texts presenting a contemporary film, usually illustrated on its cover. Its February 19, 1951, issue was dedicated to the feature film Escuela de campeones, with the title page showing a drawing of the Alumni team, wearing their characteristic vertically striped white-and-red shirts, and a subheadline indicating that it includes the complete film starring Jorge Rigaud. Published in the section “Biblioteca sintética ‘Aventuras’” (Synthetic library “Adventures”), the unsigned article shows a film still of a smiling Alexander Watson Hutton with Margaret Budge gazing into his eyes. Next to this image a box indicates that the comics were based on the film adaptation of the script by Manzi and Orlando. With drawings of scenes from the film and more text than illustrations, the story unfolds on eleven pages, showing the problems Watson Hutton had to overcome in his efforts to introduce football as educational content. If Ralph Pappier’s film already presents a moralist discourse about the use of sports as a device for spreading not only a certain knowledge about doing but also a certain knowledge about being, the magazine Aventuras goes even further to define sports as a clear ideal of being. “Noble life,” “great man,” “gentlemen,” “lack of interest and nobility,” “manly” are some of the terms used in the first part of

21 The newspaper Clarín reviewed the film as “a clean, crystalline evocation of the beginnings of football,” where “the story is quite adequately told, but sometimes overly cold in the way events were presented.” The review continues to note that the film did not emphasize the human dimension because the director feared it would be a distraction if the emotions of the characters themselves were unduly focused upon. However, in films of this type the human aspect was an indispensable element: “Without its presence, the action declines and the interest is lost. Nobility, cleanliness, sporting decency dominate every moment of this carefully crafted narrative”; see “Últimos Estrenos: ‘Escuela de Campeones’: Intensa historia de una pasión deportiva,” Clarin, December 20, 1950. On the same day, La Prensa published an article that was more descriptive than critical, saying that “the film has been made with noble purposes”; see “Fue estrenada ayer ‘Escuela de Campeones,’” La Prensa, December 20, 1950. The newspaper La Nación first announced the movie’s premiere in its December 5 issue; see “Próximos estrenos,” La Nación, December 5, 1950. According to later issues, the film was shown at the Broadway cinema until January 24, 1951.

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Fig. 5.3: Aventuras cover page, February 19, 1951. Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina.

the article. In fact, the first frames present a dialogue between rival football players, with Watson Hutton preaching: “We must teach them how to play correctly,” and Smith the priest saying: “It is a game for men!,” to which Watson Hutton replies: “and gentlemen!” The comics panels are almost exact reproductions of various scenes of the film: Watson Hutton’s arrival at St. Andrew’s School; the criticism of traditional methods “in these four peeling and old walls”; the scene in which a student is forced to put on the donkey ears and Watson Hutton’s speech on modern pedagogy; the football practice on Sunday commented on by “a black woman who was watching the show and speaking to a typical colonial water carrier, saying that this was a thing of heretical gringos”; the police intervention that follows on the black woman’s comment and debates as to whether football is a game “or just a mess”; the meeting with Sarmiento and the latter’s exhortation to teach – if necessary, by punching, kicking, and shoving. Frame by numbered frame, the texts are a series of speeches about the relationship between the teaching of a sport and the teaching of moral values, interpreted as a metaphysical

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ideal. For example, frame 18 quotes from an article published in the newspaper El Tiempo, which states that “football is a wild game of medieval origin, and the English teacher will not succeed in imposing it on our environment. This man should know that Argentines will never adapt to this brutal custom and that we are willing to defend the culture of our children.”22 Leaving aside the fact that this was a patently false prediction, it is interesting to observe the relationship between football, the act of playing, and childhood on the one hand and the interpretation of something English as barbarian and something criollo as civilized on the other hand.23 The same newspaper is quoted elsewhere as saying that “kicking the ball stiffens the brain,” which again makes explicit the classic bodymind fragmentation, positing the former as secondary to the latter.24 At the same time, the film’s moralist discourses are permeated by a duty to be active: the key word is effort. When Watson Hutton is dismissed from Saint Andrew’s School for his revolutionary ideas, when he is about to give in to the temptation of closing the school because of its debts, or when he is afraid that the Alumni Club will not win the championship – in all of these cases, sacrifice seems necessary. As stated in the comics, “there is little to admire and much to do.”25 Morality and effort are combined when, facing defeat against the powerful English team from Southampton, Watson Hutton tells the criollos: “When you were English High School boys, I taught you how to play – but not to make players out of you, but men. Sport is like life. It is made up of triumphs and failures, and the contrasts build moderation. True courage is measured in defeats.”26 The sixty frames that make up the Aventuras article can be seen as a different kind of reception of the film: just two months after its premiere, the film was already featured in a mass-circulation publication highlighting the issues and themes that the article’s author thought to be most important. If the film was not a resounding blockbuster, its re-release in the language of comics can be seen as a testament to the media’s effort to link sports and moral education.

22 Aventuras, February 19, 1951, frame 18. 23 “Criollo” refers to a way of life born in the Americas but with Old World roots. In Argentina, it is a byword for that which is absolutely Argentinean – the culture of the countryside and the gaucho. 24 Aventuras, February 19, 1951, frame 27. 25 Aventuras, February 19, 1951, frame 56. 26 Aventuras, February 19, 1951, frame 49.

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Peronist Aesthetics, Popular Masses, Sports, and Bodies What aesthetic ideas are presented in Escuela de campeones? What are the links between the narrative proposed by this feature film and the political ideology in vogue during those years? Is it possible to think of this filmic record as part of a Peronist aesthetics? To answer these questions, it is essential to situate ourselves in the present moment. We should start by recognizing the difficulty of presenting a chronologically linear reading. From its founding as a political movement in the 1940s to the present, Peronism has been characterized by constant redefinition and reinvention, recovering in its various manifestations elements of the mystique of 1946 but at the same time realigning with the historical, political, social conjecture of more recent times. Lately, important works have been published on Peronism and its cultural operations, including both cinema and its specific way of understanding the education of the body and corporal practices.27 The film Escuela de campeones fits that interpretation – not only because it presents an event that recollects the past but takes place during the first Peronist regime (1946–1955) and because the film was produced and premiered during this period, but also because the film allows us to think about the political and aesthetic ideas dominant in those years. Principally, the film functioned as a popular way of reconfiguring football and making it part of Argentinean culture by saying that it propagated the same values as those held by Peronism.28 One example is the film’s representation of Sarmiento, portraying him as a visionary of Peronist ideals. Moreover, Escuela de campeones is a fictional and emotive story, told in a simple and linear cinematographic language. As such, it can be considered a successful example of Peronist cinema, as suggested by Gonzalo Aguilar: “There can be no reflection on cinema and politics during the first Peronism if one does not consider the ‘emotional perspective’ or the chemistry

27 See, among others, Soria, Cortés Rocca, and Dieleke, Politicas del sentimiento, and Carina González, ed., Peronismo y representación: Escritura, imágenes y políticas de un pueblo (Buenos Aires: Final Abierto, 2015). As for the political use of audio-visual material in the Peronist period, see Clara Kriger, Cine y peronismo: el estado en escena (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2009); Eduardo Galak and Iván Orbuch, “Cine, educación y cine educativo en el primer peronismo: El caso del Departamento de Radioenseñanza y Cinematografía Escolar,” Cine Documental 16 (2017): 49–75. 28 Cristina Pons, “Cuerpos sublimes: el deporte en la retórica de la Nueva Argentina,” in Soria, Cortés Rocca, and Dieleke, Políticas del sentimiento, 49–65.

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of affections as they are presented in the classic film narrative with its fictional self-sufficiency.”29 Thus, the film can be seen as part of the sentimental education of the masses. Even though this type of education does not necessarily have explicit political contents, it is generally associated with popular culture as an aesthetic resource. Precisely for this reason we consider Escuela de campeones as part of a Peronist aesthetics – that is, as part of a type of societal perception of Peronism closely linked to Perón’s ideology. During Peronism, the popular sphere was, at least rhetorically, considered synonymous with the cultural sphere, as opposed to the idea of a single or elite culture. From a visual point of view, Escuela de campeones is a clear example of this aesthetic turn, recalling the arrival of the most popular sport in Argentina and highlighting its role in building a “New Argentina.”

Some Final Thoughts Doing a present-day analysis of a fictional film from 1950, based on a true story that took place at the end of the nineteenth century, made it possible for us to understand different types of political (educational) and aesthetic discourses in this later period. The film itself, in its initial intertitle, refers to itself as “evocative,” “a tribute to memory and a memento.” The 1950 reconstruction of the historical events at the beginning of the twentieth century is directly linked to the political context in the 1950s and, at the same time, is related to a particular political voice of enunciation: Peronism. The Peronist reading of what happened in 1885 puts an emphasis both on the debates about new teaching methods and on the importance of sport in educational institutions. The alliance between sport and school education proposed by Peronism is sustained by the incorporation of didactical materials, such as the recognition of rules, the relevance of systematic physical exercise, and the centrality of individual effort as a synonym of collective success. Also, this alliance is galvanized through the moral values of trust, chivalry, honor, teamwork, respect for authority and honesty, collectively seen as fair play. Despite much resistance, the incorporation and spread of school sports had taken place by the 1940s and, with Peronism as the governmental ideology, can be described as a pedagogization

29 Gonzalo Aguilar, “El cine durante el primer peronismo: entre las emociones, la doctrina y el entretenimiento,” in González, Peronismo y representación, 414.

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through sports.30 In this context, football was interpreted as a way to acknowledge Argentinean culture. A year after the film’s release, the Aventuras magazine recovered some of these dimensions and reaffirmed them through another popular language: that of the comic strip. In Aventuras, the moral discourse of the film was further radicalized – for example, by emphasizing the figure of Watson Hutton as noble, disinterested gentleman, a “great man.” It is interesting to think about the metahistorical discourse proposed by the film and its interpretation in Aventuras, since what was shown as innovative in 1951 is clearly no longer so today, more than half a century later. This allows us to understand different levels of what was interpreted as traditional or as modern in the 1950s: two terms that play a recurring role in Argentinean educational discourses. These perspectives on the possibilities of Peronism as a political movement and as a cultural project are useful in viewing the 1950s away from the distracting perspectives that are part of the modern-day rhetoric in Argentina regarding Peronism. In particular, Escuela de Campeones reflects aesthetic, ethical, and political discourses where sports, by demonstrating how to “be male” and how to live in a society where triumphs and defeats are a part of life, helps to better adapt to the particular ways of living in the New Argentina.

Bibliography Aguilar, Gonzalo. “El cine durante el primer peronismo: entre las emociones, la doctrina y el entretenimiento.” In Peronismo y representación: Escritura, imágenes y políticas de un pueblo, edited by Carina González, 413–36. Buenos Aires: Final Abierto, 2015. Aisenstein, Ángela, and Pablo Scharagrodsky. Tras las huellas de la Educación Física Escolar Argentina: Cuerpo, género y pedagogía, 1880–1950. Buenos Aires: Editorial Prometeo, 2006. Carli, Sandra. Niñez, pedagogía y política: Transformaciones de los discursos acerca de la infancia en la historia de la educación argentina entre 1880 y 1955. Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2002. Dussel, Inés. “Historia de la educación y giro visual: Cuatro comentarios para una discusión historiográfica.” In Narrar historias de la educación: Afanes de un oficio, edited by Aguirre Lora and María Esther, 451–84. Mexico City: Ediciones del ISSUE-UNAM, 2015. Elias, Norbert. “An Essay on Sport and Violence.” In Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process, edited by Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, 150–74. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Gagliano, Rafael. “Educación, historia y utopía.” Cuadernos de Pedagogía 1 (1997): 33–40.

30 See Galak, Educar los cuerpos al servicio de la política.

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Galak, Eduardo. “Del dicho al hecho (y viceversa). El largo trecho de la construcción del campo de la formación profesional de la Educación Física en Argentina. Legalidades, legitimidades, discursos y prácticas en la institucionalización de su oficio entre finales del siglo xix y el primer tercio del XX.” PhD diss., Universidad Nacional de La Plata, 2012. Galak, Eduardo. “Educar (con) la mirada: Discursos políticos y sentidos estéticos sobre la cultura física en noticieros cinematográficos.” In Gregorio Weinberg: escritos en su honor, edited by Gabriela Ossenbach Sauter, 55–74. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2017. Galak, Eduardo. Educar los cuerpos al servicio de la política: Cultura física, higienismo y raza en Argentina y Brasil. Buenos Aires: Ediciones UNDAV-Biblos, 2016. Galak, Eduardo. “Training the Eye: Sportisation and Aestheticization Processes of the Earliest Olympic Games.” Paper presented at the conference “Deporte en el proceso de estetización: Sentidos estéticos y políticos en las imágenes en movimiento de los Juegos Olímpicos,” Universidad Técnica de Ambato, Ecuador, June 2019. Galak, Eduardo, and Iván Orbuch. “Cine, educación y cine educativo en el primer peronismo: El caso del Departamento de Radioenseñanza y Cinematografía Escolar.” Cine Documental 16 (2017): 49–75. González, Carina, ed. Peronismo y representación: Escritura, imágenes y políticas de un pueblo. Buenos Aires: Final Abierto, 2015. Kriger, Clara. Cine y peronismo: el estado en escena. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2009. Lupo, Víctor. Historia política del deporte argentino (1610–2002). Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2004. Pappier, Ralph, dir. Escuela de campeones. Buenos Aires: Inti-Huasi, 1950, 95 min. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wWf6hg0ypI&t=2107s. Peña, Fernando Martín. Cien años de cine argentino. Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2012. Pons, Cristina. “Cuerpos sublimes: el deporte en la retórica de la Nueva Argentina.” In Políticas del sentimiento: El peronismo y la construcción de la Argentina moderna, edited by Claudia Soria, Paola Cortés Rocca, and Gustavo Dieleke, 41–65. Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2010. Serra, María Silvia. Cine, escuela y discurso pedagógico: articulaciones, inclusiones y objeciones en el siglo XX. Buenos Aires: Teseo, 2011. Serra, María Silvia. “Guerras y enemigos en la educación de las masas a través del cine: Argentina, 1910–1935.” Paper presented at the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) 36: “Education, War and Peace,” Institute of Education, London, July 23–26, 2014. Serra, María Silvia. “Sensibilidad escolar y régimen visual en la configuración del sistema educativo argentino.” In Escolarizar lo sensible: estudios sobre estética escolar (1870–1945), edited by Pablo Pineau, 153–58. Buenos Aires: Teseo, 2014. Soria, Claudia, Paola Cortés Rocca, and Gustavo Dieleke, eds. Políticas del sentimiento: El peronismo y la construcción de la Argentina moderna. Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2010. Warmington, Paul, Angelo Van Gorp, and Ian Grosvenor. “Education in Motion: Uses of Documentary Film in Educational Research.” Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 4 (2011): 457–72. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00309230.2011.588239.

Part 2: Images as Humanitarian Action

Siân Roberts

Chapter 6 Seeing, Feeling, Educating: British and American Quakers and the Visual Record of Humanitarian Relief Work in Russia and Poland, 1916–1924 I have a child’s photograph before me. There is nothing, childlike about it, little that is human. It is stamped with great suffering, with starvation. This is the photograph of one of hundreds of children who have perished, of thousands who still live and suffer in Eastern Europe . . . ‘Take her photograph, to-morrow she will be dead’ said her mother. ‘I will take her photograph’ answered the relief worker, ‘but to-morrow she will be better. Next week I will photograph her again, and every week until she is quite well. We will see how quickly she improves.’ But the child died, and so I have my photograph stamped with great suffering, with starvation.1 No normal person could see these children without feeling the appeal they made for a new world order in which such things would not be possible.2

These extracts were written by two women who worked as part of humanitarian relief in Europe organized by the Friends’ Emergency and War Victims’ Relief Committee (hereafter FEWVRC), the humanitarian arm of the British Religious Society of Friends also known as Quakers.3 Between 1914 and 1924 the FEWVRC provided relief for non-combatants in several theaters of war and famine, including France, Belgium, Holland, Russia, Austria, Germany, and Poland, as part of its faith-inspired witness for peace and international understanding.4

1 Joice M. Nankivell, “A Child’s Photograph,” typescript article written for the FEWVRC in Poland [c. 1923], Barrow Family Papers. 2 Florence Barrow, typescript journal record of a visit to Germany, September 1919, p. 2, Barrow Family Papers. Another copy can be found in the official FEWVRC archive at the Library of the Religious Society of Friends in London (hereafter LRSF), YM/MfS/FEWVRC/MISSIONS/10/1/6/3. 3 The Friends’ War Victims’ Relief Committee had delivered humanitarian relief in Europe during the Franco-Prussian War and was re-established in 1914. It amalgamated with the Friends Emergency Committee (formed to assist “enemy aliens” in Britain in 1914) to become the Friends’ Emergency and War Victims’ Relief Committee in 1919. As FEWVRC is the form used by the LRSF in archival catalogues, that is the acronym used throughout this chapter. 4 For an overview of Quaker relief in this period, see A. Ruth Fry, A Quaker Adventure: The Story of Nine Years Relief and Reconstruction (New York: Frank-Maurice Inc., 1926); John Ormerod Greenwood, Quaker Encounters Volume 1: Friends and Relief (York: William Sessions https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634945-007

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The first extract was written as part of an awareness and fundraising article by Australian writer and relief worker Joice Nankivell Loch who worked in the publicity department of the FEWVRC relief mission in Poland in the early 1920s.5 The second was written by the woman who led the mission in Poland, Birmingham Quaker Florence Barrow, in a journal recording her investigative mission to assess humanitarian needs in Germany in September 1919. Taken together, they capture the elements that provide the focus of this chapter, the extensive use made of the visual by the Friends’ relief teams in this period to enable humanitarian intervention and to educate the public about the consequences of war and the need for change. The following chapter will map the emotional geographies embodied in two different collections of visual material. Initially the chapter will explore images of the work in Russia and Poland that are digitally available through an online exhibit entitled Quaker Relief in Europe 1914–22 originating from the organizational archive of the American Friends Service Committee (the humanitarian service of the American Quaker Meetings that worked with the British FEWVRC from 1917, hereafter AFSC) held by The Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania.6 The focus will then shift to consider the personal visual archive preserved by Florence Barrow of her work in Russia and Poland and held by her family. The argument will also draw to a lesser extent on the institutional records of the FEWVRC, preserved and catalogued as part of the broader organizational archive of British Quakerism in the Library of the Religious Society of Friends in London, and a silent film entitled New Worlds for Old made in 1923 at the behest of the FEWVRC.7 These bodies of visual materials will be

Ltd., 1975). For a history of the AFSC, see Gregory A. Barnes, A Centennial History of the American Friends Service Committee (Philadelphia: Friends Press, 2016). On Russia specifically, see Richenda Scott, Quakers in Russia (London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1964). 5 Joice Mary Nankivell Loch (1887–1982) hailed originally from Queensland and married the journalist Frederick Sydney Loch in 1919. After spending time in London and Ireland the couple joined the Quaker team in Poland. The Lochs were not Quakers but spent a lifetime working for Quaker relief from the early 1920s. Among their publications was a jointly authored book, The River of a Hundred Ways: Life in the War-Devastated Areas of Eastern Poland (1924), which was dedicated to Florence Barrow. For more biographical information, see Ros Pesman, “Loch, Joice Mary Nankivell (1887–1982),” Australian Dictionary of National Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2012, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ loch-joice-mary-nankivell-14347/text25418. 6 Available online at http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/friends/AFSC/lanternslides.htm and http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/SC_Relief. 7 The film is held on behalf of the LRSF by the British Film Institute. For a synopsis, see http://collections-search.bfi.org.uk/web/Details/ChoiceFilmWorks/150027605.

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analyzed to explore the following questions: How did British and American Quakers use the visual as an educational intervention? How might considering these geographically dispersed collections together enhance our understanding of Quaker representational practices and of the pedagogical aims of individual actors?

Countering the Apathy of Mankind: Quakers, the First World War, and Visualizing Humanitarianism Recent historical research has identified the First World War as a significant event in the history of humanitarianism, and as a formative moment in the use of visual propaganda by agencies providing aid and relief.8 Like other agencies, Quakers made extensive use of the visual from the outset of their relief work, beginning with the FEWVRC’s involvement in Europe from autumn 1914 and the AFSC’s formation after America entered the war in 1917, and this activity has left a sizable visual archival legacy in Quaker institutional collections on both sides of the Atlantic. The images available online hail from the collections of the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College and comprise digitized copies of almost a thousand glass lantern slides depicting the relief work of American and British Quaker teams in France, Russia, Serbia, Poland, Austria, and Germany. The contextual information available online specifies that the original lantern slides were donated to Swarthmore Library as a gift by the AFSC in about 1930, and that all the slides in the collection are available in the digital exhibit.9 A set of notes written by an archivist provides invaluable context, explaining the creation of the original lantern slides by the AFSC.10 The notes explain that the AFSC solicited images from relief workers in the field to be returned to the AFSC’s office in Philadelphia, where sets of slides with associated 8 See, for example, Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (New York: Cornell University Press, 2011); Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism 1918–1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Kevin Rozario, “‘Delicious Horrors’: Mass Culture, the Red Cross, and the Appeal of Modern American Humanitarianism,” American Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2003): 417–55. 9 See “American Friends Service Committee Lantern Slides of World War I Relief Work,” Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College, http://archives.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/repositories/7/ resources/9738. 10 Lauren Stokes, “How Were the AFSC Lantern Slides Used and How Did They Come Into Existence?,” Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College, http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/ friends/AFSC/Stokes_Notes.htm.

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lecture notes were prepared and distributed to Friends’ groups to use in fundraising presentations. The images were also used for other related publicity purposes such as fundraising pamphlets and reports. The rhetorical devices used in the digitized AFSC images focus on two intersecting aspects. Firstly, they illustrate the suffering to emphasize the need for humanitarian intervention before, secondly, demonstrating the efficiency of the relief efforts and the beneficial effects on the lives of the recipients. The images of both Russia and Poland, which are the focus of this chapter, include numerous representations of ragged individual children or barefoot groups shown with original titles such as “A Ragged Russian Boy”11 and “Hundreds of thousands like these.”12 These are contrasted with images of children being clothed13 and fed,14 receiving medical treatment,15 or cared for in homes16 and school classrooms17 provided by the Friends. Like comparable agencies in the period (such as Save the Children with which the Quakers collaborated), they utilize a range of recognizable tropes which are also echoed in other Quaker images of relief work in Europe during and after the war. In particular these include a focus on the symbolic figure of the innocent and suffering child and the woman as mother and victim.18 The historian Michael Barnett has described humanitarianism as “a morally complicated creature . . . defined by the passions, politics and power of its times even as it tries to rise above them,” and the moral complexities and ambiguities involved in humanitarian use of the visual to depict suffering or physical pain inflicted on the bodies of distant “others” has been the subject of much scholarly attention.19 It has been argued that by this period, the influence of an increasingly sensationalist mass media had encouraged relief agencies to utilize visual representations of suffering that were increasingly disturbing in an effort to engage potential donors who were positioned as consumers in a humanitarian market, and that this resulted in a voyeuristic or “pornographic” form

11 http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/SC_Relief/id/2134/rec/7. 12 http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/SC_Relief/id/2138/rec/49. 13 http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/SC_Relief/id/2112/rec/6. 14 http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/SC_Relief/id/2532/rec/32. 15 http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/SC_Relief/id/2539/rec/36. 16 http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/SC_Relief/id/2537/rec/24. 17 http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/SC_Relief/id/2127/rec/8. 18 Heide Fehrenbach, “Children and Other Civilians: Photography and the Politics of Humanitarian Image-Making,” in Humanitarian Photography: A History, ed. Heide Fehrenbach and David Rodogno (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 165–99. 19 Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 7. See, for example, Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography, Jane Lydon, Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

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of spectatorship.20 However well-meaning their intentions, the Quaker agencies were not exempt from the pressure to raise funds through the use of increasingly disturbing or stereotypical imagery, and some of the images of children in Russia in particular are among the most graphic in the Friends’ visual archive. Horrific images of small children suffering the effects of famine can be viewed in the online lantern slide collection and are duplicated to some extent in albums preserved in the Friends’ Library in London.21 A particularly graphic image showing the emaciated naked body of a young girl leaning against a doorway, and identified in the caption only as a seven-year-old orphan, is one of the most disquieting.22 Without further context it is impossible to know if she was naked when the photographer encountered her or whether any clothing was removed to emphasize her emaciated body. It was not unusual to use the naked form to illustrate particular effects, and Quaker relief workers in Austria in the immediate post-war period made use of images of children whose bodies were deformed by rickets and who were similarly pictured naked.23 The use of such images was prompted by the sheer horror and volume of need encountered by the relief workers, and the necessity in this particular context to counter political opposition among the public to assisting Russia, and in Austria’s case to the fundraising for the children of former enemies.24 The relief workers were also drawing on tropes and techniques that were familiar to them from earlier humanitarian and philanthropic campaigns. Scholars have ascribed the origins of humanitarianism to the development of a culture of sensibility and sympathy in the eighteenth century, and educational and political campaigns focusing on human suffering and its physical traces on the body have been

20 Rozario, “‘Delicious Horrors’”; Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995): 303–34; Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin Books, 2004). 21 It is difficult to assess the extent of the duplication at present as some of the London images are in need of conservation and at the time of writing were inaccessible due to their poor physical condition. 22 http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/SC_Relief/id/2158/rec/3. The same image can be found in LRSF YM/MfS/FEWVRC/PICS/7/1. 23 See, for example, http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/SC_Relief/id/ 2529/rec/10. 24 On public sentiment and political opposition to campaigns supporting the relief of Russia, see Ellen Boucher, “Cultivating Internationalism: Save the Children Fund, Public Opinion and the Meaning of Child Relief, 1919–24,” in Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic NationBuilding in Britain between the Wars, ed. Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2011), 169–88.

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connected to strategies employed by the abolitionist campaigns in particular.25 Despite their relatively small number, Quakers played a leading role in these campaigns, and the literary scholar Brycchan Carey has argued that from the mid-eighteenth century Quakers shared very particular discourses and rhetorical tropes as part of broader abolitionist discourses of sensibility in which appeals to emotion stimulated the audience to action.26 As technology developed, the visual became an increasingly essential component in the suite of rhetorical devices employed by abolitionists. Quaker women were very active in these campaigns, and indeed several of Florence Barrow’s female relatives played a leading role in the earliest and most influential of the British women’s antislavery organizations, the Birmingham Ladies Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves founded in 1825. The Birmingham society used the visual to great effect, commissioning a local artist, Samuel Lines, to produce powerful engravings that privileged the suffering of enslaved women in particular and disseminating these images alongside affective poetry and other texts.27 This tradition was also adopted as part of the visual practice of Christian missionaries, and it was a British missionary, Alice Harris, who produced and disseminated the photographs of mutilated bodies in the Congo Free State in the early 1900s that were widely reproduced in a range of media as part of the Congo Reform Campaign.28 Images were used by missionaries from a range of religious denominations including Quakers, and the annual reports of the Friends’ Foreign Mission Society, for example, regularly used images representing the positive results of their educational and welfare work in various global contexts as both a fundraising and pedagogical tool.

25 Barnett, Empire of Humanity; Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain”; Sharon Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). For a useful summary of the literature on the relationship between eighteenth-century sensibility and the development of humanitarian thinking, see Lydon, Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire, chapter 1. 26 Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Brycchan Carey, From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1657–1761 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 27 Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 2015), 47–116, esp. 57; Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), 43, 45, 97–98. The images used by the Birmingham Ladies Society can be seen at Birmingham Archives and Collections, Library of Birmingham, MS 3173. For an example, see https://www.search.connectinghistories.org.uk/Details.aspx?&ResourceID=357&Pa geIndex=1&KeyWord=slavery 28 Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera; Kevin Grant, “The Limits of Exposure: Atrocity Photographs in the Congo Reform Campaign,” in Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography, 64–88.

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Another characteristic that the Quaker relief workers shared with missionaries was the use of the lantern slide lecture as a means of disseminating their message.29 When looking at the images presented in the AFSC online exhibit the present-day viewer needs to remember that this is not how they would have originally been seen by an audience. The current exhibit includes very little accompanying context, other than a brief caption, an estimated date, and very brief details as to provenance, and even the contextual notes referred to earlier are not immediately obvious to the user unless the collection is accessed via the Swarthmore Collection website rather than from the landing page for the online exhibit. Originally, however, they would have been encountered within the context of a lecture, a collective affective experience in which the visual was combined with auditory vocal testimonies that were specifically scripted to deliver particular complementary “lessons,” and therefore the meaning received and constructed by the audience was shaped by the performance as a whole. By this method geographical and cultural distance was reduced, and the idea of a relationship between those at home and the suffering “others” in distant parts of the world was reinforced.30 Sliwinski has argued that the affect produced in the audience during a lantern slide performance was a particularly effective means of drawing attention to human rights violations, and the same argument is equally applicable to the desire of the relief worker to produce a feeling of shared humanity and inspire a sense of collective responsibility for the ease of suffering.31 Newspaper reports of Quaker relief lectures provide a glimpse of the combined power of the lantern slide and voiced testimony. In April 1922, for example, the FEWVRC’s May Brinsley Richards gave a lantern slide lecture on the Russian famine in Penzance, Cornwall, where the reporter noted that she “studiously refrained from indulging in any dramatic flights of oratory.” Indeed, she had no need to do so, as the author considered her recitation of the “tragic” and “appalling” facts to be sufficient, and “when these were supplemented by actual photographs of the people, and particularly the little children, humanity could not remain untouched.”32 However, this use of graphic images of suffering was far from being only a strategic or financially motivated decision to produce and manipulate an affective response in the audience. It is clear from the recollections of relief workers in the field that they were personally profoundly affected and moved by the

29 Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera, 57–81. 30 Sandy Callister, “Being There: War, Women and Lantern Slides,” Rethinking History 12, no. 3 (2008): 317–37. 31 Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera, 79. 32 The Cornishman and Cornish Telegraph, 12 April 1922, 3.

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very traumatic scenes that they encountered. They understood the affective power of the images because of their own embodied and emotional responses to the original scenes, and this understandably resulted in a desire to bear witness, and a sense of responsibility to share the knowledge as a means of countering public apathy. In recalling her horror and feelings of helplessness, the non-Quaker journalist and suffrage activist Evelyn Sharp who travelled to Russia on behalf of the FEWVRC alluded directly to the suffering of Christ, language that would resonate powerfully with a Quaker and Christian audience: Some [children] looked as if they could not survive: these sat crouched against the wainscoting in corners, with old, dead faces, or stood up against the wall with outstretched arms, like one boy I saw, who looked as if he were being crucified for the apathy of mankind.33

Florence Barrow wrote that some of the scenes she witnessed in German children’s hospitals in 1919 were “almost more than one could bear” while her fellow traveler on that journey Frederick Merttens recalled that the sight of malnourished children in the Berlin hospital “forced tears into our eyes, and we turned away too overcome for words.”34 His companion on the visit, Birmingham Quaker Edwin Gilbert, was so moved that he responded by immediately writing a letter to a British newspaper describing the scene. As Fehrenbach and Rodogno point out, the humanitarian sector was not one monolithic homogenous movement; different rhetorical strategies could run in parallel within the same organization, and individual actors could make different representational and pedagogical choices to their colleagues or to their governing hierarchy.35 While this latter aspect is true of any organization dependent on voluntary workers, it is arguably even more applicable to a faith group which prized the agency of individual conscience above adherence to hierarchical structures and policies. In the next part of the chapter, therefore, the emphasis will shift to explore the personal response of one such individual, Florence Barrow. It will consider how her visual archive illuminates Quaker visual practice, and how it makes explicit the pedagogical choices that she made during her relief work in Russia and Poland.

33 Quoted in Fry, A Quaker Adventure, 170. 34 Copy of letter, Florence Barrow in Berlin to Miss Braithwaite, 28 September 1919, LRSF, FEWVRC/MISSIONS/10/1/6/3; letter from Frederick Merttens in Berlin to the FEWVRC London office, 13 September 1919, LRSF, FEWVRC/MISSIONS/10/1/6/10. 35 Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography, 8–9.

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Imagining the Future: Appeals for a New World Order If the First World War was a turning point in the history of humanitarianism, the same can equally be said of the life trajectory of Florence Mary Barrow. Born in Birmingham in 1876, she hailed from an affluent Quaker family that had a strong tradition of activism in local philanthropy, civic politics, and global humanitarian causes. As an unmarried middle-class woman Florence engaged in voluntary social work with a number of charitable organizations, motivated by her faith and family culture. She was also an educator as a volunteer teacher of adult education classes for working class women, a lifelong commitment that began in her teens. The War broadened her sphere of activism, and she became one of a large number of Quaker relief workers, many of them women, assisting non-combatants in Europe and beyond. Greenwood, in his history of Quaker relief, estimated that of a total of 473 FEWVRC workers in Europe during 1914–18, 156 were women with a further 880 women active in relief in the post-war period to 1923.36 The majority were British and American volunteers, with small numbers from other nationalities and some non-Quakers who were in sympathy with the Friends’ ethos. Florence’s war-time trajectory resulted in her becoming one of the most active and experienced Quaker relief workers. From 1914 she was engaged in assistance to Belgian and Serbian refugees in Britain before traveling to France in 1916 where she delivered aid to displaced Serbians in Frioul, near Marseille. From July 1916 until mid-1918 she worked as a relief worker in the Samara district of Russia. The following year she made the investigative visit to Germany previously alluded to, and from early 1920 until 1924 she worked in Poland where she was promoted to the role of head of the Anglo-American Quaker relief mission. She continued her involvement in Quaker humanitarian relief throughout the interwar period and from the early 1930s was increasingly involved with assistance to Jewish and other refugees from central Europe, alongside her continued activism in adult education and voluntary social work. She died in Birmingham in 1964.37 Quakers have a long tradition of meticulous record-keeping and their interest in recording and preserving a collective organizational memory also extended to

36 Greenwood, Quaker Encounters Volume 1, 194. For a detailed overview of Quaker relief in this period, see Fry, A Quaker Adventure. 37 For more on Florence Barrow and her activities, see Siân Roberts, “A ‘Position of Peculiar Responsibility’: Quaker Women in Transnational Humanitarian Relief, 1914–24,” Quaker Studies 21, no. 2 (2016): 235–55.

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Quaker family culture. Quaker women in particular have been identified as the memory keepers in families with a long history of adherence to Quakerism.38 Florence Barrow was no exception and she preserved a significant collection of personal and family papers. The part of the collection that deals with her own activism is extensive and, in addition to correspondence and ‘official’ papers such as minutes and reports produced by the FEWVRC, it also includes personal correspondence, diary and journal entries, scripts and notes for lectures, drafts of publicity and promotional texts, and autobiographical accounts.39 These texts document her experiences, and the same experiences and memories are presented, reworked, and re-presented in a variety of written formats for multiple audiences. The written material is complemented by a large collection of photographs which can be broadly divided into two types. Firstly, photographs that appear to be very professionally produced to a high technical level and that are similar, and in some cases duplicate, photographic prints found in the FEWVRC’s organizational archive in London. The photographers’ names are not recorded, and the images comprise both loose prints and constructed albums on particular aspects of the work. The latter are occasionally titled in a way that reveals their original purpose, such as, for example, one album entitled “Publicity B[oo]K C 1923.” These were presumably created either by the FEWVRC’s central publicity sub-committee, or by the local “Publicity Department” that formed part of the team led by Florence in Poland. This team employed a succession of women with a background in writing and journalism including Joice Loch and the American journalist Anna Louise Strong.40 The mission reports preserved in Florence’s archive provide an insight into the work and intentions of this department, and include references to the taking of photographs and the writing of articles and stories sent to the press in Britain and America. In June 1923, for example, Joice Loch recorded that she had been out taking photographs of various relief activities and that a set of slides had been sent to America.41

38 Sandra Stanley Holton, Quaker Women: Personal Life, Memory and Radicalism in the Lives of Women Friends, 1780–1930 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007). 39 Some of this material is duplicated and complemented in a smaller collection of personal papers at the LRSF, collection references Temp MSS 873, Temp MSS 590. 40 Like Loch, Anna Louise Strong (1885–1970) was not a Quaker. She undertook relief work with the Friends in the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to writing for the press, she published a number of books including Children of Revolution that described Quaker famine relief in Russia with proceeds going to support the John Reed Children’s Colony on the Volga. 41 Publicity Department Report, 20 June 1923, Barrow Family Papers. Copies of these reports are also held as part of the official archive in the LRSF.

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Secondly, and sitting beside these images are a large number of much smaller, less technically accomplished photographs which appear to be snapshots taken by Florence and her colleagues. Florence had a camera with her on her humanitarian travels, and one intriguing photograph shows her standing on the step of a railway carriage holding what appears to be a camera in her hands. Writing home from Russia to her companion Gertrude Humpidge in September 1916, she requested films for the “pocket Kodak,” and here she may be referring to the “Vest Pocket Kodak” often described as the “soldier’s camera” due to its popularity during the First World War.42 In this Florence reflects a tradition identified by Val Williams of women who served in Europe during the First World War carrying their own cameras to photograph the circumstances in which they worked.43 Williams argues that in contrast to designated war photographers, these amateur female practitioners recorded the rhythms of their daily lives and their surroundings rather than “heroic” scenes, and this is certainly the impression given by the myriad of small “snapshots” found in Florence’s collection. Florence also had a role model in her mother, Jane (née Harrison, 1831–1908) who was an amateur photographer of some skill, and family anecdote recalled her traveling the countryside in a cab to take photographs which she then developed in the vehicle with the blinds drawn.44 Florence was therefore familiar with photography as a practice, although it is interesting to note that her personal papers do not include many images taken by her of other social causes in which she was involved in Birmingham. Presumably she had no similar need to authenticate circumstances that were familiar to her audience, or the scenes did not hold the same level of picturesque exoticism as peasant life in Russia and Poland. There are clear indications in Florence’s archive of how photographs were used as part of a broader publicity strategy alongside the written and spoken word, and her papers also illuminate how the AFSC lantern slides were used. When home Florence gave regular lectures to raise awareness and funds, and her papers include notes and scripts indicating her use of lantern slides. A typescript 42 Florence Barrow to Gertrude Humpidge, 29 September (9th October) 1916, Barrow Family Papers. Her letters are dated according to the British and Russian calendars; Colin Harding, “The Vest Pocket Kodak Was the Soldier’s Camera,” Science and Median Museum, 13 March 2014, https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/the-vest-pocket-kodak-was-the-soldierscamera/. 43 Val Williams, Women Photographers: The Other Observers 1900 to the Present (London: Virago, 1986), 25–46. See also Val Williams, Warworks: Women, Photography and the Iconography of War (London: Virago, 1994). 44 George Corbyn Barrow, The Barrow Family: Myth Legend and Some Fact (Birmingham: privately published, 1994), 7.

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lecture on Poland written by Strong in 1920 includes detailed commentaries on each slide. Although it is now unfortunately separated from the numbered sequence of slides that obviously accompanied it, the text gives a very clear sense of the contextual information delivered with the AFSC images, and it is possible to match some individual images to scenes described in the script. The lecture began with an introduction to recent events and promised to take the viewer “on a trip through Poland, in exactly the way you would see it if you came on a visit to the Friends’ Mission,” and reminded the audience that the overall aim of Friends’ relief was to “promote international good-will, by showing a spirit of friendliness irrespective of race, religion or nationality, and to relieve these [sic] suffering in all countries from the effect of war.”45 The viewers were instructed to imagine themselves physically experiencing the journey, and a point of connection was provided for an American audience which also drew attention to Poland’s difference: And now we will suppose that we have come to Warsaw, travelling by fast through-train from Berlin, stopping at German customs, going out, and at the Polish customs, coming in. Warsaw is a large, rambling, and rather dirty city, that looks somewhat like Chicago. It does not have the finished, orderly look of the cities in Western Europe.46

The lecture provides statistical and factual information relating to costs and numbers displaced, while at the same time providing a more personal commentary on the recipients who appear in the images, all tailored to emphasize the need and to forestall questions of deservedness, morality, and the efficiency of the expenditure. In “picture 4” we are told that the woman seen living in an old dugout “tells us that three children have been born and have died in their rude substitute for a home,” while in “picture 6” the man standing next to his dugout “you see, is a decent, self-respecting fellow, with nice, clean children.” After stressing that “we are trying to establish decent living conditions,” the audience is reminded of the Quaker belief in encouraging self-help. The recipient will pay back a percentage of the building cost to a local committee who will use it to help the community, as “You see, he is not asking for charity, but only a chance to help himself.”47 Destroyed homes and hungry families are contrasted with newly built houses, medical treatment, successful harvests, and the feeding and clothing of children; “bundles” of sorry refugees returning from Russia are seen alongside images of Florence Barrow visiting refugees and villagers to

45 Anna Louise Strong, “Lantern Lecture on Poland July to September 1920,” Barrow Family Papers, introduction. 46 Strong, “Lantern Lecture on Poland,” introduction. 47 Strong, “Lantern Lecture on Poland,” picture 12.

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discover their needs. Interestingly the AFSC online exhibit includes images of Florence doing this, although she is not named in the captions. She is featured for example in “A hunger case” showing “a mother and child pleading” with the unnamed Florence in front of a barbed wire fence.48 This image also appears in the albums relating to Poland in the FEWVRC archive in London, one of several examples of duplication with the AFSC lanterns slides indicating that the same images were sent to, and exchanged between, both central offices. It is clear that Strong’s lecture also included disturbing images of the type discussed earlier, as one caption refers to refugees returning from famine-stricken Russia displaying signs of “terrible undernourishment like this, where the swollen stomach of the child, and the gaunt face of the mother, tell their own tale.”49 An interesting reflection given that the accompanying script clearly indicates that the lantern slides were not originally left to speak for themselves but were supplemented by the vocal performance. Florence was not entirely dependent on lantern slide technology to share her photographs. A number of small photographs in her collection are mounted on card with captions written underneath in her hand, in a form that is reminiscent of display panels in an exhibition. It seems reasonable to suggest that she would have taken these display cards with her to the fundraising talks that she gave when home on leave; they would have been far easier to carry than even the most transportable of lantern slide equipment. The content of the images selected by Florence to mount on card, and indeed the content of her personal visual archive generally, also raises interesting questions. Although there are some similarities with the AFSC lantern slide collection, there are also significant differences in emphasis. Firstly, it is noticeable that there is a distinct lack of photographs that might be categorized as images of “atrocity” (other than in printed pamphlets that are part of the collection). There are certainly images that reflect the considerable hardships of life in both Russia and Poland, characterized by representations of extremely poor housing for example, and showing families living in former army dug-outs or children waiting to be fed outside soup kitchens. However, the images Florence chose to display, and those in her collection generally, tend on the whole to project a more hopeful and positive representation of the people and their potential futures. The emphasis is on reconstructing, and reimagining, a new and different world in the future. Fehrenbach and Rodogno have argued that until comparatively recently the rhetorical devices employed in humanitarian imagery remained relatively static in their

48 http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/SC_Relief/id/2209/rec/32. 49 Strong, “Lantern Lecture on Poland,” picture 21.

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emphasis on suffering bodies, and that it is only in recent decades that the representation was broadened to include “resilient and self-reliant recipients of aid.”50 In this they follow Silvia Salvatici who contends that a new visual narrative, which focused less on suffering and more on the rehabilitative aspects of relief work, came to the fore in the period immediately following the Second World War when it was utilized by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) as part of its reconstructive mission.51 Salvatici draws attention in particular to the representation of children, educational programs, and efforts to provide work and training for girls and women in handcrafts such as sewing and spinning. On a similar note Karin Priem, in her discussion of Werner Bischof’s photographs of children taken at the end of the Second World War, has argued that photographs of the young in particular were used to affectively engage the support of a transnational public for European reconstruction in this period and to project “imaginaries of the future.”52 Although the literature therefore identifies these more positive representations as a largely post-Second World War phenomenon, I would contend that these characteristics were also in use by the Friends in the period immediately following the First World War. Florence and her Quaker colleagues believed that relief work should be far broader than addressing emergency needs, and that humanitarian action should involve reconstruction and positive reform as a constructive contribution to furthering international friendship and world peace. As the FEWVRC pamphlet The Rebirth of Poland argued, it was “not enough that people should be fed and clothed; they must also be encouraged to feel that life is worth living and that the present is pregnant with hope for the future.”53 Furthermore, that future was to be imagined and brought about in partnership with the recipients, thereby displaying the “democratic” principles of Friends’ relief work. While acknowledging that there were inevitable imbalances of power in relief work, historians of humanitarianism have noted that Quakers on the whole exhibited more equality and less paternalism in their relief work than other agencies.54 These ideas are

50 Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography, 16. 51 Silvia Salvatici, “Sights of Benevolence: UNRRA’s Recipients Portrayed,” in Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography, 200–22. 52 Karin Priem, “Beyond the Collapse of Language? Photographs of Children in Postwar Europe as Performances and Relational Objects,” Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 6 (2017): 688. 53 FEWVRC, The Rebirth of Poland [c.1921], Barrow Family Papers. 54 Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 117, 285, 292. See also Fiona Reid and Sharif Gemie, “The Friends Relief Service and Displaced People in Europe after the Second World War, 1945–48,” Quaker Studies 17, no. 2 (2013): 223–43.

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reflected in Florence’s activities in both Russia and Poland. When she initially traveled to Russia, Florence worked in the town of Buzuluk and neighboring villages in the Samara district where by early 1917 about 30% of the population were refugees, some of the six million non-combatants displaced within the Russian Empire.55 She and her colleague, Birmingham-based social worker Annie R. Wells, initially established feeding and clothing schemes and medical programs for the refugees who were predominantly Polish women and children displaced by conflict on Russia’s western front. However, within weeks of their arrival they were also engaged in educational and occupational interventions as part of looking towards future reconstruction. In Andreyefka, for example, school classes for children were organized and a circulating library was established. They established a home for children at Mogotovo where the educational activities included a school for about 60 boys and girls, singing lessons, training in carpentry and gardening for boys, and evening classes for older girls.56 Florence responded to the desire of displaced women for occupation by organizing a home industry scheme that made pragmatic use of their extensive existing skills in traditional handcrafts, and their enjoyment of weaving, spinning, and embroidery. This addressed their need to earn money but also increased morale and sustained selfrespect. Writing home in January 1917, she described the 100 women and girls working at the time, explaining that “[t]he refugees are getting so keen on their work & talk of ‘our factory’ with its three looms & sewing room & wool room . . . You can hardly imagine what a difference it is making to them in every way.”57 Very similar activities were later undertaken in Poland, where she worked with women and families returning to their home villages from Russia; indeed she travelled significant distances to locate individual women and children whom she had known and worked with in the Buzuluk area. In addition to the essential relief work focusing on housing, agricultural reconstruction, and medical care, the women’s industries scheme was re-established on a larger and more commercial footing, and an orphanage and agricultural training school for the young was established at Kolpin. It is representations of this work that predominate in Florence’s personal collection of images, projecting more positive representations of displaced children and women than many of those in the AFSC slides. Figure 6.1, for example, comes from a body of images relating to the Kolpin Orphanage and Agricultural

55 Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 3. 56 FEWVRC, The Unchanging Russia [c. 1917], Barrow Family Papers; Florence Barrow, typescript report on Mogotovo, July 1917, LRSF, MSS 590/1. 57 Florence Barrow to [Gertrude Humpidge], 1 January 1917, Barrow Family Papers.

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Fig. 6.1: Unnamed boy at Kolpin Orphanage and Agricultural School, c. 1923, Barrow Family Papers. Reproduced courtesy of the Barrow Family.

School, established by the Friends in a former country house near Brest-Litovsk. The photograph features and unnamed boy who was resident at Kolpin. Warmly dressed and smiling directly into the camera he is shown with one hand leaning on a wall, his other arm positioned as if resting his hand on his hips, projecting an impression of confidence and happiness. Nothing about this photograph, other than the contexts in which it appears, evokes a picture of suffering, passivity or deprivation; indeed his mischievous smile and almost swaggering stance suggests an active young man full of agency looking forward to the future. The photographer is unknown but the image appears in Florence’s personal collection. The same photograph also appears in one of the FEWVRC’s official albums documenting the relief work in Poland, and it is clear that it was also reproduced in publicity materials as a cutting from an unidentified publication is also preserved in Florence’s papers. This presents the same image but this time the viewer’s response is shaped by the caption “A Polish boy restored to health and happiness.”58 This photograph is one of many formal and informal depictions of the Kolpin boys and girls in Florence’s personal archive. We see the children learning and proudly displaying their certificates of achievement, posing with their pet dog, at work on agricultural tasks or caring for animals, undertaking physical exercise, swimming in a river, and at play on a climbing frame.

58 Poland Album 2, c. 1918 – c. 1922 LRSF, YM/MfS/FEWVRC/PICS/3/7.

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Similarly, there are numerous images of women engaging in the handcraft industries schemes in both Russia and Poland. These show smiling women and girls spinning, weaving, knitting or engaging in embroidery. Although the differences in dress and topographical details imbue some of the images with a certain exoticism, and would therefore have emphasized the “otherness” of those portrayed for a British audience, these photographs are different in content and representation to the images depicting destitute and depressed women that are seen in the AFSC slides. Despite the fact that these images could be read as representing deserving recipients – or what Malkki has referred to as the trope of the “exemplary” refugee, a device previously familiar from philanthropic imagery –, it would appear therefore that Florence’s interest was in illustrating shared interests and the potential of the future.59 The emphasis on the role of humanitarian action in the creation of a new and improved world can also be seen in the moving film that the FEWVRC commissioned in 1923, not least in its title New Worlds for Old. Like the still images, the film fulfilled the dual function of appealing for financial resources while also functioning as a pedagogical instrument. During the war, film became a popular means of instruction as well as entertainment, and it is therefore not surprising that film was seized upon as a transformative educational technology by humanitarian organizations attracted by the immediacy with which it animated the activities of the relief workers and its symbolic embodiment of progress and modernity.60 The Poland and Russia subcommittee of the FEWVRC recognized the “great value of such a method of publicity and appeal” when it discussed the making of a film in the Russian famine area in June 1922, and in 1923 the war correspondent and Polar explorer George Hubert Wilkins was commissioned to capture relief work in France, Austria, Poland, and Russia.61 Despite its connotations of modernity, moving silent film still shared many of the rhetorical devices of the earlier lantern slide show, such as the use of before-and-after scenes illustrating the need and the subsequent efficacy of the intervention. For the audience, the surrounding performance also retained similar characteristics, in that films were commonly shown accompanied by an introductory lecture and were

59 Liisa H. Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization,” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 3 (1996): 377–404. 60 Michelle Tusan, “Genocide, Famine and Refugees on Film: Humanitarianism and The First World War,” Past and Present 237 (2017): 1–39. 61 Minute 889, Poland and Russia Subcommittee minutes, 8 June 1922, LRSF, YM/MfS/ FREWVRC/COMM/PORU/M2.

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followed by a collection.62 The role previously undertaken by the vocal articulation of a pre-prepared script in the lantern slide show was now performed in part by intertitles showing text in between the moving images to convey a particular message. In New Worlds for Old the footage of Poland shows similar scenes to the still imagery: peasants living in dug-outs, medical inspections of babies, the distribution of seeds and equipment, horses plowing fields, the building of homes, children waiting for their new homes to be built, and one small boy “helping father” with the construction work. As with Florence’s archive, there are scenes of women spinning and weaving and receiving payment for their embroidery accompanied by the intertitles “Self-help is real help” and the plea “Will you help us carry on this great work?” Similarly, the Russian scenes from Buzuluk Children’s Home, which Florence helped establish and run during her period in Russia, show happy everyday scenes of the relief workers entertaining the children, while also informing the audience that in some villages one in ten had died of malaria until the relief workers arrived to inoculate “thousands” of children. Here again we see women working in the handcraft workshops established by Florence and her colleagues and the reminder that the success of the venture “rests with you generous looker-on.” The film ends with a brief shot of naked frozen corpses heaped in a Russian cemetery (validated with a caption stating that it was an “actual” photograph dated 1921) which very quickly cuts to an intertitle reminding the audience that “your generosity has produced happy faces” and illustrated by scenes of children eating round a table. All this activity, advised the intertitle, was not paupering the recipients but aimed at supporting self-help, and was motivated entirely by a desire to “create ‘New Worlds for Old.’”63 As Joice Loch, who accompanied Wilkins on his tour to film Polish relief work, later wrote: “This picture was to go over the world, and tell the world of our refugees and how they could be helped if people were generous.”64 The other notable characteristic of photographs preserved by Florence is their focus on the ordinary daily lives of the men, women, and children that she encountered. Ian Grosvenor has argued that images reflecting the everyday practices of ordinary life enable the viewer to become conscious of a shared

62 Tusan, “Genocide, Famine and Refugees on Film,” 11, 26. 63 For a synopsis of the film, see the catalogue of the British Film Institute, http://collectionssearch.bfi.org.uk/web/Details/ChoiceFilmWorks/150027605. 64 Joice M. Nankivell Loch and Sydney Loch, The River of a Hundred Ways: Life in the WarDevastated Areas of Eastern Poland (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1924), 226. Another similar account is given in Joice Loch’s autobiography: Joice Nankivell Loch, A Fringe of Blue: An Autobiography (London: John Murray, 1968).

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humanity with people who they may consider “other.”65 We see a similar trait in the photographs of Russia that Florence chose to mount on card and that illustrate how the rhythms of daily life continued, even in the midst of war and displacement. They show refugees engaging in family and communal experiences and aspirations that would be recognizable and common to the intended audience, and which might therefore serve to un-“other.” One display card, for example, shows a bride, groom, and guests at “a refugee wedding in exile” that Florence attended and described in her letters home. Similarly we see groups of children where only the caption alerts us to the fact that they are waiting outside a soup kitchen and that this, therefore, is not a “normal” childhood scene. Others show scenes from the children’s home in Mogotovo including groups of children arriving on a horse and cart, smiling children posing in the snow with a sledge or sitting together in the dining room and classroom.66 The unmounted single images in the collection reflect similar scenes and include, for example, a photograph of a little girl called Anna taking food to her pet rabbit, and a group of boys posing with a decorated Christmas tree, all emphasizing to the viewer that these children were not so different to their own. Crucially, in contrast to the AFSC lantern slides and the photographs in the albums in the official FEWVRC collection, many of Florence’s images are captioned with the subjects’ names on the reverse, and crossreferencing to her correspondence and journals, and the experiences that she and her colleagues re-worked into stories for fundraising and educational purposes, enables us to find out more details about their lives and experiences. Even if we allow for an element of elaboration or fictionalization in the fundraising accounts, this to some extent counters the anonymization, depersonalization, and silencing of the individual that is commonplace in images of refugees and humanitarian subjects.67 We therefore know from Florence’s caption that the woman seen spinning in Fig. 6.2 was Anna Drega and that she is seen with her niece Olga. We also know, through Florence’s letters and the life story that was movingly told in a pamphlet authored by Anna Louise Strong, details of her experiences of displacement in Russia before returning to Poland to find her ruined home and re-establish her life.68

65 Ian Grosvenor, “‘What Do They Know of England Who Only England Know’: A Case for an Alternative Narrative of the Ordinary in Twenty-First-Century Britain,” History of Education 47, no. 2 (2018): 148–68. 66 Barrow Family Papers. 67 See Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries.” 68 Anna Louise Strong, “The Story of Anna Drega,” n.d. [c. 1922–24], Barrow Family Papers. Copies are also available in LRSF.

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Fig. 6.2: Anna Drega spinning flax with her niece Olga, early 1920s, Barrow Family Papers. Reproduced courtesy of the Barrow Family.

Florence continued to correspond with the Drega family for several years after returning to Birmingham. This, and the personalization of the images, reflects the heavy emphasis that Florence and her Quaker colleagues placed on personal service and the importance of developing a meaningful relationship of “friendship” with the recipients, despite the dynamic of unequal power that is inevitably present in any charitable relationship. This was rooted in the Quaker belief in the equality of all before God, which drove Quaker humanitarian mission and practice. Despite a shared belief in this principle, there were significant differences of background and political outlook between the British and American Quakers, which often led to tensions in the field, and that may explain to some degree the differences in emphasis in the AFSC’s lantern slides

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and the images that predominate in Florence’s collection.69 By this point a significant section of British Quakers, including many in the FEWVRC, were less conservative in theological and social terms, and politically further to the left than their American counterparts. Greenwood asserts that the FEWVRC included a number of members who displayed a “strong Utopian strain” and who dreamed of social change.70 Florence was herself influenced by the significant shifts of belief and attitudes in British Quakerism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that Thomas Kennedy has styled the Quaker “renaissance.”71 This led to an increasingly socially aware, liberal Quakerism under the influence of politicized and socialist Quakers who played a significant part in determining the British Society of Friends’ resistance to the First World War. Florence attended the Manchester Conference of Friends in 1895 that Kennedy identified as a watershed moment, and in 1919 joined the Birmingham branch of the politically left-wing Independent Labour Party with her brother Harrison Barrow following his release from a six-month prison sentence for contravening the censorship principles of the British Defence of the Realm Act.72

Learning to See and Feel: Educating Communities of Emotion and Action In her study of the British government’s projection of visual representations of imperial citizenship to school children, Gabrielle Moser considers how audiences learn to look at images of themselves and others, and concludes that in order for citizenship to be visible to the audience, viewers had to be taught to see it and to recognize it.73 This chapter has argued that in their use of the visual Florence Barrow and her fellow Quaker activists were seeking to do more than convince their audience to contribute financially to Quaker relief projects, however important and pressing that aspect might have been. Viewing Florence’s

69 Tammy M. Proctor, “An American Enterprise? British Participation in US Food Relief Programmes (1914–1923),” First World War Studies 5, no. 1 (2014): 29–42. 70 Greenwood, Friends and Relief, 194. 71 See Thomas Kennedy, British Quakerism 1860–1920: The Transformation of a Religious Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 72 Minutes, Birmingham branch Independent Labour Party, 20 March 1919, Birmingham Archives and Collections, Library of Birmingham. 73 Gabrielle Moser, Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019).

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images in comparison with the digitized AFSC lantern slides collection makes explicit the pedagogical choices that she made, and that in stimulating an affective response in their audience, Florence and her colleagues were also seeking to produce a pedagogical outcome in which the audience was encouraged to see, and to recognize, their shared humanity with distant others. The aim was to foster what Fehrenbach and Rodogno have termed “communities of emotion and action” in which the initial affective response might lead the spectator to reflect on the reasons behind the particular circumstances, and to conclude that a different future, in which ordinary people did not suffer the appalling consequences of war, was not only necessary but possible if the viewer chose to act.74 In this reading, while recognizing that some of the Quaker images project stereotypical representations that ascribe passivity and victimhood, with all the moral ambiguities entangled in that process, we can see in other images a pedagogical space in which more agency is ascribed to the subjects than might appear to be the case if the AFSC slides are viewed in isolation. In this space the viewer could be implicated in a more active engagement in questioning a world order that allowed such circumstances to exist unchallenged and the images appear as less a Foucauldian technology of control, silencing, and depersonalization than is often privileged in the work of scholars who have emphasized photography as an instrument of governance.75 This reading, in contrast, draws on the work of scholars who have attributed a more positive, politically transformational role to photography such as Sliwinski’s argument that providing the opportunity for the audience to literally see violations of human rights through photography was a significant moment in establishing the recognition of the human entitlement to such rights.76 It also draws on Ariella Azoulay’s conception of photography as a relational event that can have political consequences, what she terms a “civil contract of photography [that] shifts the focus away from the ethics of seeing or viewing to an ethics of the spectator, an ethics that begins to sketch the contours of the spectator’s responsibility toward what is visible.”77 Without further research it is impossible to know to what extent the audiences engaged with this spectatorial responsibility. The fact that large sums were raised in support of relief work in both Russia and Poland, and that countless volunteers came forward to serve in the FEWVRC, does not of course demonstrate to what extent the donors or volunteers may have accepted or resisted intended meanings or shared Florence’s desire, expressed in

74 Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography, x. 75 See, among others, John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988). 76 Sliwinsky, Human Rights in Camera, 79. 77 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 130.

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the opening quotation to this chapter, on the need for a new world cast in a particular political or Quaker humanitarian understanding. My interpretation also draws on a reading of Florence’s images which fully incorporates their provenance and context in the broader landscape of her life and activism and in its archival legacy. It is seeing the images in the light of what is known to me about her life and beliefs, interweaved with her correspondence, journals, and the awareness-raising texts that she and her colleagues wrote, that suggests a reading in which the images are implicated in this set of wider overall aims and motivations, and a different relationship between relief worker and recipient. Knowing that she went out of her way in Poland to find and re-establish her relationship with some of the women and children with whom she had worked in Russia, and that she kept in touch with some of those whom she knew best for many years, inevitably colors my reading of their images in her archive. Were I to view her images stripped of the contextual provenance of the subject’s identities and life stories, would I see less agency and more passivity, less intimacy and more paternalism in their representations? Florence’s archive illuminates how the AFSC images were meant to be seen within their surrounding contextual narrative, and makes explicit how the interrelationship between image and spoken narrative directed the viewer towards particular meanings and understandings. Although digitizing the AFSC lantern slides has undoubtedly produced the very positive benefit of facilitating and increasing access to them, the viewer should be conscious of the way in which the requirements of the digital platform, and the nature of the curatorial intervention required to enable their dissemination in this way, inevitably separates them from the contextual archive, and produces a very different encounter to that which was originally intended. The ability conferred on the individual user to download, save, and potentially further disseminate individual images from the digital exhibit without any identifying or contextual markers risks rendering them orphan, stripped of any related information about their creation or who the subjects were, and when and where they lived. In her much cited call for the need to consider the full spectrum of intersecting elements that make up both the social biography and performative quality of an image, Elizabeth Edwards also drew attention to the way in which multiple and contesting histories intersect within and around photographs, and through which new meanings are continually made and understood.78 As with the ethnographic images that were the focus of Edwards’ particular study, the images under

78 Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001).

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consideration in this chapter were produced in a very specific context and at a very difficult time in the history of a geographical area that has seen significant contestations and changes of boundaries and identities in the intervening years. Many of the villages and peoples that Florence and her colleagues described as Polish are now in Belarus or Ukraine, and the British city in which she lived has a substantial Eastern European population of its own. Although speculating on how these images would be seen and understood by contemporary audiences in these present-day locations is beyond the scope of this chapter, it has hopefully served to demonstrate the value of seeing them in the full complexity of their archival context for informing our understandings of the motivations and the pedagogical aims of those who originally sought to bring the scenes and subjects represented to light.

Bibliography Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008. Barnes, Gregory A. A Centennial History of the American Friends Service Committee. Philadelphia: Friends Press, 2016. Barnett, Michael. Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism. New York: Cornell University Press, 2011. Barrow, George Corbyn. The Barrow Family: Myth, Legend and Some Fact. Birmingham: privately published, 1994. Boucher, Ellen. “Cultivating Internationalism: Save the Children Fund, Public Opinion and the Meaning of Child Relief, 1919–24.” In Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-Building in Britain between the Wars, edited by Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas, 169–88. London: Institute of Historical Research, 2011. Cabanes, Bruno. The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism 1918–1924. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Callister, Sandy. “Being There: War, Women and Lantern Slides.” Rethinking History 12. no. 3 (2008): 317–37. Carey, Brycchan. British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Carey, Brycchan. From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1657–1761. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Edwards, Elizabeth. Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Fehrenbach, Heide. “Children and Other Civilians: Photography and the Politics of Humanitarian Image-Making.” In Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography, 165–99. Fehrenbach, Heide, and David Rodogno, eds. Humanitarian Photography: A History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

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Fry, A. Ruth. A Quaker Adventure: The Story of Nine Years Relief and Reconstruction. New York: Frank-Maurice Inc., 1926. Gatrell, Peter. A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War I. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Gatrell, Peter. The Making of the Modern Refugee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Grant, Kevin. “The Limits of Exposure: Atrocity Photographs in the Congo Reform Campaign.” In Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography, 64–88. Greenwood, John Ormerod. Quaker Encounters Volume 1: Friends and Relief. York: William Sessions Ltd., 1975. Grosvenor, Ian. “‘What Do They Know of England Who Only England Know’: A Case for an Alternative Narrative of the Ordinary in Twenty-First-Century Britain.” History of Education 47, no. 2 (2018): 148–68. Halttunen, Karen. “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture.” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995): 303–34. Harding, Colin. “The Vest Pocket Kodak Was the Soldier’s Camera.” Science and Median Museum, March 13, 2014. https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/the-vest-pocket -kodak-was-the-soldiers-camera/. Holton, Sandra Stanley. Quaker Women: Personal Life, Memory and Radicalism in the Lives of Women Friends, 1780–1930. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007. Kennedy, Thomas. British Quakerism 1860–1920: The Transformation of a Religious Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Loch, Joice M. Nankivell. A Fringe of Blue: An Autobiography. London: John Murray, 1968. Loch, Joice M. Nankivell, and Sydney Loch. The River of a Hundred Ways: Life in the WarDevastated Areas of Eastern Poland. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1924. Lydon, Jane. Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Midgley, Clare. Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870. London: Routledge, 1992. Moser, Gabrielle. Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. Pesman, Ros. “Loch, Joice Mary Nankivell (1887–1982).” Australian Dictionary of National Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2012. http:// adb.anu.edu.au/biography/loch-joice-mary-nankivell-14347/text25418. Proctor, Tammy M. “An American Enterprise? British Participation in US Food Relief Programmes (1914–1923).” First World War Studies 5, no. 1 (2014): 29–42. Reid, Fiona, and Sharif Gemie. “The Friends Relief Service and Displaced People in Europe after the Second World War, 1945–48.” Quaker Studies 17, no. 2 (2013): 223–43. Roberts, Siân. “A ‘Position of Peculiar Responsibility’: Quaker Women in Transnational Humanitarian Relief, 1914–24.” Quaker Studies 21, no. 2 (2016): 235–55. Rozario, Kevin. “‘Delicious Horrors’: Mass Culture, the Red Cross, and the Appeal of Modern American Humanitarianism.” American Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2003): 417–55. Scott, Richenda C. Quakers in Russia. London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1964. Sliwinski, Sharon. Human Rights in Camera. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Stokes, Lauren. “How Were the AFSC Lantern Slides Used and How Did They Come Into Existence?” Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College. http://www.swarthmore.edu/ library/friends/AFSC/Stokes_Notes.htm.

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Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988. Tusan, Michelle. “Genocide, Famine and Refugees on Film: Humanitarianism and The First World War.” Past and Present 237 (2017): 1–39. Ware, Vron. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History. London: Verso, 2015. Williams, Val. Warworks: Women, Photography and the Iconography of War. London: Virago, 1994. Williams, Val. Women Photographers: The Other Observers 1900 to the Present. London: Virago, 1986.

Tim Allender

Chapter 7 Westward Religious Image Vistas: Female Roman Catholicism in Colonial and Postcolonial India, 1904–1960 Introduction This chapter examines image-making in India as the colonial world gave way to independence on the subcontinent. It is interested in the pockets of colonialism that were able to remain, post-1947, because they were adaptive to this new reality. Within this frame of travel from the colonial to the post-colonial world, images are shown to exemplify India’s nuanced place regarding transnational inquiry and its historicity, where influence and interaction came from other sites within India and also internationally. The chapter also shows that India does not sit well with general assertions on this theme. For example, studies into transnationalism in the twenty-first century have concluded that it has been interaction between different societies, instead of internal evolution within these societies, that has been the principal dynamic for development and modernity.1 Other studies on this theme, however, strongly indicate the importance of seeing modern globalization in terms of its historical structures and their permanent renegotiation over time.2 In India, there remains a different idea of what modernity means and, as this chapter illustrates, the local Indian domain has been a strong driving force in directing Indian-based endeavors in a way where there have remained dominant, historically-based reference points, directing and reconfiguring some transnational influences at the local site while accommodating other such influences.3 Neglecting this phenomenology has disrupted and obscured deeper narratives of inquiry, especially around India’s independence from Britain in 1947. This period is usually written about in terms of the political struggle between 1 Michael Geyer, “The New Consensus,” in Transnationale Geschichte als transnationale Praxis, ed. Matthias Middell (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2009). 2 Matthias Middell and Katja Naumann, “Global History and the Spatial Turn: From the Impact of Area Studies to the Study of Critical Junctures of Globalisation,” Journal of Global History 5 (2010): 1–22. 3 See, for example, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634945-008

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the British as the relinquishing colonial power and Indian nationalists. Such histories dwell on the stark political binaries that occupied both sides of this struggle (British and Indian) and involve constructions of political rupture. However, this chapter sees other imperial and neo-imperial imperatives at work, where the usual demarcation of Partition (Independence) in 1947 as being rendered, instead, in terms of cultural transfer across racial lines. The power structures of cultural oppression remained in place in the East/West interplay, even though the formal strictures of empire had withered away as the broader post-colonial world took shape. With this scenario in play, the chapter asserts that the visual turn has an important role in interrogating these sensitive sites of historical interaction, both in the colonial and postcolonial world. This view is contrary to the assertion of Catteeuw, Dams, Depaepe, and Simon, who downplay any central role that the image might have in historical studies of education.4 The image was, in fact, often used in India to communicate subtle messages to colonial and postcolonial audiences that were capable of multi-dimensional interpretation by the viewer. The image was in a sense separate from the text – particularly when the text was too explicit and revealing. Yet even when text was used in this period, it sometimes evoked visual imagery rather than the riskier enterprise of one-dimensional literal meaning that might offend stakeholders with different socio-cultural and political standpoints. Today, such control of meaning through the deployment of images has been disrupted and appropriated by the digital age, as I will posit in the conclusion of this chapter. This is a significant phenomenon given the history of the use of the image in India as a sometimes separate avenue of conveying meaning that could mediate important social and educational change, before and after independence. This chapter illustrates that this mediation well outlasted the political upheaval of 1947–8. Yet it also provides important context by looking at one small part of the postcolonial world, to understand what has been lost as a site for inquiry for historians to study, and why new paradigms of academic inquiry into the deployment of the image are now needed.

4 Karl Catteeuw, Kristof Dams, Marc Depaepe, and Frank Simon, “Filming the Black Box: Primary Schools on Film in Belgium, 1880–1960: A First Assessment of Unused Sources,” in Visual History: Images of Education, ed. Ulrich Mietzner, Kevin Myers, and Nick Peim (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 203–32, esp. 229.

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Loreto With these broad theoretical and cultural structures in mind, this chapter concentrates on one site of interaction to illustrate a broader religious visual scene. The site is Loreto, an Irish Roman Catholic teaching order for girls which was founded in Calcutta in the state of Bengal (northeast India) in 1841. After relocating from England to Rathfarnham in Ireland, Loreto steadily established a global network in North America and in many territories that were colonies of the British Empire. However, its sites in India became heavily enmeshed in a vibrant array of Indian religions and cultural traditions and these, particularly as the twentieth century unfolded, took this religious order away from its earlier European base: much faster, as it turned out, than its foundations in other parts of the world. Additionally, what became a relatively tenuous thread of international connection with other Loreto orders in the world accentuated the need for the Calcutta order to adapt to local conditions, in terms of governing elites and cultural milieus. This accommodation was particularly important, as part of a broader bargain with power elites, if Mary Ward (the foundress of the order) and the order’s core Christian religious beliefs were to be preserved “abroad” in India, even after India’s independence from Britain. The visual record in the order’s official, high-quality publication in India, Palm Leaves, illustrates this journey. The visual messaging of this official magazine forms the centerpiece of this chapter. The Loreto women religious community in Calcutta remained mostly confined within the walls of its convents and schools until the later 1950s. However, Palm Leaves provided an avenue of communication (separate from what the order’s students brought home themselves). The annual magazine had a circulation among its relatively large and sometimes dispersed parent population throughout Calcutta and also the alumni who, by the end of the British period, were spread across India and the world. Here, the images were strategically chosen, as was the text, to appeal to the parent population and also to navigate and selectively reflect India’s changing political alignments as the Independence struggle grew more intense in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Though a product of empire, by 1947 these images also affirmed Loreto’s place in the new nation-state.

Loreto in the Early Twentieth Century By the early twentieth century Loreto had achieved much of its expansion in India, and consolidating this expansion became an important priority. After its foundation at Loreto House Calcutta on December 30, 1841 – and apart from

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some early schools that lasted only a few years – branch schools, mostly for the poor, were established in Bow Bazar (1844), Sealdah (1853), and later Dharmatala (1877), which were all nearby suburbs of Calcutta. A large orphanage and school was established at Entally, also in Calcutta, in 1843. Among other outposts, there was the key outreach settlement of Morapai (1904), located in the Sunderbunds district, on the Ganges Delta, about twenty-five miles east of Calcutta.5 By 1905 there were 91 women religious (nuns) and 8 novices. Government grants were meager, about a quarter of what was available to Protestant institutions. In 1905 these Loreto institutions collectively had 1928 students enrolled. Significantly, while many of these girls came from poor families, 429 girls were enrolled at middle or upper school level: a relatively rare phenomenon at the time, with most government schools having enrolments of girls at the primary level only.6 This was a very broad educational brief of Loreto, and several of its schools had been established to shadow boys’ schools set up by the Belgium Jesuits based in Calcutta – the Jesuits being the traditional educational allies of Loreto in other parts of the world. Quite apart from the distances between schools, there were also different tribal, communal, and cultural micro-communities to connect with at these various locations. Even colonial government schooling efforts were organized chiefly through Deputy Commissioners and Directors of Public Instruction (DPI) in each province. However, the Loreto network in India spread across several provinces. Its educational and religious messaging also had to accommodate largely Protestant-sympathetic colonial governance structures – rather than Loreto’s early Irish Roman Catholic loyalties – as well as many Roman Catholics who were Eurasian or Indian instead of European. In Bengal in particular, most of its non-European intake in these early years came from racial groupings other than the dominant Hindu communities. This cultural and religious traveling, which spread the Loreto’s work thinly across Bengal and beyond, necessitated strong central messaging around its educational ethics for girls, which also chimed with broader political realities and parental demands. Situating these narratives well enabled the order to maintain its Christian ethos in India, and this discipline makes its messaging, both textually and visually, a good reflection of changing broader social attitudes among colonial and nationalist the power-brokers of the time.

5 Loreto in India MSS, “Various Foundations,” Loreto House Archives, Calcutta (LHAC). 6 “Statistics of the Loreto Schools in India – 1905,” PI 1/1905, LHAC.

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European-Projected Roman Catholic Education in India By 1904 Loreto had a firmly entrenched accomplishments curriculum for the daughters of the European and Eurasian elites of the city of Calcutta. This curriculum, imported from Europe, was an education for mostly middle-class girls, which focused on seemingly feminine subjects such as music, needlework, deportment, geography, and history. Calcutta was still the center of colonial governance for all of India – the capital did not move to Delhi until 1911 – and there were many European families who sought an education for their daughters, particularly if they could not afford to send them back to England for a private education or wanted them close by in the family home in India as they grew up. There was also a cohort of Eurasian (mostly mixed Indian/European race) and Indian families in the city who signed up for this brand of education as well. Responsive to the aspirations of this parent market, Loreto’s imagery from the early twentieth century focused on reassuring outward displays. Christian religiosity, as a form of affirmation for Catholic families in Calcutta, was conveyed as senior Loreto girls were captured by the photographer’s lens in biblical costume. The elaborate public performance of Christian-based Old Testamentthemed plays (primarily for parents) had, in fact, been a feature of Loreto life ever since the very first months of Loreto’s foundation in India on December 30, 1841. However, the availability of cheaper photography by the early twentieth century permitted this messaging in Palm Leaves well after the play had been performed. There was also a sense of Europeanness that needed projection, which juxtaposed more strongly with Loreto’s Calcutta context. The actors in the improvised play The Rose of Savoy, performed in 1904 (see Fig. 7.1), unequivocally displayed European norms, where European students of the college were dressed in the high fashion of the day as part of their feminine accomplishments education. Here, the students were not captured in the image as acting out their roles in the play. Instead, they posed as themselves, having performed the play, but displaying their European credentialing. Such images projected to the wealthy European and Eurasian parent body that the elite form of Loreto education their daughters were receiving did not involve an accommodation with the cultures of India. By the early twentieth century, Loreto was also navigating other sensitive racial and cultural boundaries. These boundaries included the classroom, where the daughters of relatively wealthy European and Eurasian families shared the same classrooms as the daughters of wealthy Indian families. In nineteenthcentury colonial India, and still by the 1900s, government and mission schools

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Fig. 7.1: The Rose of Savoy, Palm Leaves, 1904 © Loreto South Asia Province Archive.

were forced to accommodate caste and race by resorting to the expensive option of providing separate classrooms, especially for different race and caste girls. Loreto mostly did not go down this pathway, refusing to acknowledge such race and caste separateness. However, these sensitivities pressed strongly from outside. Eurasians, in particular, held fiercely to their separateness from Indians.7 Additionally, European literature of the period identified the cultural attitudes of the memshab (a relatively wealthy European wife living in India) as making it impossible for the English and Indian to meet as friends, where the problem was identified by these writers as being a social rather than a political one.8 And from the wealthier Indian side of the story there was just as uncompromising an attitude towards British Europeans: “We were very conscious of what the British idea [was] of

7 Valerie Anderson, “The Eurasian Problem in Nineteenth Century India” (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, 2011). 8 See, for example, E[dward] M[organ] Forster, A Passage to India (London: Edward Arnold, 1924); Edward John Thompson, An Indian Day (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938); Dennis Kincaid, Durbar (London: Harcourt, 1933); Edmund Candler, Abdication (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1922), cited in Allen J. Greenburger, The British Image in India: A Study of the Literature of Imperialism, 1880–1960 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 104–06.

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what is right and wrong, but they didn’t want us in certain places. We did not like the English women . . . they were snobs . . . ”9 While unable and probably unwilling to articulate these racially-based parent sensitivities in textual forms, as they then influenced Loreto school life, the use of the image was deployed as an unspoken reassurance of racial separateness. In the 1909 Palm Leaves edition, “The School Orchestra” is made up of European and Eurasian students, again in uncompromising European dress. Music, a hallmark of the girls’ accomplishments education, signifies their class and their racial belonging.10 In a separate image in the same edition, “Our Indian Girls” are dressed in Indian saris and without European accoutrements.11 They are receiving a Loreto education but without any outward display of a loss of their culture. These public images reinforced to Loreto parents the racial and cultural safety of sending their daughters to the college. In this pre-World War One era, Mother Superior Gonzaga Joynt was the public face of Loreto in Calcutta. Her service to education was recognized by the government of India, and there were several portraits in Palm Leaves of this long-standing and dynamic leader of the Calcutta-based order. However, the rest of the order remained cloistered and anonymous and true to their religious vows. In the next image, “The Chapel, Loreto House” (see Fig. 7.2), the Loreto women religious, in full habit, face away from the camera. They are worshipping in a pre-Vatican II chapel, quiet and controlled and recognizable as such around the world – and indicative, too, of Loreto’s global connections through the prism of religiosity.

The 1920s After World War One these image portrayals, which had reflected the conventional convent habitus in conventional global, Roman Catholic terms, became more fluid and spontaneous. Individuals were no longer anonymous and senior Loreto students were individually identified by name and achievement. Loreto was one of the first institutions in Calcutta to establish a college affiliated with Calcutta University in 1912. Here graduates undertook the Intermediate Arts Bachelor Degree (instead of the Senior Cambridge Exam, which was the equivalent) as a direct pathway to university study; and a year later a Licentiate of Teaching

9 Interview with a former Loreto student 1936–1942, (LSt.1), Calcutta, 18/10/15. 10 Palm Leaves, 1909, 17. 11 Palm Leaves, 1909, 27.

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Fig. 7.2: Loreto House Chapel, Palm Leaves, 1912 © Loreto South Asia Province Archive.

was established that was also recognized by the university. However, even in 1925, graduates of the college were still displayed in the Europe aesthetic: in European dress, demure, poised, and looking away from the camera lens (see Fig. 7.3). The images in 1925 still indicate the feminine messaging of the pre-war period. However, new global professional futures had, in fact, been imagined from 1909 onwards: The stirring, the unrest which betoken the “modern spirit” are indicative of a new phase of development in India, a development which is only the natural result of a century of wider education and progres. . . . Women have won the rights to higher education and professional careers, their social influence is fully recognized, and to-day the battle rages round the question of civil rights. We are not going to discuss the question in its double aspect of Suffragetism and Christian Feminism. We, in India, are not confronted with that problem yet, but there are other problems to be solved, and how are girls today preparing themselves to be labourers in the social vineyards of the future?12

12 “TO-DAY and TOMORROW (Thoughts for Our Girls),” Palm Leaves, 1909, 7–9.

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Fig. 7.3: Miss Dorothy Koegri I.A.B. (teacher); Miss Sybil Goodwin I. A. B., both College graduates, Palm Leaves, 1925. © Loreto South Asia Province Archive.

Tapping into what was seen as an international scenario regarding the international rights of women, Palm Leaves was careful not to take this too far – even though correspondence from Australian and Irish convents at this time began talking of professional careers for their students, despite the global order’s general conservatism. However, the Indian context was in play here, too. The rising Nationalist Movement did not recognize such Western professionalization brands for Indian women, and its activism against the British saw a different role for Indian women from Indian men – that is, a female activism that still centered on the household.13 Yet, regardless of politics, many elite Indian families wanted to send their children to Loreto, not for its religion but to make them better custodians of the Indian family, provided their culture was not lost. Furthermore, this sensitivity

13 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 116–34.

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accorded conveniently with an accomplishments education, despite its European predication. As one student of Loreto in this period put it: My mother was a very orthodox Hindu. She trained me in our own religion, but was very set on convent training because they taught deportment, they taught politeness . . . because that is how a well brought up girl behaves. In those days we were so Victorian . . . girls didn’t even laugh loudly and their demeanour was very low key. So she approved of convent education and she knew I had already started schooling in English and the best schools were in English . . . Our own Indian culture demanded a certain type of decorum. That decorum fitted right in with what Loreto was teaching to be part of any society. You might call it a Victorian thing, but otherwise their [Loreto] ideas on marriages, children, business and how to conduct themselves was [sic] very much Indian.14

Social Outreach in the 1920s By the later 1920s Loreto was beginning to publicize its work with underprivileged Indian communities through its social outreach work and with Morapai in focus. Morapai, on the Ganges Delta, had been founded in 1904, with an orphanage and school for very poor Indian girls. The school rapidly expanded to 117 children in its first year, assisted by the offer of food, shelter, dispensary health care, and an education.15 This school was also significant because it was where Loreto’s Indian women religious order, the Daughters of St. Anne, carried out most of their outreach work in this period. Subsidized by the wealthier Loreto boarding schools, Loreto began accentuating a narrative around caring for the underprivileged. Images reinforcing this theme began celebrating ingenuity in spreading meager resources so as to reach as many needy children as possible – though, unlike the mainstream Loreto schools in Calcutta, with the usual prerequisite of a Christian baptism first for the disempowered and very poor Indian children of the Ganges Delta. Figure 7.4 shows two Loreto women religious in poses of caring for mostly cholera Indian orphans at Morapai. Christian conversion agendas by the Loreto order were more apparent in these poorer communities. Yet, this also set up a difficult binary for Loreto sisters of needing to conform to Christianity publicly, while confronting much more immediate personal tragedies. For example, in their public declarations in Palm Leaves the death of an orphan was not so terrible to these sisters if a baptism could be performed first: “I had the joy of

14 Interview with a former Loreto student 1936–1942, (LSt.1), Calcutta, 18/10/15. 15 Loreto in India MSS, Various Foundations, LHAC.

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Fig. 7.4: Sister Magdalena (right) and Orphans at Morapai, Palm Leaves, 1934. © Loreto South Asia Province Archive.

baptizing another child dying of cholera.”16 This statement conformed to official statements of Roman Catholic religiosity of the day. Yet, in the early years of Morapai, the emotional cost of such deaths to these sisters living at this lonely outpost, could only have been accentuated by this covering over of their true emotions in the interests of adhering to the broader public imperatives of the Roman Catholic church.

Partition, 1947 After Partition in 1947, Loreto needed to orient itself to the realities of an independent India. Maintaining the support of the bhadralok (Indian middle classes of Bengal) was assisted by Loreto’s education of many of their daughters in the past four generations. The trade-off had been a high-quality education – including university-level education for some of these girls after 1912. The friendship between Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and Éamon de Valera, Ireland’s third President, also helped Loreto’s case for a place in an emerging and independent India.17

16 Palm Leaves, 1913, 76–80. 17 Interview with Loreto Sister (LS2), Calcutta, 5/2/16.

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However, there were still many uncertainties as to Loreto’s future in India. Loreto women religious who were born abroad (mostly in Ireland) did not have Indian citizenship (still the case today), despite many of them having spent their adult lives in the order in India. And some did not have their visas renewed once India gained its independence and therefore were forced to return to Europe. The visual aesthetic of the Loreto buildings themselves was also a shifting scene as shown in Palm Leaves. The building landscape of Calcutta transmogrified as plaster and brick structures of the Portuguese and early British period were steadily replaced by what resembled neo-Stalinist brutalist architecture, though sometimes retaining or recreating their nineteenth-century interiors. These replacements were really accommodations to the climate and the occasional but strong earthquakes that gripped (and continue to grip) West Bengal. Structures such as St. John’s Anglican Church (a sturdy stone building constructed after the Georgian architectural style of the kind to be found throughout England) remained largely intact in Calcutta. However, plastered stuccoed townhouses of the British period decayed as Banyan trees (not to be removed because of the Hindu belief that this is where their dead relatives reside) grew into them and steadily devoured their structural integrity. In 1958 the original Loreto House (European-shaped architecture and partially restored after an earlier earthquake) was demolished largely for these reasons. Post-1947 also brought the vista of a new India into view. Loreto’s religiosity, as projected by images of its European foundress, Mary Ward, remained, as did commentary on the Roman Catholic ceremonials around baptism, confirmation, and entries into the Novitiate. Yet, carefully vetted extended senior student essays now appeared on leading nationalist figures, Indian festivals, and commentary on the first Independence Day. Ongoing confluence with the West was emphasized, but now from an Indian perspective. For example, one student essay confirmed that M. K. Gandhi had studied Christianity and was “particularly moved” by the Sermon on the Mount, “with its insistence on returning good for evil.”18 The essay also mentioned that he had been a friend of the late Helena Blavatsky, a founder of theosophy in the United States, with its universal belief system of ancient “essential truths,” and that he was also a friend of a leading theosophist, the late Annie Besant: a long-time former resident and leading Indian Nationalist. There were also somewhat reluctantly conceded trade-offs about the colonial past. The laws of the old Raj were rejected. And there was acknowledgement in these student essays of much suffering involved in Ghandi’s Satyagraha (truth insistence) movement of non-violent non-cooperation, when

18 Palm Leaves, 1949, 10–11.

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Indians had chosen to participate. Yet, with the reforming Brahmo Samaj in view (strong in Bengal),19 there was also space devoted to Gandhi’s reforming of the “wrongs of the Indian community” (without mentioning specifically his opposition to caste and communally-based Hindu/Muslim antagonism).20 Regarding Independence Day, few images were deployed except of one very young Loreto girl holding India’s new national flag. In a carefully vetted student public address to Loreto college and school, new India was characterized, away from high Nationalist rhetoric, as “torn with internal strife . . . a starving and illclothed population, border wars and disunion that present depressing pictures.”21 However, a “triumphant” future awaited if values of monotheism – whether Indian or Roman Catholic – were observed and where gender was also central: Our courage, determination and firm faith in God will enable our motherland to hold her rightful place in the world of the future. . . . The nation is free – its women must break all the chains and come forward. Now is the time of self-probing and formulating worthy resolves and not only of planning but of proving, by their deeds, the inherent truth of the words of Florence Nightingale – “patriotism is not enough.”22

Loreto sisters also had their parent market to consider where the education of the daughters of these parents represented the still valued ‘convent’ education of the past – with most of its social and class mobility possibilities remaining in place. But even as Independence had approached five years earlier, there was already a much stronger reference to Indian culture and new nationalist citizenship projections. The nuns were bringing us up to be what our parents wanted us to be . . . They were not compromising [by claiming] that [this] was a British way of thinking. Loreto was never British. For College education, [in teaching] Citizenship they [were] teaching us to be proud of our country and what it had achieved and how, as a citizen of this country, to be ourselves . . . They celebrated all of our festivals, all the culture was brought forward . . . Celebration was part of our psyche: Christmas, Diwali, singing – we started learning all the Tagore songs.23

19 The Brahmo Samaj in the nineteenth century was a Bengal-based reformist movement that aimed to rid Hinduism of its medieval practices and return societal Hinduism back to the purity of the Vedas (ancient Sanscrit Hindu religious texts). Founded by Ram Mohan Roy and Debendranath Tagore in 1828 as a monotheist creed, it sought to abolish such practices as sati (widow burning), caste, and child marriage. 20 Grace D’Souza, “Mahatma Gandhi’s Life and Works,” Palm Leaves, 1949, 10–11. 21 Palm Leaves, 1949, 9. 22 “Independence Day, 1948: (An address delivered to the School Children and College students of Loreto House, Calcutta at the Flag Raising Ceremony on 15th August, 1948, by Miss Shanta Mitter, Fourth-Year Student of the College,” Palm Leaves, 1949) 8–9. 23 Interview with a former Loreto student 1936–1942, (LSt.1), Calcutta, 18/10/15.

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How to be a good citizen means integration, mixing of castes, religion, community wise, and it is [Loreto] schools like these that held us together otherwise we would [have gone] in 10 different directions.24

Loreto was staking a claim to be a moderating influence for India’s future while divesting itself of complicity with the British colonial past. Yet there were more material, cross-religious anecdotes Loreto could also point to, including the circumstance surrounding the death of Sarojini Naidu, a poet, Indian nationalist, and women’s rights campaigner, at Lucknow. She had visited the Loreto Convent at Lucknow (north-central India) in 1947. Lucknow Loreto school was closed so that Loreto students could be conveyed along with Loreto sisters of the convent to Government House (of the United Provinces) to pay tribute to this “crusader of great causes.”25 Surrounded by the crowds of the sorrowing poor of Lucknow, among whom Naidu had worked, the Loreto girls walked in procession to the couch on which her remains were laid out. Palm Leaves noted that “Pandit Nehru himself made the crowd divide to allow us to approach.”26 The article also reported that the Loreto children sang “Lead Kindly Light” and that Naidu’s daughter, Miss Padma Naidu, had asked for this hymn to be sung just before she died.27 The 1950s also brought new visual representations by Loreto of India’s cultural and political landscape. It was true that from early in the twentieth century, Loreto students had performed the plays of Calcutta-based Rabindranath Tagore, an internationally renowned playwright, poet, musician, and Indian Nationalist. There also had been organized visits (in covered carriages and afterhours) to see his nephew Abanindranath Tagore’s nationalist-inspired artworks at the Calcutta Museum.28 Yet, unlike the earlier pictures in the 1920s of British officials visiting Loreto (and engaging in the rituals of high tea with the staff and without students), the visual record for a “new” India offered a different composition (see Fig. 7.5). In the 1950s, India’s royal and political elite were now invited to officiate. And their depiction was one of interacting directly with Indian Loreto students, in personal contact poses (see Fig. 7.6). After Partition there were also rather idiosyncratic attempts at explaining the colonial past in India that downplayed British abuses of power. For example, in 1950 a long Loreto address was published in Palm Leaves that sought to trace British rule and the struggle for independence, and to make sense of a

24 Interview with a former Loreto student 1936–1942, (LSt.1), Calcutta, 18/10/15. 25 “Loreto Convent, Lucknow,” Palm Leaves, 1950, 14. 26 “Loreto Convent, Lucknow,” Palm Leaves, 1950, 14. 27 “Loreto Convent, Lucknow,” Palm Leaves, 1950, 14. 28 Mother Gonzaga Joynt to “Archbishop,” September 6, 1906, Box 347 (“Letters from Indian Religious Orders in India”), Dublin Diocesan Archives (DDA).

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Fig. 7.5: Lord and Lady Lytton, the Fete, Loreto House, Palm Leaves, 1927. © Loreto South Asia Province Archive.

modern-day India where Loreto might acknowledge its past colonial context yet provide a logical trajectory for its contribution in the future. This was an impressive piece of synchronistic writing that garnered most of the key political events, though omitting General Dyer’s Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, in 1919 and the Great Revolt of 1857. The history of India was, instead, a gentle and anticipated progress to independence in 1947. The address went on to claim that since the days of Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India, the British had always intended to leave India. And Hastings was quoted as writing as far back as the late eighteenth century: A time, not very remote, will arrive when England will, on sound principles of policy, wish to relinquish the domination which she has gradually and unintentionally assumed over this country.29

In other words, independence was a logical and a mutually negotiated occurrence. And now, in 1950, the address concluded, India had deficits which the

29 “The New Republic of India (An address by Mrinalini Malik, College Student of Loreto House, on the first Republic Day, 26th January, 1950),” Palm Leaves, 1950, 11.

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Fig. 7.6: Governor-General’s visit to Loreto, Darjeeling, Palm Leaves, 1949. © Loreto South Asia Province Archive.

likes of Loreto could assist in remedying by contributing, through education, to the building of new citizenry: We are not expected to face the various national problems with the self-sacrificing spirit of Gandhi or with the tremendous vigour of Nehru, but as citizens . . . we are still overburdened with poverty, starvation still takes toll of many lives, all manner of diseases and superstitions dry our blood and choke our minds.30

30 “The New Republic of India,” Palm Leaves, 1950, 13.

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Indian Festivals Despite such implausible narratives, by 1950 the Loreto-inspired message became one of Roman Catholic “presences” in India but with strong acknowledgment of “the great significance” of Indian festivals, including the presentation of coconuts to the God of the Sea in August to mark the end of the monsoon season. There was also the life history of Sita, the wife of Ram, who was carried off by Raven, the king of Ceylon, 3,000 years ago. And there was Diwali, the Hindu festival of light, of course, as well. And by this decade, visual representations in Palm Leaves were especially prominent when it came to characterizing Saraswati Puja, in honor of the goddess of learning: The goddess is made of mud, and the night before, the Puja is finally painted, beautifully decorated . . . on the festival day, which is fixed and forecast by great Hindu astrologers, the students after having a bath in the Ganges, place all their books and writing materials at the feet of the goddess. Then they offer their devotion by chanting “mantras” with the assistance of Hindu Brahmin priests who must be present. With great pomp the goddess is carried through the streets to the Ganges where it is immersed. . . . On this particular occasion the girls wear yellow saris and remain bare-footed . . . on the day of the Puja no student reads or writes, or even touches pen and pencil.31

For Hindu children in particular, it was clear that these worship rituals cut across European Judeo-Christian morality stories. Unlike the nineteenth century, by the 1950s there were many more Hindu girls enrolled at Loreto institutions. With the Puja, this intervention into Loreto’s education work went even deeper in that it related student learning with the festival itself, defining the school term dates that the secular state decreed for schools generally in Bengal. Furthermore, Loreto’s parent clientele was not likely to permit any watering down of their daughters’ participation in these rituals; and there is strong evidence that Loreto embraced these ceremonials as a signal to all that it had, as an institution, indigenized sufficiently to be no longer considered part of Europe’s empires, and also as testament to its insistence that it was an Irish and not a British outfit in the first place.

The Loreto Indian Habitus The Indian domestic servants of Loreto House also featured in the 1950 edition of Palm Leaves. Their family links were longstanding and, unlike Loreto’s mostly European sisters, and the pupils in their schools, these Indians continued to 31 “Indian Festivals,” Palm Leaves 1950, 41.

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be treated as the wider Bengali community would have viewed them. For those who served Loreto House, their Indian background and non-Christian beliefs were accentuated. And while Loreto took care in not identifying the caste of school children, for their servants this was done quite openly. There were the “sweepers” and their female counterparts the mehtors who did the “heavy” cleaning work, mopping floors several times a day and polishing Loreto’s metal ornamentations. Additionally, four generations of a Brahmin family had attended to the college gates over the previous century. This Indian status was necessary so they could welcome visitors, having the cultural authority to eject Indian intruders. Their caste also seemed the only one appropriate to convey Loreto women to Loreto day schools elsewhere in the city. In the quarters of the Loreto sisters, however, only Christian Indian girls – who had once attended Loreto’s outreach convent school at Morapai – were permitted to serve. Crossing this cultural space was their privilege, including caring for the sick and the invalid (women religious) as well as carrying their messages outside the college walls.32 Additionally, by the late 1950s, Loreto’s outreach programs to the poor were depicted as more integrated enterprises. Loreto sisters, though still veiled in religious habit, were now photographed “outdoors” and in educational settings in cultural spaces that were Indian rather than European. Figure 7.7, for example, shows Loreto women religious interacting with girls belonging to the order’s Hindi medium school in Darjeeling. This was in preference to many earlier depictions of European-predicated education with its impressive Darjeeling college as a backdrop. Cross-class student interaction was now also shown. Loreto college girls were displayed in Palm Leaves in informal poses intermingling with poor Indian girls, indicating that such student visits to these underprivileged settings were school-sanctioned. These visits were not only encouraged as part of the new Loreto outlook in postindependent India, but also portrayed as an important part of the broader education of middle-class Loreto girls. Additionally, Palm Leaves magazines showed college sports champions in Indian saris rather than in Loreto uniforms, while others were shown engaging in traditional Indian dancing (as opposed to earlier British-period European dancing).

32 “The Domestic Staff of Loreto House, Calcutta,” Palm Leaves, 1950, 38.

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Fig. 7.7: “An Outdoor Party at St Teresa’s Hindi School, Darjeeling,” Palm Leaves, 1947. © Loreto South Asia Province Archive.

Loreto’s Representations of Its Students’ Futures Most significantly, in this period, however, was the change in the way Loreto chose to publicize and represent its students to broader Indian society in Bengal. Loreto now located itself as encouraging female student self-actualization. In this it carefully tapped into progressive streams of Bengali social thought regarding women that were yet to be found in many other parts of India. The move also reflected strong moves in the West (including many former parts of empire) to wean middle-class girls away from accomplishments education that limited their academics futures onto a curriculum that was mostly the same as the boys. As a former Loreto student and then teacher in the 1950s remembers it: Women [wanted] to be a proud part of society, not to be suppressed, and [Loreto] colleges such as this allowed us to express ourselves as women . . . [in] jobs, [not only as] teachers, doctors but now in the army, official posts, banks, pilots and [in] usual male occupations. We had a lot of women coming up in corporate houses. It was the possibility that women could do anything. I am sure there must have been a friction with some parents but in Bengal the parents were more encouraging than elsewhere in India in foresight, more permissive, more cultured.33

33 Interview with a former Loreto teacher in the 1950s and 1960s (LT1), Calcutta, 18/10/15.

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There was also another use for Loreto’s visual representations. This was to display to middle-class parents and to Bengali society at large the reach of its international networks of students – though only in terms of presenting the personal travels of its former students rather than conveying a sense of belonging to Loreto schools globally. In this context the production of the image was used to document Loreto’s growing diaspora of ex-students across India and around the world. This collective story was mostly built up as former pupils sent pictures of themselves after they had graduated from Loreto to the Loreto sisters who had formerly taught them. Professional achievement or personal success was the message, and these partly reflected the trajectories established by their race and the type of Loreto school they attended. For example, graduates from Tara Hall Chalet in Simla (a hill station in north India where the old Raj was governed by the British in the summer months) were made up mostly of the daughters of British bureaucrats and diplomats. There were also European graduates of Loreto College, Calcutta, who followed similar married futures. These girl graduates often were able to use the class status built by their parents in India, as well as their own Loreto education, to end up in finishing schools in Europe and marriage to upper-middle class Europeans resident in Britain or returning officers from a fading or former Raj. One such image had the caption “Blanche Peat is now Mrs Gray and lives in Surrey. We hear that she has become quite domesticated – strange as it must seem to those who knew Blanche.” Here the image was one chosen voluntarily by the former student and sent to her alma mater, though the caption was probably not.34 There were other diversions, too, for the etiquette-directed, European accomplishments graduate of Tara Hall: Rosemary Williams is enjoying her work with the Ornithological Society as much as ever. She spent a week on Skokholm, an island off the coast of Pembrokeshire, where there is a bird observatory, and had a wonderful time being blown by strong winds and watching birds. Part of her Summer holidays were spent in Ireland. She toured Connemara which she had not visited before and fell completely in love with it.35

Apart from such class-bound, time-rich frippery, Loreto education continued to be considered a useful asset for the marriage market (Indian, Eurasian or European), with recent ex-Loretans finding married futures in South Africa, England, and other parts of India.36 In this period Eurasian and Indian Loreto girls had, in fact, a much more diverse range of futures, compared to before

34 Palm Leaves, 1950, 97. 35 Palm Leaves, 1951, 85. 36 Palm Leaves, 1950, 97.

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Partition in 1947, with a significant college cohort going on to higher university study and the professions abroad. In the two decades after 1947 (and compared to less professional progress in the West regarding women physicians), a large number of Loreto College graduates were able to graduate from medical college in India, having their credentials recognized and them finding meaningful employment in India and abroad. This empowerment was reinforced by the use of the images of these graduates (by this time much more frequently used in Palm Leaves), and the commentary around them was about their professional attainments rather than their personal traits and appearance. Some of Loreto’s graduates also combined their new professional status with marriages across Indian/Eurasian racial lines which had been so antagonistic just two decades earlier. The new nation states of an independent South Asia –including India, Pakistan, and Burma – had been established. Yet, Loreto’s diaspora of past students also transcended these new national borders. For example, Nishan Hasan (now Mrs. Rahman) was reported as being “happily married” and living in Australia, where her husband was the Trade Commissioner for Pakistan.37

Conclusion Palm Leaves ceased regular production in the 1960s. Other modes of communication from Loreto, including the Indian newspapers in West Bengal, partly took over its role. However, its visual projections from 1904 to 1960 demonstrate the strong local habitus of this Roman Catholic order. Loreto was robust enough to socialize and enculturate its own community of students, parents, and alumni largely on its own terms. To help achieve this, Palm Leaves shifted orthodox Roman Catholic mentalities (that drove the global Loreto order) to more Indian-specific responses as the century unfolded. Loreto was able to preserve its claims to a Judeo-Christian ethic, but in a way that was indigenized by signaling through the visual medium deeper and enduring Indian traditional values and culture, particularly after 1947. Additionally, the visual record left by Palm Leaves traces the nature of Loreto’s modernizing story in the twentieth century and demonstrates that this story was not driven by transnational messaging, which mostly focused on the political dimensions that came with the independence struggle. Rather, Loreto moved from Christian conversion ethics, which were unequivocally Western in 37 Palm Leaves, 1949, 85.

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construction in the early twentieth century, to softer and more culturally accommodative Christian ‘presence’ mentalities in India, post-1947. This meant its Christianity might be fused with Indian cultural and spiritual values without compromising its central educational mission and its capacity to stay in India after independence. Emphasizing its Irish, not English, heritage, and with a similar story of Irish independence struggle, Loreto used these credentials of being outside an English empire to then sanitize (as a putative outsider) the colonial past. This past could be then seen as a constructive precursor of Indian citizenship, post-1947, where Loreto sisters, mostly as Westerners, could continue to have a role to play. This narrative with all its flaws was sustained by visual imagery rather than an over-reliance on text. These visual avenues of outside communication (often unconsciously constructed) permitted this license in Loreto’s messaging in the late 1940s and 1950s. The narrative also helped to provide Loreto with an ongoing space to justify continuing to educate the daughters of aspirational middleclass families in India, as well as the outreach work it has pursued amongst the poor. In this sense, and as documented by its visual record, it has been Loreto’s internal evolution, concentrating on Indian culture and society rather than transnational politics, that has mostly driven its modernity story on the subcontinent today. Analysis of this kind of image-making, in fact, also points to a kind of cultural malignancy. This was because the prevailing cultural dominance of the West, even after 1947, remained in place in elite Indian circles and was usurped by them, until the late 1950s.38 In fact, this chapter shows how the image and its subjects also remained mostly outside the Indian cultural domain. (The Indian cultural domain was less able to be wrangled anyway into one narrative by the Western photographer because of its different and numerous socio-cultural heritages.) Building on Chris Pinney’s work that concerns the colonial period, this chapter in fact verifies that image-making, as displayed to “outside” audiences, still largely implied dynamics that objectified the “Indian” as well as his or her “Indianess.”39 These images continued to exemplify the Eastern as a cultural “curio,” on display to Western-minded individuals, many of whom were leading Indian nationalists, already at least part-educated in the West.

38 For further analysis of this broader phenomenon of Western cultural transfer (with an undermining Nationalist intent) in New Delhi in elite Indian circles, post-1947, see Nayantara Pothen, Glittering Decades: New Delhi in Love and War (New Delhi: Viking, 2012). 39 Chris Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997).

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However, there now has been a break with this kind of academic inquiry into the image. As in other parts of the world, the conveyance of the image in modern-day India has undergone a revolution with the advent of service provider platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. These and other platforms are replacing more static modes of visual imagery that belonged to the twentieth century with stable interpretative sites for the historian to access, as this chapter has shown, using Loreto as its case study. Today, Loreto in India, like many other educational sites, projects visuals that are now sourced and publicized by students and adults who are not part of the order. New digital media scatter and decenter mentalities around a once focal Loreto order. And, as a result, the digital revolution compels the historian to find new paradigms and theorizations capable of gaining some purchase on the multi-modality of image-making and its application in the modern world. In this way traditional methodologies of historians when focusing on the image are more seriously disrupted by the digital age than they are for textual analysis. With visual media now so dispersed and transitory, finding a discernible center that is stable enough for critical historical analysis is currently a challenging enterprise, particularly for postcolonial research. And this while more conventional textual documentary production continues and will be available to future historians to access in ways requiring far less theoretical revision and epistemological accommodation compared to future studies of the image. On the other hand, the loss of control of the image in recent times has not led to these new images becoming a diabolical instrument of confrontation, as Depaepe and Henkens had predicted in 2000.40 In fact, in some ways the work of Loreto is better conveyed by this new media in all of its various manifestations. For example, Sister Cyril Mooney, educating Calcutta’s very poor, has documented her work through YouTube and podcasts.41 These podcasts convey a story of commitment to the young and endangered poor of Calcutta. There is also a taste of whimsy, for example, in the Times of India, where the alumni of Loreto, Lucknow, report, again with visuals, the presence of boys at a social setting there after school hours.42

40 Marc Depaepe and Bregt Henkens, “The History of Education and the Challenge of the Visual,” Paedagogica Historica 36, no. 1 (January 2000): 10–17. 41 See, for example, “In India, Sister Cyril Mooney Works to Changes [sic] Lives of the Poor,” YouTube video, 8:44, January 6, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WaNhU9P9oM. 42 Renu Singh, “Boys Make Their Presence Felt at the Loreto Alumnae Association Bash in Lucknow,” Times of India, December 28, 2014. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/ events/lucknow/Boys-make-their-presence-felt-at-the-Loreto-Alumnae-Association-bash-in-Luck now/articleshow/45630839.cms.

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More centrally, though, what the visual record of Loreto has shown up until 1960 at least, is Loreto’s nuanced yet substantial internal evolution over the past century or so, which has mostly remained separate from the broader contours of postcolonial, transnational political messaging around Indian independence. Like other sites of once colonial interaction, the production of the image accentuates an earlier and different visual legacy, pre-1960. And it has been this earlier visual legacy that has demonstrated far more tangibly part of the story as to how these once colonial sites negotiated political independence while continuing to be directed by remaining Westerners on the subcontinent.

Bibliography Archival Sources Loreto Provincial Archives, Calcutta Loreto in India MSS, “Various Foundations” Palm Leaves (Loreto House, Calcutta), various editions, 1904–1960 “Statistics of the Loreto Schools in India – 1905,” PI 1/1905. Dublin Diocesan Archives Box 347: “Letters from Indian Religious Orders in India”

Secondary Sources Anderson, Valerie. “The Eurasian Problem in Nineteenth Century India.” PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), 2011. Catteeuw, Karl, Kristof Dams, Marc Depaepe, and Frank Simon. “Filming the Black Box: Primary Schools on Film in Belgium, 1880–1960: A First Assessment of Unused Sources.” In Visual History: Images of Education, edited by Ulrich Mietzner, Kevin Myers, and Nick Peim, 203–32. Bern: Peter Lang, 2005. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Depaepe, Marc, and Bregt Henkens. “The History of Education and the Challenge of the Visual.” Paedagogica Historica 36, no. 1 (January 2000): 10–17. Geyer, Michael. “The New Consensus.” In Transnationale Geschichte als transnationale Praxis, edited by Matthias Middell. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2009. Greenburger, Allen J. The British Image in India: A Study of the Literature of Imperialism, 1880–1960. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.

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“In India, Sister Cyril Mooney Works to Changes [sic] Lives of the Poor.” YouTube video, 8:44, January 6, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WaNhU9P9oM. Middell, Matthias, and Katja Naumann. “Global History and the Spatial Turn: From the Impact of Area Studies to the Study of Critical Junctures of Globalisation.” Journal of Global History 5 (2010): 1–22. Muthiah, S., and Harry MacLure. The Anglo Indians: a 500-Year History. New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2013. Pinney, Chris. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pothen, Nayantara. Glittering Decades: New Delhi in Love and War. New Delhi: Viking, 2012. Singh, Renu. “Boys Make Their Presence Felt at the Loreto Alumnae Association Bash in Lucknow.” Times of India, December 28, 2014. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/enter tainment/events/lucknow/Boys-make-their-presence-felt-at-the-Loreto-AlumnaeAssociation-bash-in-Lucknow/articleshow/45630839.cms.

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Chapter 8 Humanitarian Photography Beyond the Picture: David “CHIM” Seymour’s Children of Europe For me, some of the best images live somewhere between a still photograph and what a book can become with a series of images and lots of different layers and sometimes even other media. – Susan Meiselas1 Chim’s photographs of the children are his family album. This spiritual family will remain his only one: the man who loved children would never have any of his own. – Carole Naggar2

Introduction In its May 1948 edition, the UNESCO Courier featured a short article with the headline “Unesco Begins Photo Survey of War-Hit Nations.”3 The purpose of this initiative was to visually document the “needs and problems of children” who had survived the war and, in many cases, were traumatized, physically handicapped, and had lost one or both parents.4 The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) commissioned David Seymour, one of the founders of the international photo cooperative Magnum, for this project.5 In a 1999 book on Seymour, his assignment for UNESCO is described as a “labor of love”;

1 Susan Meiselas, “Style Can’t Sustain You: Notes from the Field,” interview by Coralie Kraft, lensculture, https://www.lensculture.com/articles/susan-meiselas-style-can-t-sustain-younotes-from-the-field. 2 Carole Naggar, CHIM: Children of War (New York: Umbrage Editions, 2013), 21. 3 “Unesco Begins Photo Survey of War-Hit Nations,” UNESCO Courier 1, no. 4 (May 1948): 3. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000073741. 4 “Unesco Begins Photo Survey of War-Hit Nations,” 3. 5 David Seymour was commissioned for a second UNESCO mission in the context of the fight against illiteracy in Southern Italy; see Giovanna Hendel, Carole Naggar, and Karin Priem, eds., Note: The authors would like to express their warm thanks to the UNESCO Archives – in particular to Adama Pam, Eng Sengsavang, and Giovanna Hendel. We would also like to thank Carole Naggar whose work has inspired this chapter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634945-009

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this also applied to his earnings, “for instead of paying the usual magazine rate of at least one hundred dollars a day,” UNESCO offered twenty-six dollars.6 Seymour’s three-month mission took him to his former home country Poland, as well as to Greece, Italy, Hungary, and Austria, where he visited villages and cities ravaged by war, refugee camps, schools, an international children’s village, orphanages, homes for “disturbed” or disabled children, and hospitals. He focused on children and young adults: how they suffered as a result of the destruction and the physical and emotional damage induced by the war, how they coped with poverty, desolation, and abandonment, and how the interventions carried out by United Nations agencies, such as UNESCO and UNICEF, affected their situation.7 It was UNESCO’s intention to publish Seymour’s photographs “in the form of five photographic stories in the U.S.A., the U.K., France, Canada and Latin America” to raise funds in some of its member states.8 A first selection of Seymour’s images appeared in December 1948 in Life magazine,9 followed by an article in the UNESCO Courier in February 1949 and a book entitled Children of Europe published by UNESCO in 1949 in three languages (French, English, and Spanish).10 Many other reproductions of David Seymour’s photo journey have since been published again and again because of their extraordinary quality and ongoing appeal. In his 2016 book The Documentary Impulse, Stuart Franklin explores the urge to visually document the world, and this was certainly one motive for the photography project announced by UNESCO and carried out by Seymour.11 However, there was also a second, humanitarian impulse, the “imperative to reduce suffering,” as described and analyzed by Craig Calhoun in 2008.12 Indeed, Seymour’s

They Did Not Stop at Eboli: UNESCO and the Campaign against Illiteracy in a Reportage by David “Chim” Seymour and Texts by Carlo Levi (1950) (Paris: UNESCO; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). 6 Inge Bondi, CHIM: The Photographs of David Seymour (London: André Deutsch, 1996), 90. Bondi mistakenly assumed that Seymour only worked for the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). 7 See Carole Naggar, A Second Look: Chim’s Children of War, http://time.com/3796013/a-sec ond-look-chims-children-of-war/#1. 8 “Unesco Begins Photo Survey of War-Hit Nations,” 3. 9 “Children of Europe: Christmas Finds Many of Them Still in Great Need of Help,” Life, December 27, 1948, 13–19. 10 See “The Children of Europe: A Unesco Photo Story,” UNESCO Courier 2, no. 1 (February 1949): 1, 5–9, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000073912; Children of Europe: Photos by David Seymour, publication no. 403 of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Paris: UNESCO, 1949). 11 Stuart Franklin, The Documentary Impulse (London: Phaidon Press, 2016). 12 Craig Calhoun, “The Imperative to Reduce Suffering: Charity, Progress, and Emergencies in the Field of Humanitarian Action,” in Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics, ed. Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 73–97.

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photographs were not only made for reasons of documentation but also for promotional purposes; they were made to circulate across different media, shape public opinion, and prompt humanitarian action. Both aspects – the documentary and the humanitarian impulse – imply engagement and action, and they are usually enhanced when children are involved.13 This chapter thus focuses on the role of documentary photography in the context of UNESCO’s child rescue and childcare campaigns and examines how photography as a technology became a crucial part of mediating and promoting humanitarianism. We will start by mapping the broader context of our study and discussing some of the main trends of humanitarianism. We will then focus on photography as an institutional and material practice of humanitarian ‘propaganda’ and how notions of childhood intensified the urgency of humanitarian campaigns. Next, we will trace how David Seymour’s photographs were carefully selected and edited, and how UNESCO appropriated his photographs in its publications.14 Finally, we will also look beyond UNESCO and humanitarian aid; by tracing one of Seymour’s most iconic photographs, we will explore the picture’s long life up to the present day.15

Humanitarianism and the Formation of “Ethical Communities” Seymour’s photographs of the Children of Europe are historically situated in the aftermath of World War II, when a wave of complex and sometimes contradictory humanitarian initiatives established a new international order. Humanitarianism and the history of human rights have been the focus of much research. Many histories of humanitarianism emphasize liberalism, capitalism, and related ethics as

13 In their book Humanitarian Photography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno also use the term “humanitarian impulse,” which may have been inspired by Stuart Franklin. 14 A recently discovered UNESCO photo album including contact sheets and texts by David Seymour reveals how his photographs were edited in the context of another UNESCO media campaign. See Karin Priem, “David Seymour’s Album on the Fight against Illiteracy in Calabria as a Tool of Mediatization: Material Traces and Visual Storytelling,” in Hendel, Naggar, and Priem, They Did Not Stop at Eboli, 263–74. 15 Another example of the long life of a photograph taken in the aftermath of WWII is Werner Bischof’s picture of the “The Boy from Roermond.” See Karin Priem, “Beyond the Collapse of Language? Photographs of Children in Postwar Europe as Performances and Relational Objects,” Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 6 (2017): 683–96.

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the most significant and interconnected forces in the shaping of humanitarian action and the desire to reduce suffering. One of the most prominent, and critical, voices in the field is Michael Barnett. He concludes his 2011 book Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism by pointing out major ideological, ethical, and political dilemmas concerning humanitarian practices.16 In Barnett’s view, humanitarianism necessarily involves paternalistic authority, power, and control, even if its purpose is to provide care and help for marginalized and suffering populations. Humanitarian agencies often claim to act neutrally and to adopt a universal ethical approach with the aim of creating a better world. However, the involvement of strong nationstates representing Western interests and their attitudes of cultural, social, and political superiority in terms of knowledge, expertise, and standards of civilization often run counter to this officially neutral agenda. Barnett argues that “[f]ew humanitarians enter a world of ruin with the goal of putting the pieces back together the way they were; instead they treat the ruin as an opportunity to seek justice and human improvement.”17 The humanitarian impulse, according to Barnett, is not only inspired by visions of liberty, progress, growth, social engineering, and human perfection, but also depends on experiences of catastrophe and destruction. The “spectacular growth of humanitarianism,” especially in the wake of World Wars I and II, was often a result of the fear of losing ethical and/or ideological superiority and a “sense of purpose” on the side of the “givers” and the “compassionate.”18 In addition, catastrophe and destruction were perceived as a threat, not only to national or international security but also, equally importantly, to economic interests, which in turn triggered humanitarian engagement.19 Thomas Haskell’s two-part essay “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility” testifies to strong connections between economic markets and humanitarianism. In Haskell’s view, humanitarianism is not so much about control; rather he sees it as having emerged hand in hand with liberalism during the eighteenth century. Haskell argues that humanitarianism was erected on the pillars of liberal economic rationales that forged “bonds created not by class interest but by the subtle isomorphisms and homologies that arise from a cognitive style common to economic affairs, judgments of moral responsibility,

16 Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 17 Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 227. 18 Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 224–27. 19 Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss, “Humanitarianism: A Brief History of the Present,” in Barnett and Weiss, Humanitarianism in Question, 1–48.

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and much else.”20 He posits that the principles of the market and its entangled spheres of interest altered “perceptions of causation in human affairs,” which in turn also led to humanitarianism.21 According to Haskell, the mutual promises, interests, and dependencies embedded in a contract between business partners encouraged an attitude of achievement by acknowledging responsibilities and acting consciously to fulfill specific agreements and obligations. As such, the rationales of the market created compassionate engagement and humanitarianism in a scenario of mutual dependencies via a causal structure. In other words, a flourishing liberal market-based society was established on the basis of an approach which focused on the ability to take part in processes of exchange – and this ability was guaranteed by humanitarian intervention. Thomas W. Laqueur similarly posits that a specific causal thinking changed mentalities and strongly influenced humanitarian narration, but he emphasizes the existential presence of the human body. He argues that “humanitarian narratives” in history referred mostly to the functioning of the human body and the causalities of pain and agony. According to Laqueur, it is indeed the human body and its suffering that triggers humanitarian action by creating bonds “between those who suffer and those who would help.”22 In line with what has been said we would like to argue that humanitarianism, when based on economic rationales, human experiences, and causality, can be compared to an “ethical community,” to use the term coined by Jacques Rancière. According to Rancière, an “ethical community” perceives those who suffer as a threat and views alienated outsiders as people “to whom the community must extend a hand in order to re-establish the ‘social bond.’”23 Indeed, until the end of the Cold War, humanitarianism represented a phenomenon that combined economic interests and the need for security with showcasing empathy and promoting Western values and action in order to foster a more peaceful and economically healthy world order based on shared Western values. Relevant humanitarian campaigns were usually carefully crafted in terms of their messages and contents.

20 Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2,” American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (June 1985): 547–66, quotation on 547. 21 Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1,” American Historical Review 90, no. 2 (April 1985): 339–61, quotation on 343. 22 Thomas W. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 177. See also Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 23 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2011), 189.

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Photography as an Institutional and Material Practice to Create Public Consent During and after World War II, promotional materials and books issued by humanitarian agencies, as well as many cultural and popular media, featured photographs dedicated to humanitarian causes. Many of these photographs were performing across different media. Due to their “media plasticity,” photographic images were included or excluded and/or (re-)appeared in various media campaigns.24 These campaigns and their specific regime of visibility were launched to invite debate, to convince, to shape opinions, and to define what mattered in the public sphere.25 Photography played a key role in this process. Photography’s power derives from its capacity to capture and make visible – and to provide a human face to – events and occurrences otherwise forgotten in the flow of real time, while its technological dimensions at the same time facilitated and determined the institutional production and management of visibility and knowledge. Photography was a central element of the mediation of humanitarianism and the “engineering of consent” within a wider public.26 Therefore, analyzing how humanitarian photography works means looking beyond the picture; it means that we also need to analyze the media ecologies, institutional usages, and circulation practices and processes that the photographs were part of. Photographic pictures commissioned by humanitarian agencies were indeed specifically made to establish public consent and were (re-)used – often in refashioned ways – within many contexts and media. Several works can help us gain a better understanding of these processes. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s 1999 book Remediation – the term referring to “the representation of one medium in another” – is a pioneering work on how different media interact with and borrow from each other, mutually making and remaking themselves and each other.27 According to Bolter and Grusin, both old (e.g., analogue photography) and new (digital) media tend to erase their making and “mediated character” and pretend

24 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 13. 25 See Lilie Chouliaraki and Tijana Stolic, “Rethinking Media Responsibility in the Refugee ‘Crisis’: A Visual Typology of European News,” Media, Culture & Society 39, no. 8 (2017): 1162–77; Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008). 26 See Edward Bernays, The Engineering of Consent (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955); see also Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). 27 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 45.

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to provide “transparency” and “immediacy” by presenting what there is to see.28 Therefore, it is important to trace and make visible that which was erased in selection and editing processes to shed new light on how photography works as a technology and an institutional practice. Mediation processes and the making of visibility are also the focus of recent research in journalism studies. Lilie Chouliaraki has analyzed the “symbolic power” of transnational media “to manage the visibility of suffering” and the conditions that make it possible to produce “cosmopolitan communities of emotion and action.”29 It must be stressed, however, that it is equally important to analyze the making and management of visibility from a different point of view. This point of view implies putting a focus on the material hermeneutics of photography and exploring how the humanitarian field edited and ‘engineered’ its purpose by means of specific media technologies. In fact, photography was an omnipresent technology, which after the Second World War was expected to facilitate transnational if not universal humanitarian concerns and related messages as “ongoing moments.”30 David Phillips’ description of photography “as an interpretative rather than a transcriptive medium” highlights the persuasive qualities of the medium.31 He describes documentary photography as representing a “combination of evidence and instruction,” which “necessarily entails various rhetorical and aesthetic techniques that combine fact with feeling, information with effect, and factuality with polemic.”32 The marketing committees of humanitarian agencies were well aware of these qualities of photographs and used them in a carefully selected way as “authorities” of evidence and truth and as a means of showcasing international crises, social concerns, and emergencies with the intention of influencing the public.33 According to Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, humanitarian photographs can be labeled as public images – that is, as images specifically made for the public – and “as means for continually making sense of the world.”34 They suggest that a public image is not fine art but rather “a real artefact, not a fabricated reality” and that researchers should start “to consider what it can do on its own terms.”35 28 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 24. 29 Lilie Chouliaraki, “The Symbolic Power of Transnational Media: Managing the Visibility of Suffering,” Global Media and Communication 4, no. 3 (2008): 329–51, quotations on 329. 30 Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment (New York: Vintage, 2007). 31 David Phillips, “Actuality and Affect in Documentary Photography,” in Using Visual Evidence, ed. Richard Howells and Robert S. Mattson (Berkshire: Open University Press, 2009), 56. 32 Phillips, “Actuality and Affect in Documentary Photography,” 64. 33 Phillips, “Actuality and Affect in Documentary Photography,” 58. 34 Hariman and Lucaites, The Public Image, 3. 35 Hariman and Lucaites, The Public Image, 5.

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Analyzing photographs as public images sheds new light on the controversial debates about atrocity photographs. Atrocity photographs have been described as voyeuristic, pornographic, disrespectful, polemical, and sentimental, as a means of ideological control and as signs of the power of the visualizer, as objects of consumption, and, finally, as a mode of domination through the act of representation.36 Countering the arguments of critics who see suffering as an experience that should not be exposed to those who claim the “right to look,”37 Susie Linfield has argued that atrocity photographs may well serve as “incubators” of human rights; in her view, they raise empathy and political concern by showing human faces and the “real” nature of the body.38 In a bid to break away from morally inflected debates that see photography as a pornographic “spectacle,” John Roberts suggests looking at the “ecology of the photograph.”39 In this reading, analyzing the contexts of photographs is as important as analyzing their content.40 This also echoes Hariman and Lucaites’ argument that the moral, or ethical, analysis of public images does not do full justice to what images do and how they frame judgments while circulating in the public world. Instead, they argue that it is “important . . . to reaffirm that photography is not only a medium of representation but also one that operates performatively. It not only records something but also displays it to a spectator for dedicated, artistically enhanced observation and response” while putting on display “performances” of social life and “adding viewers along with other potential spectators to the audience.”41 In line with Ariella Azoulay and her study on The Civil Contract of Photography,42 Hariman and Lucaites define spectatorship as a “civic capability,” and it is photography as a public medium that offers this

36 See Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003); Susie Linfield, “The Ethics of Vision: Photojournalism and Human Rights,” in My Brother’s Keeper: Documentary Photographers and Human Rights, ed. Alessandro Mauro (Rome: Contrasto, 2007), 12–29; Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 473–96; Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser, eds., Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (London: Reaktion Books, 2012); John Roberts, Photography and Its Violations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). See also Priem, “Beyond the Collapse of Language?,” 691, for a very similar argument, although in a different context. 37 Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look.” 38 Linfield, The Cruel Radiance, 34, 39. 39 Roberts, Photography and Its Violations, 9. 40 Christina Twomey, “Severed Hands: Authenticating Atrocity in the Congo, 1904–13,” in Batchen et al., Picturing Atrocity, 39–50. 41 Hariman and Lucaites, The Public Image, 14. 42 Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography.

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mode of watching and establishes a public space of relations between the photographer, those who have been photographed, and the audience.43 Therefore, the agency of photography builds long-lasting relationships with audiences and is intensified when the photographs depict children. From the early twentieth century to the present day, the need to care for children has generated worldwide interest and competition for leadership among humanitarian agencies such as the League of Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Save the Children Fund in the UK, initiatives launched after World War II by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and UNESCO, Schweizer Spende, UNICEF, and many non-governmental organizations. For humanitarian agencies, childhood represents a neutral ground based on universal ethics. Social work and childcare are seen as a means of enhancing prestige, eliciting sympathy, and convincing audiences to take immediate action.44 Children suffering from traumatic war experiences were and still are a key focus of humanitarian activities. It was no accident that the photographer Werner Bischof noted in his diary while on a photo journey through Western Europe for the Swiss monthly Du in 1945: “On the one side lies the East – on the other the West. Both powers have serious problems of various kinds. If I succeed in representing this in and with children, I will have achieved a purely social, and at the same time European work of art.”45 Bischof’s ambitions – to draw upon the power of photography and images of children to present, make, and articulate histories and to promote international relations – echoed those of many other postwar humanitarian photographers. If we look at the history of childhood, it has been strongly influenced by the invention of the child as a pedagogical idea and a target of adults’ affectionate care. Egle Becchi and Dominique Julia have emphasized that childhood is a concept created by adults.46 Childhood has been shaped not only by visual practices but also by educational concepts, scientific theories, and a whole array of objects that have been made specifically for children.47 With the rise of mass education and the nation-state during the nineteenth century, children were also perceived as future citizens. They were increasingly seen as a force that would not only

43 Hariman and Lucaites, The Public Image, 14. 44 Dominique Marshall, “The Construction of Children as an Object of International Relations: The Declaration of Children’s Rights and the Child Welfare Committee of League of Nations, 1900–1924,” International Journal of Children’s Rights 7, no. 2 (January 1999): 103–47. 45 Werner Bischof, After the War (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1997), x. 46 See Egle Becchi and Dominique Julia, Histoire de l’enfance en Occident, vols. 1 and 2 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1998). 47 See Philippe Aries, L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Plon, 1960).

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shape the destiny of nations but also help establish international harmony. Liisa Malkki has suggested that “children occupy a key place in dominant imaginations of the human and the ‘world community.’”48 In her view, this allows us to perceive childcare as “suprapolitical” even if based on political rationales.49 Malkki has identified five interrelated dimensions that make modern notions of childhood and photographic images of children the most powerful elements in the field of international humanitarianism: children are perceived “(1) as embodiments of a basic human goodness and innocence; (2) as sufferers; (3) as seers of truth; (4) as ambassadors of peace (and symbols of world harmony); and (5) as embodiments of the future.”50 Likewise, Susan D. Moeller has argued that children are used in the media to “bring moral clarity,” draw attention, motivate action, “lend fervor” and moral rigor “to an argument for (or against) a public policy position,” and “dramatize the righteousness of a cause,” even if this cause is not directly related to children’s issues.51 Therefore, Moeller sees children as “proxies” used to “invoke an audience’s sympathy on a plane that appears apolitical or suprapolitical” and to “reframe a political issue.”52 Among many examples confirming Malkki’s and Moeller’s analyses is a 2018 photograph of a “Honduran asylum seeker, 2, and her mother” by John Moore that went viral in the social media and that is said to have changed U.S. President Donald Trump’s mind on the issue of separating migrant children from their parents. The picture also appeared in a collage on the cover of Time magazine on July 2, 2018.53 The image was mediated, remediated, and transmediated as a “proxy” of U.S. migrant policy. To fully understand why this photograph of a crying girl facing separation from her mother stands out, we should not only analyze the image within the context of John Moore’s other images of the U.S.-Mexican border in May and June 2018; we should also study how the image’s various appearances across different media created a network of meaning-making and impacted public debate.

48 Liisa Malkki, “Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace,” in In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care, ed. Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 59. See also Heide Fehrenbach, “Children and Other Civilians: Photography and the Politics of Humanitarian Image-Making,” in Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography, 165–99. 49 Malkki, “Children, Humanity and the Infantilization of Peace,” 59. 50 Liisa Malkki, The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), Google Play Books, chap. 3. 51 Susan D. Moeller, “A Hierarchy of Innocence: The Media’s Use of Children in the Telling of International News,” The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 7, no. 1 (2002): 36, 39. 52 Moeller, “A Hierarchy of Innocence,” 46, 48. 53 https://time.com/magazine/us/5318226/july-2nd-2018-vol-192-no-1-u-s/.

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Lilie Chouliaraki has argued that media practices referring to the innocence of children constitute an “infantilization” of refugees, as these practices stress the power of those who are able to act on behalf of those who suffer.54 At the same time, it should be noted that the motif of the innocent child in Western culture also has a flipside, which largely originated from Christianity and the notion of children as “inheritors of original sin.”55 Children were not only seen as innocent victims and angel-like creatures guaranteeing peace and harmony; they also provoked suspicion. They were perceived as a threat to society, undermining established concepts of citizenship, moral conventions, and intergenerational agreements.56 Both imaginaries – the innocent child and the child as a threat – have played a crucial role in humanitarian aid. Finally, there is yet another notion of childhood which strongly emerged during the interwar and post-WWII periods: at the time, the argument for the particular vulnerability of children was framed and bolstered by scientific-psychological, socio-economic, and political influences. Humanitarian agencies had strong ties with international scholars in experimental psychology and educational practitioners who advocated a learner-centered and emancipatory New Education designed to foster individuality, activity, democracy, and the transformation of society. Strong emphasis was put on establishing children’s colonies. This educational model was based on the community model and was built on the assumption that every children’s colony would transform into a self-sufficient community of teachers and students while becoming a model for society. The New Education movement and humanitarian agencies at the time were forming a conceptual alliance, not only because they shared similar concerns and interests, but because they also unanimously perceived photography as a mode of ‘objective’ observation or documentation of their activities and engagement. In a nutshell, caring for children was seen as an investment that would yield not only economic but also social and political returns. Images of destruction and suffering children were perceived as a threat and, therefore, triggered moral responsibility and reasoning. Much like the rationales of the market with its entangled spheres of interest, the intertwined narrative threads of images altered or at least brought into focus “perceptions of causations in human affairs” and paved the way to humanitarian engagement.57 Images of children in particular were able

54 Chouliaraki and Stolic, “Rethinking Media Responsibility in the Refugee ‘Crisis,’” 1168. 55 Malkki, “Children, Humanity and the Infantilization of Peace,” 60. 56 Anne Higgonet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998). 57 Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Human Sensibility,” 343.

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to attract concern, empathy, and involvement and thus gave rise to ethical “communities of emotion and action.”58

David Seymour’s Children of Europe: From UNESCO into the World While travelling through war-ravaged Europe on assignment by UNESCO, David Seymour is said to have used “a total of two hundred and fifty seven rolls of film to take photos on his Rollei and Leica.”59 Not all of these images have been published, although Seymour’s contact and caption sheets live on in the Magnum Archives in New York. As mentioned earlier, nine of Seymour’s photographs from his travels were published in Life magazine in December 1948.60 In 1949, another body of the photographer’s work was published in the UNESCO Courier (Fig. 8.1), followed by an official UNESCO book publication entitled Children of Europe (Fig. 8.2), with only two images overlapping with those in Life magazine.61 The UNESCO publication Children of Europe featured fifty-two images by Seymour and explicitly mentioned him as the author of the photographs. A selection of Seymour’s pictures was also included in another UNESCO book published in 1950 on Homeless Children.62 In addition, two images from Seymour’s photo journey were on display in The Family of Man exhibition which was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955 before traveling the world. Curated by Edward Steichen, the exhibition was designed to promote universal humanism by means of U.S. cultural diplomacy in times of Cold War. Not surprisingly, the two pictures included in The Family of Man were rather cheerful photographs. One of them shows girls of an orphanage run by Catholic nuns at Monte Cassino (Italy) playing ball and ring-a-ring-a-roses in

58 Lilie Chouliarki, “The Symbolic Power of Transnational Media: Managing the Visibility of Suffering,” Global Media and Communication 4, no. 3 (2008): 329–51. 59 Dario Cimorelli and Alessandra Olivari, eds., David Seymour (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2014), 87. 60 “Children of Europe: Christmas Finds Many of Them Still in Great Need of Help.” 61 “The Children of Europe: A Unesco Photo Story”; Children of Europe. 62 Thérèse Bosse, Homeless Children: Report of the Proceedings of the Conference of Directors of Children’s Communities, publication no. 573 of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Paris: Paul Dupont, 1950).

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Fig. 8.1: Front page of the UNESCO Courier 2, no. 1 (February 1949).

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Fig. 8.2: Front cover of Children of Europe: Photos by David Seymour, publication no. 403 of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Paris: UNESCO, 1949).

ruins, and the second one features a young female teacher playing the violin and acting as a cheerleader while being followed by a bunch of happy toddlers.63 The 1949 article in the UNESCO Courier included fifteen photographs by David Seymour and is about the urgency and purpose of humanitarian and educational interventions in post-war Europe: “Gradually, against the ruins, there is a reaching out. For the physically handicapped must be given both the skill and the will to life. The deaf must communicate with the hearing. The crippled must learn first to walk. And the blind too must be given the faith to reach out in the darkness.”64

63 It is worth noting that Seymour took several photographs of the girls at Monte Cassino. This makes available to viewers an almost cinematically documented sequence in history which lives on in many published versions and on contact sheets. Pictures of this sequence can be found in Children of Europe, n.p.; Bosse, Homeless Children, n.p.; The Family of Man (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 94. 64 “The Children of Europe: A Unesco Photo Story,” 1.

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Moreover, the article mentions an additional group of endangered children: “But there is another reaching and another darkness: the delinquent, the lost, the orphaned – they too reach out.”65 In a highlighted box the article asks if the world could “coldly ignore these children’s plight.”66 Interestingly, the UNESCO Courier also offered space for the photographer’s voice; it is difficult to judge, however, if and how the quotes by David Seymour have been edited by UNESCO. Seymour’s most authentic remarks most probably are the photographs’ captions, as they are phrased in a style that Magnum members routinely used to create and comment on their photo stories.67 In sum, Seymour’s photographs have been edited to support the textual message: they show children playing in ruins, children collecting money to survive, children in overcrowded classrooms, and a juvenile court in Italy, and these worrying scenes are juxtaposed with photographs of schools for ‘handicapped’ children in Poland and Italy, of newly erected school buildings, selfmade teaching materials, children being vaccinated, children’s colonies, and a girl selecting books in a library for children in Poland. The actual book Children of Europe starts with a “Letter to a grown up” written by a fictional child representing all the children of Europe. This letter was most likely not written by Seymour but carefully crafted and edited by one of UNESCO’s public relations officers. The letter contains facts and figures intertwined with a standardized biography of a ten-year-old child who presents the issues of child rescue and childcare to an international audience. It is obvious that the book was made for promotional purposes and, again, Seymour’s photographs selected for print were meant to support the campaign. The letter begins with a description of a happy childhood that this child will never experience because of war, and talks about the “13,000,000 abandoned children in Europe who had their first experience of life in an atmosphere of death and destruction.”68 It then points out that these children grew up in fear and that many of them were deported to refugee and concentration camps, where they became witnesses of violence. It goes on to explain how this in turn caused moral and emotional disorders, even more so as circumstances forced them to live a life of self-protection, with lying, cheating, stealing, and being cruel as necessary survival strategies. The letter posits that the disastrous situation of abandoned and deported children did not end after the war and that the vast majority “have

65 “The Children of Europe: A Unesco Photo Story,” 1. 66 “The Children of Europe: A Unesco Photo Story,” 5. 67 See Priem, “David Seymour’s Album on the Fight against Illiteracy in Calabria as a Tool of Mediatization.” 68 Children of Europe, 5.

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found nothing but loneliness and want.”69 It explains that this has led children to live in groups and make their living by selling items illegally on the black market, with some girls even turning to prostitution. After this lengthy description of the problems these children faced, the fictional young author of the letter openly asks for support “to make up for lost time.”70 This support should focus on schooling, vocational education, and the many independent “children’s villages” that had emerged all over Europe. The letter explicitly refers to UNESCO’s efforts to monitor these initiatives, mentioning that, thanks to UNESCO’s work, an “International Federation of Children’s Communities” was founded and an international conference of directors of children’s communities was hosted by the Pestalozzi Children’s Village Association in Trogen, Switzerland.71 As already mentioned, the photography section of the UNESCO publication Children of Europe features fifty-two images. The provided captions perfectly harmonize with the letter, and this result was achieved by a complex process of mediatization, storytelling, and editing. The visual story starts with children walking through and living in ruins under disastrous conditions and without the support of adults. This is followed by a section on how children survive in cities by engaging in illegal activities such as selling cigarettes and other found or stolen commodities on the black market. In the next section, the police, worried parents, social workers, and Juvenile Courts enter the picture. We then see images of girls and boys living in young offenders’ institutions (referred to at the time as “reformatories”) with one image hinting at sexually transmitted diseases. However, this section, while emphasizing the transformation from childhood to adolescence, also includes some emotionally appealing portraits in a more artistic style. The book then goes on to show poor housing conditions before highlighting the success of humanitarian interventions in areas such as mother and child care; the distribution of food, shoes, and clothes; medical care; care for disabled children; schooling and vocational education. The photographic section of the book ends with children building their own colonies and villages and dancing in a circle, holding hands. The very last section of the book ends with a call to readers to offer their support: “Share your world with us. We too shall be grown-up people in a few years. Do not abandon us a second time and make us lose forever our faith in the ideals for which you fought.”72

69 Children of Europe, 6. 70 Children of Europe, 8. 71 Held in July 1948, the conference was summarized in a conference report published by UNESCO; see Brosse, Homeless Children. 72 Children of Europe, n.p.

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The mediation of Seymour’s pictures and the story featured in the UNESCO book, which combines a fictional child’s letter with photographs and explanatory captions, is very similar to the UNESCO conference report on children’s villages. The report was richly illustrated with photographs, but it included only very brief credits at the end of the book. Alongside the institutional photographs, David Seymour’s pictures were the only ones assigned to an individual author. Seymour’s photographs of his journey through Europe not only linked these two publications and their basic rationales on childcare, but they were also intertwined with institutional images in a mediated network of meaningmaking. Seymour’s images were subsequently published elsewhere in various media and have continued to be reproduced up to the present day: some of them have taken on an iconic status and have been published many times, while others only came to life at a later stage.

Seymour’s Photographs as Living Objects and Triggers of Historical Imagination One of the most disturbing and emotionally charged images from Seymour’s Children of Europe documentary project is a photograph that has been reproduced numerous times.73 It shows a girl from Warsaw in front of a blackboard with her drawing on it. The image was published for the first time in December 1948 in Life magazine – an appropriate time to donate and demonstrate empathy with mentally disabled child victims of the war – and also appeared in the already mentioned UNESCO Courier article and the report on the children’s villages conference in Switzerland published in 1950. The caption in Life magazine read as follows: TERESKA DRAWS HER HOME. Children’s wounds are not all outward. Those made in the mind by years of sorrow will take years to heal. In Warsaw, at an institute which cares for some of Europe’s thousands of “disturbed” children, a Polish girl named Tereska was asked to make a picture of her home. These terrible scratches are what she drew.74

73 See, e.g., Cimorelli and Olivari, David Seymour, 86–113; Cynthia Young, ed., We Went Back: Photographs from Europe 1933–1956 by CHIM (Munich: Prestel; London: DelMonico Books; New York: International Center of Photography, 2013), 168–205. 74 “Children of Europe: Christmas Finds Many of Them Still in Great Need of Help,” 16.

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In the UNESCO Courier article, Tereska’s photograph was edited as a cover image and accompanied by a text box referring to the purpose of Seymour’s photo journey: In this issue the Unesco Courier presents a small selection from over five-thousand photographs, taken for Unesco last year by Mr. David Seymour, a U.S. photographer, during a visit to Austria, Greece, Hungary, Italy and Poland. They show some of the problems of Europe’s war-handicapped children – the physically handicapped, the morally handicapped, the emotionally handicapped, and the mentally handicapped – and the efforts being made to educate them. For the main task is to educate them, to replace the powerful memory of violence which still haunts their lives, and to feed the living root of self-expression in them which is eager for nourishment.75

The caption of the image in Life magazine identified an individual child’s situation while referring to psychological damage created by war. It indicated that the girl’s name was Tereska and that she was drawing her home at a Warsaw initiative for “disturbed” children. The UNESCO Courier combined a general description of a troubling situation in a text box with an individualized section that appeared in bold letters right next to the text box. In order to reinforce its broader public call for humanitarian action, UNESCO thus ‘engineered’ public opinion by juxtaposing more generalized information with a moving story of a girl named Tereska: Tereska, a small girl at a special school for war-handicapped children recently constructed in Warsaw, Poland, was asked to draw her house and family. She produced this representation of her confused mind – wavering chicken-track lines crisscrossing each other. What is it that she sees when the teacher says “draw a house”? Is it the memory of terror and the fact of ruin? Are not the chicken-track lines of this little child’s drawing but the reflection of an uprooted life, the mirror of disorder and chaos which the war has strewn over Europe?76

In the UNESCO report on the children’s villages conference, the caption stated: “A tangle of scrawls on the blackboard, a look of remembered horror in her eyes: this girl of Warsaw tries to draw her home.”77 Here, Tereska was depicted by UNESCO as a nameless representative of handicapped child victims or as an example of “remembered horror” intertwined with a text advocating new education

75 “The Children of Europe: A Unesco Photo Story,” 1. See also fig. 1 in this chapter. 76 “The Children of Europe: A Unesco Photo Story,” 1. 77 “Children of Europe: Christmas Finds Many of Them Still in Great Need of Help,” 16; the reproduction of the image in Brosse, Homeless Children, is inserted between text pages 32 and 33.

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as a “living foundry for the shaping of humanity.”78 Finally, it is essential to stress that the photograph of Tereska was not included in the 1949 UNESCO publication Children of Europe. Perhaps the picture was perceived as too discouraging for potential donators and the forward-looking orientation of the book as outlined by the fictive child’s letter. We also found Tereska’s image in a 1961 edition of Madame Express, a supplement to the French journal L’Express where it was mentioned in the context of an international photography exhibition in Paris. The accompanying text box informed the reader that the photograph, which the journal labeled as “‘Le tableau noir’ de David Seymour,” was not exhibited due to a lack of space. In any case, the editors of L’Express obviously felt the urge to publish the picture because, in their opinion, it captured a tragic and significant moment in history.79 Again, the extraordinary photograph and its discomforting message most probably were perceived as too disruptive and disillusioning in view of managing public opinion. Still, Tereska’s photograph continued to travel in time and space, appearing, for example, on a website and blog called “rarehistoricalphotos.com.” When accessed in July 2017, the blog post dedicated to Seymour’s photograph was entitled “A girl who grew up in a concentration camp draws a picture of ‘home’ while living in a residence for disturbed children, 1948.”80 The accompanying text informed readers that the image had been reproduced in many versions and with different captions; one example mentioned was an exhibition on War/Photography at the Brooklyn Museum in New York (November 8, 2013 – February 2, 2014) where Tereska was introduced as a survivor of a concentration camp. The blog included twenty-eight comments written between April 2015 and June 2017. Most of them reflected on anti-Semitism, the Warsaw ghetto, the holocaust, and the slaughter caused by the Germans. There was also a long debate about the diverse ethnic backgrounds of those who were killed and persecuted by the Nazis and which population suffered the most. In addition, there was an exchange on responsibility for humanitarian damage by looking at collaboration and resistance against the Nazi terror. Many comments included speculations about the identity and background of the girl – was she Jewish or Polish, and what kind of experiences might she have suffered? Other comments showed empathy and concern for her gruesome fate, and there was even a psychological diagnosis. Many commentators wondered what

78 Brosse, Homeless Children, 33. 79 “L’Enfant, l’homme et la guerre,” L’Express, November 9, 1961, 48. 80 See “A Girl Who Grew Up in a War Zone Draws a Picture of ‘Home’ While Living in a Residence for Disturbed Children,” Rare Historical Photos, January 25, 2015, http://rarehistorical photos.com/girl-concentration-camp-disturbed-children-1948/.

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happened to the girl. A comment dated April 5, 2017, seemed to reveal the true story of Tereska. It said that Tereska was a Polish child who lived through the Warsaw Uprising that began in August 1944. The comment also revealed that the Germans shot Tereska’s grandmother, forcing Tereska and her sister to find their relatives by walking through the streets of Warsaw, a city that at the time was a place of terror, bombings, and mass executions. According to the entry, Tereska was finally placed in a mental institution, where she died. At the time, it was difficult to judge if the story was accurate. What was evident, however, was that Seymour’s photograph triggered storytelling, controversial debates and exchanges, and many imagined scenarios. This engagement all started with an image that has travelled a long way since it first appeared in Life magazine and in various UNESCO publications. Many people have since participated in a long process of meaning-making across time and space and in many media.81 In the meantime, the introductory text of the blog post has been updated as a result of further research done by Patryk Graziewicz, Aneta Wawrzyńczak, Matt Murphey, and Carole Naggar.82 Tereska’s story was discovered by checking “Chim’s original contact sheets and captions to reconstruct his Warsaw itinerary of September 1948” (Fig. 8.3) and by linking this to sources from a school archive, oral testimonies, and ego documents originating from Tereska’s family (Fig. 8.4).83 In a nutshell, we know today that Chim took his photograph in Tereska Adwentowska’s primary school, a school for special needs in Ulica Tarczyńska 27 in Warsaw. Tereska had a sister and a younger brother. During the bombing of Warsaw she was injured by shrapnel when still a child. She and her sister were fleeing Warsaw to reach their relatives and were suffering from starvation. In the mid-1950s she was sent to a mental asylum. Tereska died at the age of 37 in the Tworki Psychiatric Hospital near Warsaw where she had lived since the 1960s.84

81 In 2008 Georg Siebenkotten established the Tereska Foundation which was inspired by David Seymour’s iconic photograph. The foundation is dedicated to supporting disabled children. See Carole Naggar, Tereska and Her Photographer (New York: Russet Lederman, 2019), 4. 82 See “A Girl Who Grew Up in a War Zone Draws a Picture of ‘Home’ While Living in a Residence for Disturbed Children,” Rare Historical Photos, January 25, 2015, https://rarehistorical photos.com/girl-concentration-camp-disturbed-children-1948/. 83 Naggar, Tereska and Her Photographer, 5. See also Carole Naggar, “Unraveling a 70-YearOld Photographic Mystery,” Time Lightbox, April 12, 2017, https://time.com/4735368/tereskadavid-chim-seymour/. 84 See Naggar, “Unraveling a 70-Year-Old Photographic Mystery.”

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Fig. 8.3: Double spread from Naggar, Tereska and Her Photographer, 90–91.

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Fig. 8.4: Double spread from Naggar, Tereska and Her Photographer, 104–105.

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By revealing the photographer’s itinerary, Seymour’s contacts sheets offered an almost filmic access to history, and Tereska’s photograph thus became part of a new historical context that gave more weight to individual experiences and a full life story. This also inspired a fictional text by Carole Naggar, Tereska and Her Photographer, published in 2019. Naggar’s book is an outstanding example of historical imagination, of photography beyond the image, and of how historical storytelling based on a photograph’s wider context (e.g., the filmic structure of contact prints) and on how archival research can help us presence the past.85

Conclusion Humanitarian organizations saw photographs as powerful agents of meaning-making that would help promote their specific humanitarian narratives. By establishing an institutional practice of photography, documentation, mediatization, and public relations, by editing photographs and combining them with texts, the marketing committees of humanitarian agencies developed a flexible ‘propaganda’ strategy and fine-tuned management of public consent that would elicit a certain causality,

85 In her fictional story, Carole Naggar imagines Chim’s thoughts about his encounter with Tereska and her classmates as follows: “Among all the photographs I took during my trip to Austria, Greece, Hungary and Italy, the picture of Tereska – that I made in Warsaw after I came back from Otwock – is the one that always haunts me. Upon my return, I printed it dozen of times. I could not tear myself away from her look . . . The classroom was sunny and pleasant, with small, child-sized writing desks, waxed wooden floors, white walls with a dark baseboard and a horizontal blackboard. At first I photographed drawings by five children: Genia, Henio, Jóso, Tadzio and Wojtek. I thought that their creations were strange, because apart from Henio’s drawing, where you could see large stains representing bombs and a human stick figure falling, all the others were peaceful: stylized houses with tiled roofs and smoking chimneys, smiling mothers surrounded by children as they worked in their kitchen, tables and chairs, gardens with daisies and above them chubby-cheeked suns. How was that possible? These children were in Warsaw during the uprising. Their houses had been bombed and destroyed. These had to be dream homes. But Tereska’s drawing was completely different. I first noticed that she was drawing chalk lines with her left hand, her right arm hung down her side. She was wearing a dark-blue smock, and in her hair was a grosgrain ribbon that seemed too heavy for her face. Her left sleeve was stained with chalk. Then, when she turned to look at me, as if to invite me as her witness, I saw her face. Her light eyes were full of terror and her expression disconsolate. She had a small half-moon scar near her hairline and the left side of her forehead. I pressed the shutter without at first seeing she had drawn. Then I saw it: a tangled ball, a labyrinth of muddled lines – a maelstrom that seemed to grow out of her hand and extend it.” Naggar, Tereska and Her Photographer, 33–34.

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affective responses, and active engagement and would also illustrate the outcome of their interventions. Looking at David Seymour’s photograph of Tereska reveals yet other important aspects of the life and biographies of photographic images. When the image of Tereska was first published in December 1948, the emotional weight and individual quality of the photograph may have immediately convinced the editors of Life magazine of its power to engage the public. Nevertheless, Tereska’s picture was often excluded from publication and public exposure, including the 1949 UNESCO book whose scope was more general and universal. The editors may have felt that the photograph would have upset readers and sabotaged their story of healing and reconciliation. The photograph of Tereska only gradually and falteringly made its way as an agent of meaning-making along with other images and texts before achieving its present-day iconic status. As a fascinating example of humanitarian photography, Seymour’s picture traveled beyond the confines of UNESCO, also with the help of the infrastructure of Magnum Photo and the Magnum Archives. It is important to note that, in this process, Seymour’s contact sheets and their cinematic quality were playing a crucial role as historical sources. It is because of these photographic traces and the information that could be deduced from them that Tereska now has a full life story and will be remembered. Her picture has become a photographic icon and continues to trigger research, public engagement, and historical imagination. Even now, when Tereska’s full story seems to have been revealed, this as well as countless other humanitarian photographs continue to live on as powerful historical moments in the present, breaking silences and bearing witness to human experiences.86

Bibliography “A Girl Who Grew Up in a War Zone Draws a Picture of ‘Home’ While Living in a Residence for Disturbed Children.” Rare Historical Photos, January 25, 2015. http://rarehistoricalpho tos.com/girl-concentration-camp-disturbed-children–1948/. Aries, Philippe. L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime. Paris: Plon, 1960. Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008. Barnett, Michael. Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Barnett, Michael, and Thomas G. Weiss. “Humanitarianism: A Brief History of the Present.” In Barnett and Weiss, Humanitarianism in Question, 1–48.

86 See also Priem, “Beyond the Collapse of Language?”

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Barnett, Michael, and Thomas G. Weiss, eds. Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Batchen, Geoffrey, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller, and Jay Prosser, eds. Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. Becchi, Egle, and Dominique Julia. Histoire de l’enfance en Occident. Vols. 1 and 2. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1998. Bernays, Edward. The Engineering of Consent. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955. Bischof, Werner. After the War. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1997. Boltanski, Luc. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Bondi, Inge. CHIM: The Photographs of David Seymour. London: André Deutsch, 1996. Bosse, Thérèse. Homeless Children: Report of the Proceedings of the Conference of Directors of Children’s Communities. Publication no. 573 of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Paris: Paul Dupont, 1950. Calhoun, Craig. “The Imperative to Reduce Suffering: Charity, Progress, and Emergencies in the Field of Humanitarian Action.” In Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics, edited by Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss, 73–97. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. “Children of Europe: Christmas Finds Many of Them Still in Great Need of Help.” Life, December 27, 1948, 13–19. Children of Europe: Photos by David Seymour. Publication no. 403 of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Paris: UNESCO, 1949. Chouliaraki, Lilie. “The Symbolic Power of Transnational Media: Managing the Visibility of Suffering.” Global Media and Communication 4, no. 3 (2008): 329–51. Chouliaraki, Lilie, and Tijana Stolic. “Rethinking Media Responsibility in the Refugee ‘Crisis’: A Visual Typology of European News.” Media, Culture & Society 39, no. 8 (2017): 1162–77. Cimorelli, Dario, and Alessandra Olivari, eds. David Seymour. Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2014. Dyer, Geoff. The Ongoing Moment. New York: Vintage, 2007. Fehrenbach, Heide. “Children and Other Civilians: Photography and the Politics of Humanitarian Image-Making.” In Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography, 165–99. Fehrenbach, Heide, and Davide Rodogno, eds. Humanitarian Photography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Franklin, Stuart. The Documentary Impulse. London: Phaidon Press, 2016. Hariman, Robert, and John Louis Lucaites. The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Haskell, Thomas L. “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1.” American Historical Review 90, no. 2 (April 1985): 339–61. Haskell, Thomas L. “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2.” American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (June 1985): 547–66. Hendel, Giovanna, Carole Naggar, and Karin Priem, eds. They Did Not Stop at Eboli: UNESCO and the Campaign against Illiteracy in a Reportage by David “Chim” Seymour and Texts by Carlo Levi (1950). Paris: UNESCO; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

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Higgonet, Anne. Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998. Laqueur, Thomas W. “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative.” In The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt, 176–204. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. “L’Enfant, l’homme et la guerre.” L’Express, November 9, 1961, 48–49. Linfield, Susie. The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Linfield, Susie. “The Ethics of Vision: Photojournalism and Human Rights.” In My Brother’s Keeper: Documentary Photographers and Human Rights, edited by Alessandro Mauro, 12–29. Rome: Contrasto, 2007. Malkki, Liisa. “Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace.” In In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care, edited by Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin, 58–85. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Marshall, Dominique. “The Construction of Children as an Object of International Relations: The Declaration of Children’s Rights and the Child Welfare Committee of League of Nations, 1900–1924.” International Journal of Children’s Rights 7, no. 2 (January 1999): 103–47. Meiselas, Susan. “Style Can’t Sustain You: Notes from the Field.” lensculture. https://www.len sculture.com/articles/susan-meiselas-style-can-t-sustain-you-notes-from-the-field. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “The Right to Look.” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 473–96. Moeller, Susan D. “A Hierarchy of Innocence: The Media’s Use of Children in the Telling of International News.” The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 7, no. 1 (2002): 36–56. Naggar, Carole. CHIM: Children of War. New York: Umbrage Editions, 2013. Naggar, Carole. A Second Look: Chim’s Children of War. http://time.com/3796013/a-secondlook-chims-children-of-war/#1. Naggar, Carole. Tereska and Her Photographer. New York: Russet Lederman, 2019. Naggar, Carole. “Unraveling a 70-Year-Old Photographic Mystery.” Time Lightbox, April 12, 2017. https://time.com/4735368/tereska-david-chim-seymour/. Phillips, David. “Actuality and Affect in Documentary Photography.” In Using Visual Evidence, edited by Richard Howells and Robert S. Mattson, 55–77. Berkshire: Open University Press, 2009. Priem, Karin. “Beyond the Collapse of Language? Photographs of Children in Postwar Europe as Performances and Relational Objects.” Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 6 (2017): 683–96. Priem, Karin. “David Seymour’s Album on the Fight against Illiteracy in Calabria as a Tool of Mediatization: Material Traces and Visual Storytelling.” In Hendel, Naggar, and Priem, They Did Not Stop at Eboli, 263–74. Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Continuum, 2011. Roberts, John. Photography and Its Violations. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003. “The Children of Europe: A Unesco Photo Story.” UNESCO Courier 2, no. 1 (February 1949): 1, 5–9. The Family of Man. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1955. Twomey, Christina. “Severed Hands: Authenticating Atrocity in the Congo, 1904–13.” In Batchen et al., Picturing Atrocity, 39–50. “Unesco Begins Photo Survey of War-Hit Nations.” UNESCO Courier 1, no. 4 (May 1948): 3. Young, Cynthia, ed. We Went Back: Photographs from Europe 1933–1956 by CHIM. Munich: Prestel; London: DelMonico Books; New York: International Center of Photography, 2013.

Part 3: Recovering the Image as Artifact

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Chapter 9 Marked Surfaces: Analog and Digital Re-inscriptions of a Portrait In his thought-provoking essay, The Engine of Visualization, Patrick Maynard argues that photography is essentially a technology to physically “mark surfaces,” through the agency of light and chemicals.1 As marked surfaces, photographs are flat material objects covered in traces – described as “discontinuous physical states of the surfaces of things”2 – that allow us to extend our power of perception and imagination. As a photograph migrates through different spheres of consumption and discursive spaces, additional interventions on its surface overlap, marking its changing identities as collectible, museum artifact, art object, and digital source. Scraps, labels, notes, and catalog numbers scribbled by former owners, dealers, and curators reveal important clues to the way photographic material has been interpreted and inscribed into new taxonomical arrangements. Far from being inert matter, photographs emerge from these re-inscriptions as active agents, their material qualities often determining the modalities according to which they are consumed and appropriated. The digital turn has been accompanied by an increasing preoccupation with the destiny of the analog referent.3 In the past two decades, new tendencies within visual culture have challenged the obsession with textuality associated with the structuralism and post-structuralism of the 1970s and 1980s,4 championing, by contrast, a materialist approach which relies more on sensory experiences, suggesting alternative ways of looking at images, and pointing to the limits of a rigid semiotic interpretation.5 Our experience of images is necessarily mediated by their physical form, and looking at a picture presupposes an involvement 1 Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 3. 2 Maynard, The Engine of Visualization, 22. 3 Nina Lager Vestberg, “Archival Value: On Photography, Materiality and Indexicality,” Photographies 1, no. 1 (2008): 49. 4 Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 7. 5 I here refer particularly to the works of Elizabeth Edwards and Geoffrey Batchen; see, among others, Elizabeth Edwards, “Material Beings: Objecthood and Ethnographic Photographs,” Visual Studies 17, no. 1 (2002): 67–76; Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, eds., Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images (London: Routledge, 2004); Geoffrey Batchen, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634945-010

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of the body which is not limited to the visual but encompasses also the haptic and the other senses.6 A photograph is not just an image but a three-dimensional object that occupies a certain physical space and is involved in a series of material and sensorial interactions,7 a hybrid “thing” that possesses “volume, opacity, tactility and a physical presence in the world.”8 Photographs “are less about conveying truthful information about their subjects than they are about enacting social and cultural rituals through morphological design and object-audience interaction.”9 As tangible objects, made of paper, glass, metal, and chemical emulsions, they are integral to human action and have the capability of playing a dynamic role by means of their different physical and functional attributes.10 The physical form of the photograph is as important as its content and constitutes a precious source of historiographic clues. The technical choices, the various formats, the chemicals used, the size and textures of the paper, the use of one printing process instead of another, are rarely casual; they all express different meanings and convey different sorts of information. Geoffrey Batchen argues that photo-objects are “animated by a social dimension, a dynamic web of exchange and functions, that gives them a grounded but never static identity.”11 The analysis of the materiality of photographs is inevitably related to the study of their circulation, use, and exchange. The physical peregrinations of picture-objects are indissolubly attached to the flow of values and narratives. In the nineteenth century, individual collecting was intimately related to the development of a broader scientific discourse, and photographs, considered as essential and factual ethnographic records, were produced and circulated according to specific agendas. For about a century and a half, image collections have been sold and re-sold, albums and folios have been dismembered, reassembled, and digitally transformed, some of them absorbed in the archives of museums and cultural institutions while others still actively traded within the market of antique photograph collectors. As discussed by Igor Kopytoff in his seminal essay “The Cultural Biographies of Things,” biographical details reveal a tangled mass of aesthetic, historical, and poetical judgments, and the convictions

Photography’s Objects (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1997); Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 6 Edwards, “Material Beings,” 67–76. 7 Edwards and Hart, Photographs Objects Histories, 8. 8 Batchen, Each Wild Idea, 60. 9 Batchen, Each Wild Idea, 78. 10 Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall, “The Cultural Biography of Objects,” World Archaeology 31, no. 2 (October 1999): 169–78. 11 Batchen, Each Wild Idea, 78.

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and values that shape our attitudes to objects.12 Clues can be read in the material forms, interventions, and taxonomical classifications of the artifact, and highlight the shift in archival practice and discourse. Starting from the above considerations, this contribution will attempt to reconstruct the journey of a photographic portrait in a collection, focusing on its corporeality, phenomenology, and performative qualities, and highlighting how the material inscriptions on its surface have marked the movements through different spheres of consumption and affected the way it has been consumed and appropriated.

Celebrities for the Album The carte de visite AM/A9/169, held at the Anthropology Library and Research Centre of the British Museum, portrays a Native American boy wrapped in an army blanket, his gaze defiantly fixed on the camera in a compelling expression (see Fig. 9.1).13 From the studio imprint on the frame of the card, we learn that he is “Little Crow’s son Wo-wi-na-pe (one who comes in sight). Taken prisoner by the Military Expedition under command of Brig. Gen. Sibley, 1863.”14 The photograph was taken by commercial photographer Joel Emmons Whitney at Fort Snelling on February 24, 1864, where Wowinape was awaiting execution, charged with participation in the Minnesota Massacre of 1865.15

12 Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biographies of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91, esp. 67. 13 The carte de visite was a small format of photographic portraits mounted on carton supports the size of a visiting card. It became very popular in the 1860s. See Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A. A. E. Disderi and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). 14 Name variants include Wo-we-na-pe, Wo-wi-na-pa, or Wówinaphe, which in English translates as “defense, (place of) refuge.” 15 Joel Emmons Whitney (1822–1886) had a studio in St Paul, Minnesota, from 1851 to 1871, and was among the first in his region to adopt the new wet-collodion process and introduce the carte de visite format in St. Paul in 1861. Among his studio’s most-noted products were cartes de visite of Sioux Indians, many of whom connected with the Minnesota Massacre of 1862. He also marketed views of waterfalls and Minnesota settlements. His business partner was Charles Zimmerman (1854?–1909) of Minneapolis and St. Paul. See Carl Mautz, Biographies of Western Photographers: A Reference Guide to Photographers Working in the Nineteenth Century American West (Nevada City, CA: Carl Mautz Publishing, 1997); Peter Palmquist,

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Fig. 9.1: Joel Whitney, Carte de visite portraying Wowinape photographed at Fort Snelling, February 24, 1864. Albumen print. © Blackmore Collection AM/A9/169. Trustees of the British Museum.

Wowinape was born in August 1846 at the Mdewakanton village of Kaposia. He had been brought up by his parents as a Dakota and in 1853 he had moved with his band to a reservation on the upper Minnesota River where he had adopted some white customs. Little is known regarding Wowinape’s role in the Sioux Uprising of 1862, but some evidence suggests that he accompanied his father to the

Pioneer Photographers of the Far West: a Biographical Dictionary, 1840–1865 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

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battles of Fort Ridgely and New Ulm and on the expedition to the Big Woods.16 Back in Minnesota with Little Crow and with a bounty on their heads, on July 3, 1863, the two were shot by settlers while picking berries in a forest. Little Crow was killed almost instantly, Wowinape managed to escape towards Devils Lake but, after nearly a month on the run, he was intercepted by army scouts on July 29, 1863.17 The trial concluded on September 28, 1863, with a guilty verdict and a sentence of death by hanging.18 Wowinape, however, was never executed. Pardoned in 1865, he was sent in confinement to Camp McClellan and later to prison at Davenport, Iowa, where he changed his name to Thomas Wakeman, became literate in Dakota, and converted to Christianity.19 Once freed, he moved to the vicinity of Flandreau, Dakota Territory, where he became active in the local Presbyterian church and conceived the concept of a Sioux Y.M.C.A. to which he devoted the rest of his life. He died of tuberculosis at Redwood Falls on January 13, 1886.20 This unexpected turn of events could not be foreseen by Joel E. Whitney, who marketed the photograph in a successful series of portraits related to the 1862 Indian Massacre. The photographs, connecting to a broader narrative around the Dakota War, presented a gallery of the feared and celebrated protagonists of the conflict, portrayed in captivity as visual reminders of the U.S. government’s reprisal and exotic historical mementos. The card’s function as a cheap collectible and public commodity is reiterated by a label pasted on the back of Whitney’s card reading “Celebrities for the Album,”21 from the Chicago photographic studio of Edward Lovejoy, suggesting that the photograph had a wide commercial distribution and was re-marketed in different cities by different photographic studios. Passing from hand to hand, traded and purchased by an unfamiliar clientele, the portraits lost their status as individual likenesses, coming to represent racial stereotypes: The Brave, the Wise Chief, the alluring Belle. The native subjects’ lack of control over the production and dissemination of the physical photographic object meant also a

16 Gary Clayton Anderson and Alan R. Woolworth, eds., Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988), 279. 17 Wo-wi-na-pe’s statement to the army was translated by Joseph De Marais, Jr., and printed in the St. Paul and St. Peter newspapers; see Anderson and Woolworth, Through Dakota Eyes, 280. 18 Wowinape was tried on the general charge of participating in the murders and massacres between August 18 and September 23, 1862, and for attempted murder and horse stealing at frontier settlements near Devils Lake in May, June, or July 1863. See “Transcript of the Commission Proceedings in Trial of Wo-we-na-pa,” Court Martial Cases 153 NN3132, in Carol Chomsky, “The United States–Dakota War Trials: A Study in Military Injustice,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 1 (November 1990): 41. 19 Chomsky, “The United States–Dakota War Trials,” 43. 20 Anderson and Woolworth, Through Dakota Eyes, 280. 21 The label reads: “Celebrities for the Album, E. Lovejoy, 87 So. Clark Street, Chicago.”

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loss of control over the individual stories that those pictures could be used to tell.22 As “celebrities” they were both real people and fictional characters, their private history made public, absorbed in the collective imagery and transmuted into legend.

From Private Collection to Institutional Archive Wowinape’s portrait was purchased by wealthy British solicitor and entrepreneur William Blackmore sometime between 1864 and 1869.23 Blackmore was a philanthropist and man of science who cultivated a wide range of intellectual interests. A well-respected member of a number of learned societies, he had founded a state-ofthe-art archaeological museum in his native Salisbury and was involved in many charitable activities, financing artists and various academic institutions.24 Most importantly, Blackmore was an avid and passionate collector with a particular interest in Native Americans (Fig. 9.2). From the mid-1860s onwards, Blackmore’s collecting interests began focusing on photographs, and one of his most ambitious projects became the realization of a major photographic anthology containing the portraits of every single Native American tribe. Although Blackmore never accomplished his initial plan, his collection – with over a thousand images – became one of the earliest and largest of its kind. His collecting endeavors incorporated the dominant nineteenth-century salvage paradigm motivated by a general concern over the loss of the ethnographic subject and by a desire to save for posterity the memory of what was considered a “breed” doomed to extinction. One of the driving forces behind the collection of objects and, more specifically, of photographic images, was the widespread notion that the “modern primitives” were a dying race and action should be

22 Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 4. 23 See William Blackmore’s diary No. 1. AC 18, Box 3, Folder 16, William Blackmore Collection, Fray Angelico Chavez History Library, Santa Fe. 24 For a biography of William Blackmore, see Herbert Oliver Brayer, William Blackmore: A Case Study in the Economic Development of the West (Denver: Bradford-Robinson, 1949); Colin Taylor, “William Blackmore: a 19th Century Englishman’s Contribution to American Indian Ethnology,” in Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays, ed. Christian F. Feest (Aachen: RaderVerlag/Edition Herodot, 1987): 321–35; Sandra Camarda, “Journeys into the Materiality of Photographs: The Case of the Blackmore Collection” (PhD diss., University College London, 2008).

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Fig. 9.2: Alexander Gardner, William Blackmore and Lakota leader Red Cloud (Maȟpíya Lúta), Washington D.C. 1872. Albumen print. © Blackmore Collection AM/A1/37. Trustees of the British Museum.

taken before their disappearance.25 In an evolutionary contest, cultures regarded as less civilized in the chart of progress were to inexorably succumb to the more advanced civilizations and fade into extinction. James Clifford argues that the belief in the “vanishing race” set the stage for a desire to “rescue ‘authenticity’ out of destructive historical change,” saving the remaining shards of ‘traditional’ cultures before they underwent drastic transformations.26 This search for the authentic “other” on the verge of disappearance constituted the core of Euro-American efforts to understand non-western culture.27

25 Edwards Elizabeth, “Representation and Reality: Science and the Visual Image,” in Australia in Oxford, ed. Howard Morphy and Elizabeth Edwards (Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, 1988), 36. 26 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 121. 27 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 122.

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Evolutionism was a highly visualized theory, where a wide range of pictorial material – such as maps, drawings, charts, and graphs – was employed for scientific analysis and comparison.28 It was, therefore, a natural process that the new photographic medium would find its place within this broad currency of images. In a society undergoing rapid changes, photography – product and icon of technology – paradoxically compensated for the anxiety generated by the frenetic industrial development and by a heightened awareness of the passing time, freezing into images what was perceived as elusive and ephemeral. If the subject could disappear, the photographic negative would survive in the form of billions of cheap, transportable, and potentially ubiquitous prints.29 Following the devastating fire of 1865 that destroyed nearly all the early Native American portraits of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Secretary Joseph Henry proposed to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to replace the paintings with photographs, which he described as a “far more authentic and trustworthy collection of likenesses of the principal tribes of the United States.”30 Blackmore responded enthusiastically to the initiative, offering his financial support and lending his personal collection to photographer Antonio Zeno Shindler so that he could make copies and prepare a catalog. This would become the first nucleus of the Smithsonian’s photographic archive.31 Shindler received from Blackmore approximately 300 photographs (and possibly some original negatives), which he reprinted or rephotographed for the Smithsonian; in addition, he produced ex novo sets of Native American delegates in visit to Washington. Blackmore intended Shindler to organize his catalog according to tribal groups, but, since the assemblage of the photographs was still in fieri, a more viable systematization according to topic and delegation group was preferred. The catalog titled Photographic Portraits of North American Indians in the Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution – now commonly referred to as the Shindler Catalogue – was published in 1869 and included 301 entries and 304 actual prints.32

28 Elizabeth Edwards, “Photography and Anthropological Intention in Nineteenth Century Britain,” Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares: Perspectivas en Antropología Visual [since renamed as Disparidades: Revista de Antropología] 53, no. 2 (1998): 25. 29 Hubertus von Amelunxen, “The Century’s Memorial: Photography and the Recording of History,” in A New History of Photography, ed. Michel Frizot (London: Könemann, 1998), 131–47. 30 Joseph Henry to the new Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Lewis Bogy, 20 February 1867, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75, Letters Received (75.11.4 Miscellaneous records), National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). 31 Paula Richardson Fleming, Native American Photography at the Smithsonian: The Shindler Catalogue (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 4. 32 Fleming, Native American Photography at the Smithsonian, 4.

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Wowinape’s portrait was re-photographed and cataloged by Shindler under record 301. Once copied, the carte de visite was sent back to Blackmore alongside a larger-format print from the negative created by Shindler.33 This new larger print is now kept in Album 19 of the same collection at the British Museum, classified under the reference AM/19/10. The print, mounted on a large cardboard, appears clearly as a photograph of a carte de visite whose mount is still well visible in the picture (Fig. 9.3).

Fig. 9.3: Antonio Zeno Shindler, Copy of Wowinape’s carte de visite made for the Smithsonian, ca. 1869. Albumen print. ©Blackmore Collection AM/A19/10. Trustees of the British Museum.

33 The majority of images were shipped back to England with the exception of a few daguerreotypes. The National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Museum Support Center, is the repository of the glass negatives donated to the museum by Blackmore himself as well as of early vintage copies of Blackmore’s photographic collection.

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Along the border of the photograph, on the white strip of the carte de visite frame, is an inscription etched – possibly by Shindler – on the negative plate (probably intended as a reference for the photographer reprinting the images and destined to be cropped out of the final picture) which permanently binds the subject with its caption and identification. A number (397), written in ink on the negative, appears in white next to the sitter; it is apparently unidentified and does not correspond to any of the known catalogs. The old Bureau of American Ethnology serial number, however, was 793, so there is the possibility that 397, inverted by mistake by the person writing on the negative plate, refers to that classification. A label with the Shindler Catalogue caption is pasted on the lower right-hand corner of the mount reading: 301 Wo-Wi-Na-Pe (One Who Comes in Sight). Little Crow’s Son. Minnesota. Copied by Shindler, Washington, 1869. Taken prisoner by the military expedition under command of Brig. Gen. Sibley, 1863.

It is worth mentioning that the negative glass plate at the Smithsonian at some early stage was damaged and consequently the later prints from that negative show the traces of the broken glass. The shards cutting through Wowinape’s figure break the illusory transparency of the photograph, confronting the viewer with its stark materiality. As the Smithsonian’s photographic archive grew steadily, Shindler’s job was continued by renowned frontier photographer William Henry Jackson, who further expanded and re-cataloged the collection. In Jackson’s catalog, Wowinape’s photograph was given another entry (number 199). Thanks to the Smithsonian’s dissemination agenda, new prints from the negatives plates of the Blackmore Collection were then widely distributed, landing in the hands of various scholars and institutions. Within such a fluid cultural and social setting, characterized by intense collaboration between private collectors, learned societies, and museums, the reciprocal exchange of images was pivotal in the development of scientific discourse.34 Photographs were explicitly designed not only to be visual memorials for the vanishing race but also raw working material for the scholar to engage with. The practice of inscribing the surface of the cards with captions and notes was paradigmatic of the nineteenth-century way of perceiving photographs as a source of unprocessed information that needed to be refined, integrated with words, and

34 Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 32–39.

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inscribed within precise narratives.35 The reproducibility of the image – and consequently its expendability – allowed for a direct engagement with the photograph that would modify its original form and turn the portrait of a more or less known individual into a scientific specimen. The translation from commercial image to archival object resided precisely in these ink notes and inscriptions; numbers and words extended the visual information provided by the photographs, framed them in a taxonomic system, and constructed their scientific reading.

Wowinape at the British Museum Following an unfortunate period of personal grief, financial losses, and health issues, William Blackmore committed suicide on April 12, 1878.36 The Victorian stigma attached to the circumstances of his downfall resulted in a sort of damnatio memoriae and Blackmore and his collection slowly fell into oblivion, despite their historical and ethnological importance. The Salisbury Museum, which merged with the old Blackmore Museum in 1904, began to dispose of Blackmore’s collections since the beginning of the twentieth century. The evolutionary comparative approach of the old Blackmore Museum was clearly obsolete and, as a regional institution, the Salisbury Museum was not interested in investing its already scarce resources in maintaining non-local collections. By the 1960s, the greater part of the collections had been cleared out.37 Whereas the exchange of photo-objects was an integral part of the early anthropological tradition, the first decades of the twentieth century witnessed an increasing decline of the idea of photographs as a centralized resource.38 With the emergence of fieldwork practice, photographs suddenly became redundant, turning into a private recording aid, helpful but not strictly necessary to the compilation of the ethnographic monograph.39 As argued by Barbara KirshenblattGimblett, photographs – alongside field notes, drawings, and recordings – represented ethnographic documents which allowed carrying away from the field

35 Edwards, Raw Histories, 39. 36 Brayer, William Blackmore, 318. 37 See the letter of Hugh Shortt, curator of the Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum, to Dr. J. Coles of the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of Cambridge, 8 April 1968, Archives of the Blackmore and Salisbury Museum. 38 Edwards, Raw Histories, 32. 39 Christopher Pinney, “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography,” in Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, 1992), 81.

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everything that was intangible, ephemeral, and unmovable: the memory of a person, a place, a landscape. Yet, all those documents were considered simply a mimesis, a reproduction made up by the ethnographer and therefore accorded a lower level of “realness” and importance when compared to the collected artifacts.40 Lately, another influence could be ascribed to a certain post-colonial critique that for a long time dominated the approach to ethnographic images. Photographic collections, especially those assembled by enthusiastic amateurs in the nineteenth century, were branded with negative associations, considered embarrassing by-products of a colonial past to be, if not physically destroyed, at least quietly forgotten.41 Wowinape’s carte de visite together with the copy made by Shindler likely reached the British Museum as part of a donation of ethnographic material and photographs of North American Indians given to the Department of Ceramics and Ethnography on February 24, 1932.42 The collection remained pretty much untouched until the mid-1970s when – in concurrence with a season of popularity of photography among scholars43 – the original portfolios were replaced by new archival boxes. This has been the only major physical intervention to the collection, although neither the sequence nor the order of the photographs has been changed. The rearrangement and classification of the Blackmore Collection was nevertheless significant as it reinforced the status of photographs as cultural objects. Above all, the substitution of the folders with boxes underlined the archival function of the collection. Conceptually, the collection remained the same although its physical form changed, communicating a set of different meanings. Whereas the original folios used to be slight and easily transportable objects, ideal to be unfolded and circulated, the boxes are now rigid and heavy containers fastened by a small metal loop, suggesting a more static function and a focus on preservation. Shortly afterward, the National Anthropological Archives and the British Museum undertook a project to exchange images and data about early photographs, each institution providing the other with the missing prints. The collection at the British Museum was used as the key to identify albums and folios and establish correlations between the prints and the respective negatives held

40 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Objects of Ethnography,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 394–95. 41 Christopher Pinney, “Other Peoples’ Bodies, Lives, Histories? Ethical Issues in the Use of a Photographic Archive,” Journal of Museum Ethnography 1, no. 1 (1989): 67. 42 See Disposal book of the Salisbury South Wilts and Blackmore Museum No. 1, 1928–1952. 43 James Elkins, Photography Theory (New York: Routledge, 2007).

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at the Smithsonian and other institutions. The combined efforts of the Smithsonian and the British Museum to systematize the collection translated into a new set of pencil notes, catalog numbers, and archival cards.

Absence and Presence The Blackmore Collection has rarely come out of storage to be publicly exhibited, an absence that invariably brings forth discussions over conservation, accessibility, exhibitionary and political matters. Museums and archives are the traditional repositories of ethnographic and historical photograph collections, on which they exert a number of material and conceptual interventions aimed at the physical and symbolic preservation of the object, which by itself represents a value and a legacy for future generations. In this perspective, public fruition and/or display becomes a compelling necessity. As argued by conservation theorist Cesare Brandi, the dialectic tension between conservation and fruition of cultural heritage – always ground for potential conflict – becomes an even more sensitive matter in the field of vintage photographs, where the entropic tendency towards a progressive decay of the photo-object makes strategies of display even more problematic.44 Nevertheless, the photograph as image, briefly taken out of the archival drawer to be displayed, embodies different values that range from generic visual reference to historical document and work of art. One public showcase worth mentioning is when the Barbican Art Centre in London borrowed a group of original pictures from the Blackmore Collection to be displayed in the exhibition Native Nations: Journeys in American Photography (September 1998 to January 1999), part of a year-long festival of American culture titled Inventing America.45 One theme of the exhibition, “Desirable Objects,” was dedicated to the commercialization of Indian photography and featured 14 cartes de visite from the Album 9 chosen to be among the most representative in terms of clichéd representation, some related to the Sioux Uprising of 1862 with “celebrities for the album” not dissimilar, in form and content, to Wowinape’s portrait. Exhibiting a wide variety of images and formats, Native Nations challenged the romanticized and simplified idea of Native Americans that often dominates popular

44 Cesare Brandi, Teoria del restauro (Turin: Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, 1977). 45 Inventing America was inaugurated on January 25, 1998. With a budget of three million pounds, it explored various aspects of U.S. culture including the visual and performing arts, literature, cuisine, and technology. Native Nations and a themed weekend entitled “Native Rites” were the only events specifically dedicated to Native Americans.

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culture. The inclusion of Native American contributors also added a richer dimension to the interpretation of photographs, counterbalancing the dominance of curatorial authority that frequently affects western ethnographic exhibitions. More interestingly, the Native Nations exhibition represented a specific moment in time when material from the Blackmore Collection shifted into a different biographical space, that of the art object. The portraits, despite being displayed according to precise curatorial and political intentions as dialectic counterpart to more explicitly artistic photographs, were equally inscribed within the same aesthetic discourse. This approach reflected a tendency toward the cultural repackaging46 that leads us to reconsider nineteenth-century documentary photographs as art on the basis of alleged aesthetic intentions and a correspondence to aesthetic canons encoded by the western artistic tradition.47 This trend has been favored also by contemporary art theories developed since the 1960s. Hal Foster stresses how the neo-avant-garde operated an “implicit shift from a disciplinary criterion of quality, judged in relation to artistic standards of the past, to an avant-gardist value of interest, provoked through a testing of cultural limits in the present.”48 This has led to the development of a series of practices involving discourses compatible with those surrounding nineteenth-century photography. In these regards, the photograph as document relates to the same sets of values shared by contemporary artists; its seriality appeals to conceptual art that emphasizes concept over craft and has ceased to disregard mechanical reproduction as a demeaning factor. In addition, the old-fashioned feel of vintage photographs, made with archaic equipment and hard-to-find materials, constitutes a strong element of attraction to artists who employ obsolete mediums in a critical, nostalgic, or ironic way. Photography’s “passage from multiplicity, ubiquity, equivalence to singularity, rarity, and authenticity” contributes to explaining the “kind of closure effected by photography’s gradual reconstitution as an art and as the museum’s natural and special object of study”49 – a process according to which art historians, exhibitions, museums, and connoisseurs help establish a false ideology of a uniform aesthetic.50

46 Christopher Phillips, “The Judgment Seat of Photography,” October 22 (Autumn 1982): 53. 47 Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition,” October 18 (Autumn 1981): 47–66. 48 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), xi. 49 Phillips, “The Judgment Seat,” 28. 50 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Written on the Body,” in In Visible Light: Photography and Classification in Art, Science, and the Everyday, ed. Chrissie Iles and Russell Roberts (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1997), 23.

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Digital Re-inscriptions The Victorian fantasy of an “imperial archive” capable of mapping the entire world’s knowledge persists in the contemporary idea of a comprehensive digital catalog of artifacts and images, widely accessible in the form of movable visual entities.51 In the late 1920s, Aby Warburg worked on the imposing figurative atlas Mnemosyne, a vast project of visual systematization of knowledge where nearly a thousand photographs related to classic art, ethnography, and mass culture were pinned on rigid plates and linked to one another by analogical theme, creating an abstract synaptic network of objects and ideas.52 A few decades later, André Malraux theorized his musée imaginaire – often cited as an example of a virtual museum ante litteram: a museum without walls where photographic reproductions would allow to widely disseminate, link, and compare works of art without the boundaries of a physical institutional space.53 Shortly afterward, the early pioneering examples of the computerization of cultural heritage collections saw the light of day and, from the late 1990s, digital museums and archives – preceded by offline educational interactives in CD-ROM and DVD format – started to become progressively more common and sophisticated.54 The first attempts to computerize the British Museum’s anthropological collections date back to 1979 when an internal study organized by the Ethnographic Department recognized digitization to be the most practical and feasible method for keeping records and retrieving information. The first preliminary stage of a computerization project was completed between 1980 and 1983 and continued during the following years, employing a modified version of a software developed by the Museum Documentation Advisory Unit and supplied to several other museums and galleries.55 Up to this point, the catalog was mostly intended for internal use and auditing purposes; it did not include digitized images and, most importantly, it was outsourced and lacked curatorial involvement.56

51 Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993). 52 E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography; with a Memoir on the History of the Library by F. Saxl, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986). 53 André Malraux, The Psychology of Art: Museum Without Walls (London: Zwemmer, 1949). 54 Santos M. Mateos-Rusillo and Arnau Gifreu-Castells, “Museums and Online Exhibitions: a Model for Analysing and Charting Existing Types,” Museum Management and Curatorship 32, no. 1 (2017): 40–49. 55 Brian Durrans, “Computerising the Museum of Mankind,” BICA (Bulletin of Information on Computing and Anthropology) 3 (July 1985): 2–5. 56 For a history of the British Museum’s digital collection, see Anthony Griffiths, “Collections Online: The Experience of the British Museum,” Master Drawings 48, no. 3 (2010): 356–67.

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Between the 1990s and 2000s, a more user-friendly software allowed the curators to directly access and edit the database and, as digital photography became more readily available, digital images of the artifacts started to be included to complement the object descriptions.57 The year 2000 saw the launch of another digital endeavor, the Compass Project (subsequently renamed as Highlights), intended as an introduction to the museum collections. Presented with the Visionary Design Award in 2002, the project offered a selection of artifacts, chosen by the curators of the various departments to represent the museum.58 Each object was given a detailed page linked to various sections that allowed the virtual visitor to understand the historical context, browse through similar items, and tour the museum’s galleries. The Compass project opened the way to the first online publication of the internal catalog on the British Museum’s webpage in October 2007.59 Since then the database has been steadily expanded and upgraded, and represents today one of the earliest and most extensive museum platforms in the world, with an average of 2,000 images added every week.60 A basic search function allows querying specific keywords, while an advanced search option allows refining the search to produce more precise results. Instructions on how to optimize the search results are available on the website. Both Wowinape’s original carte de visite and the larger copy made by Shindler are online, each accompanied by extensive metadata. Only the recto of the photograph has been uploaded on the website, giving priority to the image content. Textual information now replaces the visual and tactile evidence provided by the labels, notes, and surface marks on the verso of the card. While the accession records and the various archival re-inscriptions are carefully and dutifully reported, there is no explicit reference to the fact that the larger print derives from the carte de visite. When searching for additional images of Wowinape, however, the two images would be displayed on the same page allowing comparison. Nina Lager Vestberg discusses how software has replaced the analog archival apparatus of Derridean memory61 but still operates in similar ways, imperceptible to its users.62 Keywords, tags, metadata, and interface shape the way information 57 Griffiths, “Collections Online,” 359–60. 58 See James Hemsley, Vito Cappellini, and Gerd Stanke, eds., Digital Applications for Cultural and Heritage Institutions (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005). 59 Griffiths, “Collections Online,” 361. 60 “About the Collection Database Online,” The British Museum, https://research.britishmu seum.org/research/collection_online/about_the_database.aspx. 61 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 62 Nina Lager Vestberg, “The Photographic Image in Digital Archives,” in The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, ed. Martin Lister (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 127.

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is accessed, analogies and correlations between items are highlighted or suppressed, and meanings are constructed. This is only one of the complex issues, of both practical and theoretical nature, that accompany the creation and fruition of digital archives. On a mundane level, one of the reasons for moving towards the digitization of photographic collections is purely systematic. Creating an efficient and exhaustive database employing new technology has been the constant strive of any institution, in particular of those in possession of large holdings. A well-organized directory has the additional advantage of improving the accessibility of the material, which can then be made available digitally to the general public. The partial elimination of the risks of handling and displaying the originals results also in an increased conservation of images. While the existence of digital copies does not reduce the necessity to preserve and protect the original material, damage to the objects by frequent usage can be avoided. Finally, in the long term, the initial considerable expenses encountered by the institutions can be recovered, and the maintenance of the archive promises to require minimum costs. On the downside of digitization, the variety of metadata models used to describe photographs and the lack of a unified system of categorization has proven to be one of the major drawbacks, making cross-collection search problematic.63 A solution to this problem has been seen in the development of national and institutional policies for the preservation of photographic collections, as well as in the formation of staff specialized in photographic processes and conservation of historical images. An obvious concern when putting images online is the breach of copyright regulations. Various measures have been designed to prevent the unauthorized download, dissemination, and reproduction of the photographs, however, none of them has proven to be completely reliable and successful. An image with a lower resolution, big enough to be recognizable but unfit for printing, is a common choice, although this solution has obvious repercussions on the visual qualities of the database.64 Michael Brown points out the complex issues of intellectual property related to online displays, contesting the legitimacy of the museum’s control over what can be displayed online and according to which

63 A. S. Tope and P. G. B. Enser, Design and Implementation Factors in Electronic Image Retrieval Systems, Library and Information Commission Research Report 105 (London: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries, 2000). 64 The British Museum makes most images in the database available free of charge (and in reasonably high quality) for non-commercial/educational use, while functioning as a picture library and charging a fee for any other commercial exploitation.

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modalities.65 However, this problem cannot be ascribed to the digital display alone, since museums exercise an institutional control over the image representation and interpretation, whether it is exhibited in a gallery, stored in a basement, or displayed on a computer screen. The debate over the process of digital transformation is deeply connected to issues of authenticity and, in the specific context of photographs, can become a discourse over form and content. The different focus given to the one or the other mirrors different attitudes towards early prints. The conundrum turns out to be whether the documentary value of an image resides in its content, which by force of indexicality is, undeniably, a factual representation of an event of the past, or, conversely, in the materiality of the photo-object, in its presence and incontrovertible status as historical artifact. These issues point towards a constructivist approach to authenticity that is radically different from the one commonly associated with the interpretation of photographic practice. Questions related to the authenticity of photographic representation, which were not unknown to the Victorian men of science, have come to assume growing importance.66 Conversely, to stress the relationship between form and content underlines a different set of issues, namely the consideration of photographs as material objects and the inscriptions they are subjected to since the very stage of their production. The example of the British Museum proves that the distinction between form and content, photo-object and image, is not a neat dichotomy. In its corporate guidance, the British Museum specifies that the importance must be given to the image content; nevertheless, the way images are digitized shows an attention towards the photograph as original artifact and material object. Every scratch and brown spot becomes an index of age, the unquestionable sign that those images portray the past but are also themselves part of that past. The physical modifications, accidentally occurred to a photograph during the course of the centuries, provide data and context, reinforce the authenticity of the image, and inscribe essential information on the material. The format assumes paramount importance as an indissoluble attribute to the image content; however, the historical evidence provided by the photo-object inevitably suffers in the translation process

65 Michael F. Brown, “Can Culture Be Copyrighted?,” Current Anthropology 39, no. 2 (1998): 193–222. 66 See Jennifer Tucker, “Photography as Witness, Detective, and Impostor: Visual Representation in Victorian Science,” in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 378–408; Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

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from ‘thing’ to pixel.67 The distinctive mount of a photographic studio, the imprint of a thumb on the corner of a collodion-coated negative, the three-dimensional experience of a stereograph are bound to disappear in the digital environment. The implications of digitization in terms of materiality make it necessary to better consider the relationship between the original object and its digital counterpart.68 According to the archival standpoint, as soon as the information is accurate and control is exercised in the creation of the record, the digital image has the same value as its analog referent.69 However, it can be argued that any act of reproducing (printing, photocopying, scanning, etc.) is in itself an act of manufacturing and that the copy, by definition, can never become the original.70 The properties of a digital image add complexity to the issue. If a photograph possesses a certain size, weight, surface, smell, and fixity in time and space, its digital copy might not. The image is displayed on a screen, translated into pixel information, potentially ubiquitous, its dimensions flexible and adaptable. In view of these considerations, the concept of increased accessibility to a collection by means of a digital database is shrouded in ambiguities. When an institution makes the image available in its virtual form, it draws a thicker line between the analog object and the audience, so that the digital form becomes the principal (and often only) way museum audiences experience these collections. Digitization has the advantage of generating infinite reproductions of the objects, improving, in Benjamin’s terms, access to the image content,71 but at the same time, it annihilates the material interaction between physical objects and human beings. Such position should be mitigated by other considerations. To begin with, the original object continues to exist and to occupy a fixed space independently from its virtual counterpart. Therefore, the existence of a digital version does not eliminate the possibility to relate to the material object itself. Secondly, it must be taken into account that, despite the attempts to turn museum exhibitions into holistic experiences that engage the five senses, the contact that the general audience has with artifacts is limited and predominantly a visual one. For obvious reasons, objects are protected by glass cases or kept in

67 Abby Smith, “Authenticity in Perspective,” in Authenticity in a Digital Environment, ed. Abby Smith (Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2000), 69–75. 68 Johanna Sassoon, “Photographic Materiality in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” in Edwards and Hart, Photographs Objects Histories, 186–202. 69 Jeff Rothenberg, “Preserving Authentic Digital Information,” in Smith, Authenticity in a Digital Environment, 51–68. 70 David Levy, “Where’s Waldo? Reflections on Copies and Authenticity in a Digital Environment,” in Smith, Authenticity in a Digital Environment, 24–31. 71 See also Sassoon, “Photographic Materiality in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” 187.

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archives, and cannot be touched, felt, or smelled by the non-specialist. Upon request, photographs can be taken out of their archival drawers, but these events occur only under strict supervision and with the tactile barrier of cotton gloves. Since the physical artifact would be equally inaccessible, digitization appears as the only viable option. In terms of materiality, it is interesting to raise the question of whether the phenomenological experience is lost with the digitization process or whether it takes another form. The digital seems to further stress the emphasis on the visual over other embodied experiences, with an apparent dematerialization of the photographic image and progressive loss of sensorial experiences deriving from the direct contact with the object. Any digital experience, however, is also mediated by material objects. Images are materialized through interfaces, and the hardware possesses a stark substantial quality. The display(s) visualizing the digital copy, along with other input peripherals, are all physical objects that become mediating technologies for the human hand, translating ‘real’ human actions into virtual operations. “The focus on the interaction between the material and the conceptual, and the resultant transformations” leads to a material culture approach to performance theory.72 The performing body – a concept that combines two anthropological perspectives: of the body as “object of the will of its possessor” and as “object of socio-cultural process”73 – can interact with other bodies as well as with virtual items and spaces. This opens up new routes of appropriation for the portrait of Wowinape, paths in which materiality not only is not suppressed but potentially enhanced. The digital reproduction of a photograph can be virtually touched and retouched. It can be turned, rotated, reduced, cropped, and enlarged. Magnifying tools can highlight signs otherwise unnoticeable; filters can modify the tonal range and sharpen blurred spots so that the subject portrayed can become sharper and more recognizable. Ultimately, the image can be downloaded and printed, undergoing a second translation from virtual to material. This marks a fundamental difference between what had determined the success of early photography in the nineteenth century and its current position in postmodernity. While early photographs were praised for their qualities of accuracy and truthfulness, digital images better fit the postmodern condition which “privileges fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity” and “emphasizes process and performance.”74 72 Jon P. Mitchell, “Performance,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley et al. (London: Sage, 2006), 399. 73 Mitchell, “Performance,” 385. 74 W. J. T. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 8.

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Another concern appears to be the risk of de-contextualization and dehistoricization of the digital images, which appear on the database as fragmented, separate entries. A plethora of digital projects, however, demonstrates that it is possible to provide the digital artifact with an adequate context and narrative and that such a formalist approach to collections does not depend strictly on the nature of the medium but rather on the more general representational strategies of a museum. Nevertheless, it comes natural to think that in the mare magnum of a vast database such as the one of the British Museum, the coherence of the Blackmore Collection as a composite archival object, historically constituted through a set of taxonomical classifications and material interventions, is lost in the translation process while the links between its images progressively loosen. The above considerations suggest that the creation of a digital record is a delicate operation that necessitates a heightened awareness of a series of issues of which the materiality of the object is a fundamental one. Digitization has become an essential concern within the contemporary museum discourse. Creating a digital archive, as much as setting up an exhibition, is a way of constructing meaning and therefore involves complex representational choices. Once made accessible, this construction of meaning is subjected to continuous reformulations, and individual elements (such as Wowinape’s carte de visite), part of a virtually infinite imaginary museum, are inscribed in individual “mnemosyne atlases,” in which aesthetic and political intentions are closely interwoven. From the commercial studios of Whitney and Lovejoy to the analog and digital archives of the British Museum, Wowinape’s portrait has reconstituted itself as collectible, ethnographic document, art object, and digital image, its journeys written in overlapping surface marks. Each discursive space highlighted the complex processes of re-inscription and transformation, the change of identity and cultural associations attached to the photograph. Yet, these networks of consumption do not act independently but merge and interact with each other, producing a dense visual economy that implies continuous negotiations of its value and status as photo-object.75

75 For a definition of “visual economy,” see Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

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Bibliography Archival Sources Archives of the Blackmore Museum, Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, Salisbury, United Kingdom. Record Group 75, Letters Received (75.11.4 Miscellaneous records), Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington, DC, USA. William Blackmore Collection, Department of Africa, Oceania & the Americas, The British Museum, London, United Kingdom. William Blackmore Collection 1827–1890, Collection number AC 018, The Palace of the Governors Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.

Secondary Sources “About the Collection Database Online.” The British Museum. https://research.britishmu seum.org/research/collection_online/about_the_database.aspx. Anderson, Gary Clayton, and Alan R. Woolworth, eds. Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988. Batchen, Geoffrey. Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Batchen, Geoffrey. Photography’s Objects. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1997. Brandi, Cesare. Teoria del restauro. Turin: Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, 1977. Brayer, Herbert Oliver. William Blackmore, a Case Study in the Economic Development of the West. Denver: Bradford-Robinson, 1949. Brown, Michael F. “Can Culture Be Copyrighted?” Current Anthropology 39, no. 2 (1998): 193–222. Camarda, Sandra. “Journeys into the Materiality of Photographs: The Case of the Blackmore Collection.” PhD diss., University College London, 2008. Chomsky, Carol. “The United States–Dakota War Trials: A Study in Military Injustice.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 1 (November 1990): 13–98. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Durrans, Brian. “Computerising the Museum of Mankind.” BICA (Bulletin of Information on Computing and Anthropology) 3 (July 1985): 2–5. Edwards, Elizabeth. “Material Beings: Objecthood and Ethnographic Photographs.” Visual Studies 17, no. 1 (2002): 67–76. Edwards, Elizabeth. “Photography and Anthropological Intention in Nineteenth Century Britain.” Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares: Perspectivas en Antropología Visual [since renamed as Disparidades: Revista de Antropología] 53, no. 2 (1998): 23–48. Edwards, Elizabeth. Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums. Oxford: Berg, 2001.

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Edwards, Elizabeth. “Representation and Reality: Science and the Visual Image.” In Australia in Oxford, edited by Howard Morphy and Elizabeth Edwards, 27–45. Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, 1988. Edwards, Elizabeth, and Janice Hart, eds. Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images. London: Routledge, 2004. Elkins, James. Photography Theory. New York: Routledge, 2007. Fleming, Paula Richardson. Native American Photography at the Smithsonian: The Shindler Catalogue. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003. Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Gombrich, E. H. Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography; with a Memoir on the History of the Library by F. Saxl. 2nd ed. Oxford: Phaidon, 1986. Gosden, Chris, and Yvonne Marshall. “The Cultural Biography of Objects.” World Archaeology 31, no. 2 (October 1999): 169–78. Griffiths, Antony. “Collections Online: The Experience of the British Museum.” Master Drawings 48, no. 3 (2010): 356–67. Hemsley, James, Vito Cappellini, and Gerd Stanke, eds. Digital Applications for Cultural and Heritage Institutions. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Objects of Ethnography.” In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine, 386–443. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biographies of Things: Commoditization as Process.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Krauss, Rosalind. “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition.” October 18 (Autumn 1981): 47–66. Lager Vestberg, Nina. “Archival Value: On Photography, Materiality and Indexicality.” Photographies 1, no. 1 (2008): 49–65. Lager Vestberg, Nina. “The Photographic Image in Digital Archives.” In The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, edited by Martin Lister, 113–130. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. Levy, David. “Where’s Waldo? Reflections on Copies and Authenticity in a Digital Environment.” In Smith, Authenticity in a Digital Environment, 24–31. Malraux, André. The Psychology of Art: Museum Without Walls. London: Zwemmer, 1949. Mateos-Rusillo, Santos M., and Arnau Gifreu-Castells. “Museums and Online Exhibitions: a Model for Analysing and Charting Existing Types.” Museum Management and Curatorship 32, no. 1 (2017): 40–49. Mautz, Carl. Biographies of Western Photographers: A Reference Guide to Photographers Working in the Nineteenth Century American West. Nevada City, CA: Carl Mautz Publishing, 1997. Maynard, Patrick. The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. McCauley, Elizabeth Anne. A. A. E. Disderi and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Mitchell, Jon P. “Performance.” In Handbook of Material Culture, edited by Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, 384–401. London: Sage, 2006.

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Mitchell, W. J. T. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Palmquist, Peter. Pioneer Photographers of the Far West: a Biographical Dictionary, 1840–1865. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Phillips, Christopher. “The Judgment Seat of Photography.” October 22 (Autumn 1982): 27–63. Pinney, Christopher. “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography.” In Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920, edited by Elizabeth Edwards, 74–95. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, 1992. Pinney, Christopher. “Other Peoples’ Bodies, Lives, Histories? Ethical Issues in the Use of a Photographic Archive.” Journal of Museum Ethnography 1, no. 1 (1989): 57–71. Poole, Deborah. Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World. Princeton Studies in Culture/ Power/ History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London: Verso, 1993. Rothenberg, Jeff. “Preserving Authentic Digital Information.” In Smith, Authenticity in a Digital Environment, 51–68. Sandweiss, Martha A. Print the Legend: Photography and the American West. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Sassoon, Johanna. “Photographic Materiality in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” In Edwards and Hart, Photographs Objects Histories, 186–202. Smith, Abby, ed. Authenticity in a Digital Environment. Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2000. Smith, Abby. “Authenticity in Perspective.” In Smith, Authenticity in a Digital Environment, 69–75. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. “Written on the Body.” In In Visible Light: Photography and Classification in Art, Science and the Everyday, edited by Chrissie Iles and Russell Roberts, 69–81. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1997. Stafford, Barbara Maria. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Taylor, Colin. “William Blackmore: a 19th Century Englishman’s Contribution to American Indian Ethnology.” In Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays, edited by Christian F. Feest, 321–35. Aachen: Rader-Verlag/Edition Herodot, 1987. Tope, A. S., and P. G. B. Enser. Design and Implementation Factors in Electronic Image Retrieval Systems. Library and Information Commission Research Report 105. London: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries, 2000. Tucker, Jennifer. Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Tucker, Jennifer. “Photography as Witness, Detective, and Impostor: Visual Representation in Victorian Science.” In Victorian Science in Context, edited by Bernard Lightman, 378–408. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Von Amelunxen, Hubertus. “The Century’s Memorial: Photography and the Recording of History.” In A New History of Photography, edited by Michel Frizot, 131–47. London: Könemann, 1998.

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Chapter 10 Can Images Have the Last Word?: Images and Narratives of Children at Play in Late Nineteenth-Century Argentina Une image n’a jamais le dernier mot (pas plus qu’un mot, d’ailleurs). – Georges Didi-Huberman1

Introduction Images of children playing games have been common since the industrial revolution, and the period since then has witnessed the proliferation and increasing specification of times, spaces, and objects for children, at least in the Western world.2 However, it was only in the late nineteenth century that play was considered to be equivalent to the “true essence” of the child. From that time on, play was no longer seen as a waste of time or morally dangerous but as a formative activity, and it became the “‘work of childhood’ – the moral equivalent of labour,” as historian Stephen Kline put it.3 How did this shift happen? And which role did images and words play in shaping this new imaginary of children and play? How did pedagogical discourses move in and through different modes of expression and media? In this chapter, I will approach these questions by taking a material ontological approach to analyzing the media in which some of these images were produced and circulated, looking specifically at photographs and narrative accounts of children’s play in illustrated magazines and their contexts of production.4 I am 1 Georges Didi-Huberman, Remontages du temps subi: L’oeil de l’histoire, 2 (Paris: Les Éditions du Minuit, 2010), 93. 2 Anita Schorsch, Images of Childhood: An Illustrated Social History (New York: Mayflower Books, 1979); Gary Cross, “Plays, Games and Toys,” in The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, ed. Paula S. Fass (London: Taylor & Francis, 2012), 267–82. 3 Stephen Kline, “The Making of Children’s Culture,” in The Children’s Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 95–109, quotation on 100. 4 Inés Dussel, “Visuality, Materiality, and History,” in Handbook of Historical Studies in Education: Debates, Tensions, and Directions, ed. Tanya Fitzgerald (New York: Springer Verlag, 2020), 137–52. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0942-6_8-1. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634945-011

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interested in how images of children’s play gained currency in popular imaginaries and how they accrued new meanings through the interplay of images and texts in the printed press, paying particular attention to the new ecologies of media that transformed affective and epistemic regimes of childhood by introducing new reading practices and public pedagogies. In order to do so, I will focus on an album of amateur photographs of children’s games from Argentina, created around 1895/96 by at least one but probably several photographers who were members of a society of amateur photographers. I follow the transmedia travels of some of these pictures to two illustrated magazines, Buenos Aires (1895–1899) and Caras y Caretas (1898–1939), which included them in several articles between 1897 and 1903.5 These two periodicals published 30 photographs from this album, in most cases accompanied by or illustrating essays on children’s games. Twelve of these photographs were published by both magazines, but the texts constructed different, even contrasting narratives. These divergencies between images and texts have been scrutinized in two recent studies that analyze the tensions between photographs and their captions. Noah Sobe and Peter Cunningham have noticed the contradictory meanings assigned to progressive education pictures included in John and Evelyn Dewey’s Schools of To-morrow (1915) and other books.6 While the captions were meant to guide readers’ perceptions and to stabilize the meanings they would attach to the images, the fact that the images circulated with different texts shows that this stabilization was never complete. Sobe’s work in particular uses these tensions to gain access to the affective experiences of progressive education, and thus moves beyond representational studies. Building on his insights, my own research seeks to present another example of how images and their captions were used to produce particular affections about children, paying particular attention to the gaps and divergencies between them, and to the slippery boundaries defining children’s lives and worlds.

5 This text is part of a broader study on this series of photographs. See Inés Dussel, “Photos Found in the Archive: An Approximation to the Work with Images Based on an Amateur Album on Children’s Games (Argentina, Late 19th Century),” Revista Historia y Memoria de la Educación 10 (2019): 51–129, DOI: 10.5944/hme.10.2019.22962. 6 Noah Sobe, “Affect, Embodiment and Pedagogic Practice in Early-Twentieth-Century American Progressive Education: The School of Organic Education and John Dewey’s Schools of Tomorrow,” in Transformation von Schule, Unterricht und Profession: Erträge praxistheoretischer Forschung, ed. Kathrin Berdelmann, Bettina Fritzsche, Kerstin Rabenstein, and Joachim Scholz (Berlin: Schöningh, 2018), 167–84; Peter Cunningham, “Picturing Progressive Texts: Images of ‘Democratic Schooling’ in the Work of John and Evelyn Dewey and Contemporaries,” History of Education 48, no. 1 (2019): 118–41.

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Finally, I would also like to use this research as an example to reflect on the effects of digital archives on our own practices as historians of education. I initially gained access to these images in digital form, through an onsite (intranet) repository at the National Archives of Argentina. There I could work with the images on-screen and copy their files but could not see the actual album or most of its captions. Issues of fragmentation and decontextualization were thus evident from the very start.7 When looking for how these images circulated in different publications, I came across Caras y Caretas, a well-known, groundbreaking Argentinean periodical, which is available online at the website of the National Library of Spain.8 Two years later, through hints in secondary sources, I learned that these photographs were first published in the illustrated magazine Buenos Aires. In order to confirm these hints, I had to physically travel to the same library, which, to my knowledge, holds the only complete collection of this magazine. This unequal availability partly explains why studies of Caras y Caretas abound, while Buenos Aires has been mostly overlooked by researchers. Argentinean historian Lila Caimari says that, in the future, “what can be consulted with two or three mouse clicks from our own personal notebook will have much more prominence than what is restricted to paper format.”9 That future is already here, and has been here for some time now; it is thus of the utmost importance that historians insist on discussing the lacunae and limitations of archives, including gigantic virtual archives, and also that we educate ourselves and the next generation of historians to keep a wary eye on the arrogant promises of digitalization in order not to reproduce its silences. This chapter is organized as follows: In the first section, I will introduce the images from the amateur album on children’s games and propose some reflections on the role of photography in shaping imaginaries of childhood. In the second section, I will discuss the publication of some of these pictures in Buenos Aires and Caras y Caretas, analyzing the relationship(s) between words and images and the visual and verbal narratives constructed by these periodicals. In the concluding section, I will reflect on what these examples tell us about the complex, mediatized relationships between words and images and the role of pedagogical discourses in stabilizing some meanings around children and play.

7 Daniel Rubinstein, ed., Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age (New York: Routledge, 2020). 8 http://hemerotecadigital.bne.es/results.vm?q=parent%3A0004080157&s=0&lang=es. 9 Lila Caimari, La vida en el archivo: Goces, tedios y desvíos en el oficio de la historia (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 2017), 80. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are the author’s.

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Children and Photography: Amateur Pictures and the Production of New Imaginaries of Childhood [P]hotographs as historical sources are subject to the familiar cultural processes of othering: typifying, fetishising, normalizing and pathologizing. They are dynamic, difficult, slippery, ambiguous, incongruous and contradictory. – Elizabeth Edwards10

Anne Higonnet, a prominent visual historian, has argued that photography, since its emergence, has gained a hold over images of childhood. For Higonnet, photography was the medium that was best able to capture the Romantic ideal of childhood, both because it shared the value of naturalness and because it conveyed a sense of fleeting evanescence.11 Thus, this visual technology seemed perfectly equipped to capture the ephemeral nature of children’s lives as well as mundane, everyday scenes more appropriate for representation in the arts moyens than in the fine arts. The interconnections between photography and modern notions of childhood are also evident in Elizabeth Edwards’s remark that history and photography belong to the same epistemic project: Rankean history that aims to capture the past as it was. The seductive appeal of photographs lies in their promise to provide evidence of past events and direct access to historical experience, fragmenting time into concrete moments and thus shifting the attention from grand events to minute ones. In order to resist these seductions, historians need to critically interrogate their understandings and definitions of event, context, temporal distance, and presence, without losing sight of the fact that photographs are indeed traces of past experiences.12 How, then, can historians work with photographs of children that carry this double burden of appearing as uncontested evidence both of the natural child and of a reified past? One way is to understand them as objects to think with, produced

10 Elizabeth Edwards, “Thoughts on Photography and the Practice of History,” in The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and Twentieth Century German History, ed. Jennifer Evans, Paul Bett, and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (New York: Berghahn, 2018), 23–36, quotation on 25. 11 Anne Higonnet, “Picturing Childhood in the Modern West,” in The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, ed. Paula S. Fass (London: Taylor & Francis, 2012), 296–311. 12 Edwards, for example, analyzes the effect that categories such as “colonial photography” have on the interpretation of photographs by turning each photographic record into the evidence of a stable, clear, self-sufficient context (colonialism) that explains its meaning. What is lost are the ambivalences, contradictions, alternative possibilities contained in these records. See Edwards, “Thoughts on Photography and the Practice of History,” 28.

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within particular technologies of representation and regimes of visibility.13 To follow them as objects through their different appearances in media that seek to promote and stabilize some meanings over others, and to point to their incongruities and contradictions, might help problematize their seduction as unmediated records of children’s past experiences. Working through the problem of photographs’ seduction is particularly important in the case of the corpus under consideration. The series of amateur photographs of children at play is a little gem, both because of its photographic quality and its semantic richness. Consisting of at least 77 pictures – the catalogue code of the pictures shows a gap of 20 numbers suggesting that the original series might have been larger – the album on children’s games (juegos infantiles) depicts diverse groups, including Afro-Argentinean boys and girls, playing in different spaces: houses, schools, parks, or wastegrounds. Little is known about the album; dating the pictures and assigning authorship has been a detective-like work that has taken me through different archives and materials.14 The catalogue codes make it possible to establish that the album was produced by the Sociedad Fotográfica Argentina de Aficionados (SFAdeA, Argentinean Photographic Society of Amateurs), which was active between 1889 and 1925. The pictures of children’s games were most likely taken between 1889 and 1896, considering that the pictures were first published in January 1897. Like other amateur societies of the time, the Sociedad was a club for “gentlemen photographers,”15 founded by wealthy men who embraced amateur photography as part of the country’s social and political renewal. The society’s photographs were designed to celebrate not only what was perceived as the modernization of Argentina but also the photographic medium itself, which was increasingly popularized thanks to technological and cultural changes. The thematic focus of the society’s pictures expanded from landscapes and customs to also include broader social topics; recording poverty and different social types, they borrowed from and paid tribute to social documentary as well as to a pictorialism aligned with other international movements in photography.16 13 Inés Dussel and Karin Priem, “The Visual in Histories of Education: A Reappraisal,” Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 6 (2017): 641–49. 14 For more information on the history of the album and the Sociedad Fotográfica Argentina de Aficionados (SFAdeA), see Dussel, “Photos Found in the Archive.” 15 Verónica Tell, El lado visible: Fotografía y progreso en la Argentina a fines del siglo XIX (San Martín: UNSAM Editorial, 2017), 139ff. 16 Pictorialism was an artistic aesthetic that pitted straight (realistic) against pure (artistic) photography, understood as the one in which the camera was used to “record personal feelings and responses” in “evocative and mysterious images.” See Daniel Cornell, “Camera Work and the Fluid Discourse of Pictorialism,” History of Photography, 23, no. 3 (1999): 294–300: quote in p. 295,

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The amateur society produced and sold thematic albums, of which 46 have survived; the children’s games album is number 30 of this collection. The by-laws of the society excluded professional photographers; members committed themselves to collective authorship and were not allowed to sign their photographs or keep their negatives. The exception was the pictures that were published in newspapers or magazines; because of their publication in Buenos Aires and Caras y Caretas, we know the name of at least one of the photographers, Juan M. Gutiérrez, at the time secretary of the society. The fact that the album on children’s games forms a coherent group of pictures enables a serial analysis connecting the depicted scenes, the actors, and the choice of locations. One remarkable feature of the album is that the scenes are supposed to be casual and spontaneous, as opposed to pictures taken in the studio, and thus closer to photo-journalism and its quest to deploy collective scenes.17 Yet in the repeated takes of a game using the same scenario and the same group of children, it is possible to see the staging of the scene by the photographer; it is this staging that helps to explore how this new iconography of the natural child was being produced. The pictures in this album are different from more formal family pictures showing adults and children sharing in activities like playing, talking, or reading books.18 In the album, only five photos depict adults, generally on the margins of the scene; the photos seem to portray, and to create, a world of children where adults are peripheral. This is consistent with the findings by several scholars on the photographs of the New School movement,19 but it should be noted that the pictures of the Argentinean amateur society were taken at least twenty years earlier. Portraiture was mostly reserved for the wealthy and “important” people, where either individual or family group portraits were the norm. But the children’s album documented mundane, banal scenes that sought to record the natural environment of children’s play. Photography, contemporary with the

DOI: 10.1080/03087298.1999.10443333. For photographic developments in Argentina, see Abel Alexander and Luis Priamo, “Notas sobre la fotografía porteña del siglo XIX,” in Buenos Aires, Memoria Antigua: Fotografías 1850–1900, ed. Luis Priamo (Buenos Aires: Fundación CEPPA Ediciones, 2018), 9–27. 17 Gisèle Freund, La fotografía como documento social (México DF: Gustavo Gilli Editores, 1981), 95. 18 Schorsch, Images of Childhood, 87. 19 Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, “The Progressive Image in the History of Education: Stories of Two Schools,” Visual Studies 22, no. 2 (2007): 159–63; Sjaak Braster and María del Mar Pozo Andrés, “La Escuela Nueva en imágenes: fotografía y propaganda en The New Era (1920–1939),” Historia y Memoria de la Educación 8 (2018): 97–145.

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emergence of cinema, shared with the new medium the value of movement and spontaneity, of capturing both the moment and the sequence. Of the 77 pictures, 53 show children playing in mixed-age groups, and 28 photographs show outdoor games featuring children from mixed social backgrounds. Schools figure prominently in interior scenes. It is also interesting to note that in these photographs the camera is placed at the same level as the children; most of the shots use a wide angle to show the scene of the game within a broader frame or context. There are no high-angle shots or close-ups; a few outdoor, panoramic scenes are of worse quality, raising doubts about whether they belong to the same series or were taken by the same photographer. In general, children are portrayed with different gestures, sometimes in movement and sometimes seated or quiet. The pictures thus create “little narratives”20 that connected people and places; a large number of these scenes (24) show children observing other children at play (and being photographed) without being involved in the action themselves. But let’s take a look at the context in which the images were published and at the texts that accompanied them. How were the images affected by their recontextualization in different media? What were the texts that accompanied these images, and to what extent do these texts help us see the images differently? How were meanings about children’s play produced in and through these transmedia travels?

Images Surrounded by Words: Photographs in Illustrated Magazines The illiterates of the future will be those unable to decipher a photograph, not writing. But shouldn’t the photographer who cannot read his own images count as no less an illiterate? Is the caption not destined to become the essential component of the shot? – Walter Benjamin21

As mentioned before, 30 of the 77 pictures of the children’s games album were published in two Buenos Aires-based illustrated magazines, 12 of them in both

20 Elizabeth Edwards, “Out and About: Photography, Topography, and Historical Imagination,” in Double Exposure: Memory and Photography, ed. Olga Shevchencko (London: Transaction Press, 2014), 185–209, quotation on 189. 21 Walter Benjamin, “Small History of Photography,” in Walter Benjamin: On Photography, ed. Esther Leslie (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 93.

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magazines.22 These two magazines, Caras y Caretas and Buenos Aires, are important sources to trace the changes in the relationships between images and words along with the transformations of media ecologies, due in particular to the progress in printing and visual technologies.23 Neither of these periodicals was conceived as a children’s magazine but both included articles on children’s activities such as school festivals, exams, or promenades in parks or public spaces. The majority (24) of the published photos from the album were printed between 1902 and 1903 in the context of articles on children’s games (in a section called Páginas Infantiles) in Caras y Caretas, an illustrated weekly that pioneered the inclusion of photographs in the printed press in Argentina. Combining the traditions of the satirical press and illustrated magazines, the first issue of the periodical appeared in 1898. It initially included between 10 and 15 photographs per issue; by 1910, each issue contained over 100 photographs.24 This overwhelming number of photographs was made possible by technological improvements that were also one of the reasons for the magazine’s instant success. Caras y Caretas modernized the process of engraving, which used to be done manually by drawing pictures on metal or wood panels, and introduced mechanical engraving or half-tone techniques. It also imposed modern canons for using photographs together with texts; journalists and photographers worked together to cover a wide range of topics, from crime to social issues. With regard to photography, the magazine made use of new and varied techniques that included not only direct shots but also photomontages and reconstructions of scenes.25 Historian Sandra Szir has studied the first years of Caras y Caretas in relation to images of and about childhood, claiming that the images in the journal 22 While it exceeds the scope of this chapter, it is worth mentioning that the images that were not published include remarkable scenes of both girls and boys watching a cock fight, boxing boys, boys imitating “gauchos” (rural workers) and fighting with imaginary facones (knives), street boys using slingshots, and boys selling newspapers in the street. 23 See Laura Malosetti Costa and Marcela Gené, eds., Impresiones porteñas: Imagen y palabra en la historia cultural de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2009); Sandra Szir, ed., Ilustrar e imprimir: Una historia de la cultura gráfica en Buenos Aires, 1830–1930 (Buenos Aires: Ampersand, 2016). 24 The magazine was founded by Eustaquio Pellicer (1859–1937), a Uruguayan intellectual, and Bartolomé Mitre (1821–1906), President of Argentina from 1862 until 1868 and owner of the newspaper La Nación (founded in 1870 and still running). Caras y Caretas started printing 15,000 copies and peaked at 110,700 in 1910. Cora Gamarnik, “La fotografía en la revista Caras y Caretas en Argentina (1898–1939): innovaciones técnicas, profesionalización e imágenes de actualidad,” Estudios Ibero-Americanos 44, no. 1 (2018): 120–37. 25 Luis Priamo, “Fotografía y periodismo,” in Buenos Aires 1910 Memoria del porvenir, ed. Margarita Gutman (Buenos Aires: Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo – Universidad de Buenos Aires/Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1999), 208.

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were competing with words over who determined the meaning-making process. Szir found two main types of images of children: ‘schooled’ images of children, related to official state discourses about education, hierarchical values and good behavior; and ‘consumerist’ images of children, leaning towards humor, play, and free time.26 Despite their differences, both types of images came from the same industrial universe of production, with similar visual values, and contributed to shaping the middlebrow taste of the Argentinean urban classes. They also promoted a hegemonic image of a white, Europeanized child (el niño) contained between the school and the family, as opposed to the legal notion of the minor (el menor) that framed the lives of non-schooled, working, or institutionalized children.27 According to Szir, Caras y Caretas was a modernizing force, for it promoted both consumption and pedagogical ideals about children by using mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Even though Caras y Caretas is generally considered the driving force behind the introduction of photos in the periodical press, the photos from the amateur album were, in fact, first published in the weekly magazine Buenos Aires. The magazine began publication in April 1895 as an offspring of the newspaper La Nación and was also owned by the Mitre family. Predating Caras y Caretas by roughly three years, it began to include photographs in its June 27, 1895, issue. Remarkably, the magazine not only used photographs as illustrations but also produced pieces on the practice of photography and particularly on the amateur society SFAdeA. Buenos Aires was proud to be the first Argentinean periodical employing a photographic procedure that enabled it “to reproduce with minute details and with great realism several scenes and situations.”28 In August 1895, the magazine’s deputy editor-in-chief, Gabriel Cantilo, wrote an editorial explicitly addressing critiques of the inclusion of photographs as childish, effeminate, or trivial; his response was that the magazine wanted to be open to all publics.29

26 Sandra Szir, “Imágenes para la infancia: Entre el discurso pedagógico y la cultura del consumo en Argentina. La escuela y el periódico ilustrado Caras y Caretas (1880–1910),” Nuevas miradas a la historia de la infancia en América Latina: entre prácticas y representaciones, ed. Elena Jackson and Susana Sosenski (Ciudad de México: UNAM-Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 2012), 123–52. 27 Szir, “Imágenes para la infancia,” 146–47. 28 Bretón, “La Dolores,” Buenos Aires: Revista Semanal Ilustrada, Feb 2, 1896, 2. 29 Gabriel Cantilo, “Para empezar,” Buenos Aires, Aug 11, 1895, 1. It should also be noted that both magazines participated in the increasing appeal to women as readers and consumers and thus contributed to important changes in gender identities and relationships. See Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996).

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The inclusion of photographs put Buenos Aires at the forefront of changes in the graphic industries. In 1895, some captions included the names of both the photographer and the photo-engraver.30 The technical skills of the magazine’s chief photographer, the Peruvian Salomón Vargas Machuca, were underlined on the occasion of his taking night pictures at the theater;31 the magazine also included pieces on “photos of the invisible,” similar to x-rays, telescopic images of the sun, and amateur photographs of a child thrown up in the air.32 Buenos Aires published 18 pictures from the album, all but three with accompanying text. The texts were all signed “Enrique Herrero,” most likely referring to Enrique Herrero Ducloux (1877–1962).33 While his identity cannot be established with certainty, it seems highly plausible: Immigrated from Spain at an early age, Herrero Ducloux trained at a normal school in the province of Santa Fe and worked as a primary schoolteacher from 1893 to 1896; in 1901, he obtained the title of Doctor of Chemistry from the University of Buenos Aires and became part of the intellectual and cultural elite of Buenos Aires. As we will see below, the author of the pieces claimed to be a teacher and to have close knowledge of children. As would befit the author’s background in chemistry, Herrero’s texts for the magazine also include many references to scientific terms.34 Besides, it was common at that time that young scientists and intellectuals held part-time jobs at magazines as a way of supporting themselves.35 We know less about the author of the Caras y Caretas pieces. Six of the nine articles in which the photos from the album appeared were signed by Figarillo, a common nickname in Argentinean journalism as it had been coined by one of the most prominent intellectuals of the nineteenth century, Juan Bautista Alberdi. Some scholars claim that Figarillo was Jorge Mitre (1884–?), a journalist

30 The magazine included short pieces, generally at the end of the issue, that carried information about the technical procedures and the names of those involved. It also printed advertisements of engravers and photographic ateliers. The illustrated magazines thus also contributed to the professionalization of the graphic workers. See Szir, Ilustrar e imprimir. 31 Salomón Vargas soon moved to Caras y Caretas, where he served as organizer and head of the Photography Section between 1898 and 1922. 32 See “El Dr. Luis Harperath,” Buenos Aires, April 12, 1896, 6; “Photographs of the Sun,” Buenos Aires, April 19, 1896, 11; “Premios en la Sociedad Fotográfica de Londres,” Buenos Aires, September 6, 1896, 12. 33 I would like to thank Darío Pulfer for his help in tracing Enrique Herrero. 34 See, e.g., Enrique Herrero, “Juegos Infantiles: Tres en línea, Hilos de oro, hilos de plata,” Buenos Aires, February 14, 1897, 13–14. 35 Carlos Altamirano and Beatriz Sarlo, Ensayos argentinos: De Sarmiento a la vanguardia (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1997), 167ff.

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and close relative of the founder of Buenos Aires,36 but cultural historian Sandra Szir argues that Figarillo was José S. Álvarez, also known as Fray Mocho (1858–1903), a writer and journalist who was the first editor-in-chief of Caras y Caretas. Regardless of whether Figarillo’s signature stood for one or multiple writers, we know that it was used for articles that commented on social affairs and public life, ranging from events at public markets to interviews with AfroArgentinean women to children’s games. The page layout of both magazines was quite different. The 16 letter-sized pages of Buenos Aires had a clean, elegant look, with two columns and ample margins;37 the paper was glossy and the pictures were well defined. The magazine was sold at 0.50 pesos. Each article ran to two or three pages and included one or two photographs per page (see Fig. 10.1). By contrast, Caras y Caretas was a popular magazine; featuring 24 pages, it cost 0.25 pesos in 1898, half the price of Buenos Aires. By 1902, the magazine had 64 pages, a third of which were filled with advertisements. Its pages were crammed with text and pictures, with almost no margins. The magazine, intended for a wide broader public, included a section, Páginas Infantiles, devoted to children, which contained stories, game rules, rhymes, and riddles. It is in this section that the photos of children’s games were published in nine articles between February 1902 and January 1903. All nine articles included three highly granulated pictures each (see Fig. 10.2). How did the images relate to the words that surrounded them? The articles depicted in Figs. 10.1 and 10.2 refer to the same game, Las plumas (The pens), yet the narratives told by the two magazines could not have been more different. In Caras y Caretas, the text explained the game to the reader and recommended it as a good pause after “a violent exercise.”38 The picture served as a prompt to elaborate on the rules of the game, including tricks for winning; the text warned about its difficulty, as the young player had to learn to exert the right pressure on the pen in order to achieve the right distance, neither too close nor too far. Figarillo’s writing was dry, descriptive, and devoid of any particular affection for children. He ended the article by saying that school children were passionate about this game and that classmates usually piled around the

36 Geraldine Rogers, “Caras y Caretas en la ciudad miscelánea de 1900: afinidades de un semanario popular con el espacio urbano de Buenos Aires,” Iberoamericana 4, no. 14 (2004): 29–45. 37 Initially, the layout consisted of three columns and tightly printed text; in December 1895, it changed to two columns (see Fig. 1). 38 Figarillo, “Páginas infantiles: La payana – El rescate – Las plumas,” Caras y Caretas: Semanario Festivo, Literario, Artístico y de Actualidades, August 23, 1902, 62.

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Fig. 10.1: Page layout of “Juegos infantiles: Las plumas,” Buenos Aires, January 31, 1897, 12. Collection of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

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Fig. 10.2: Page layout of “Páginas infantiles,” Caras y Caretas, August 23, 1902, 62. Digital collection of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

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players in the schoolyards. In this and other articles, Caras y Caretas recognized the value of games in schools as educational and legitimate activities. Enrique Herrero’s strategy in Buenos Aires was startlingly different. His article seems a textbook example of using photographs as “little narratives,” and it is clear that the text exists because of the photograph. In fact, the beginning of the text referred to the image and to its producer: The group of children, Herrero wrote, could not have been depicted more artistically. It was so natural, it revealed so much truth, it possessed such a peculiar charm that one did not know whether to succumb to the delicate mastery of the artist or applaud the three boys for their faces, so proper, so adequate, so expressive.39 This praise of the photographer-artist and the children for their staging of the photograph stands in stark contrast to the truth-claim that the picture represents the natural play of children. “Some wise educators say that children show their true self at play,” wrote Herrero; to look at children playing and to do so through a photograph was a double gift that Herrero never ceased to praise. However, it seems that Herrero was torn between praising the pictorialism of amateur photographers and applauding their documentary ambitions, a tension that he solved in favor of the artistic value of images. While Figarillo used dry language to talk about the game’s rules and tricks, Herrero delved into the sensory and sensual. He created a story around the picture, setting the scene right before the start of the school day, in a breezy garden smelling of jasmine, lilies, and magnolias, and featuring stone tiles and a vine arbor. Herrero gave names to the three boys: Martín, Julio, and Ramón. Through language, he zoomed in on the faces and lives of the boys in a way that the photographer and the camera lens did not. Martín, the player, was smart but also a little truant, as could be seen by his scuffed boots; Julio was more of an observer, but Ramón, the judge, had a real seriousness that captivated the viewer. Herrero wrote about the beauty and charm of these boys, of the delicious group portrait they made. The awareness of the medium remains present throughout the text, which creates a sensual atmosphere not devoid of erotic charges. Here, it is also worth noting the connections between the photographic medium and pedagogical discourses about freedom and the nature of children, a good example of Anne Higonnet’s argument about photography gaining a hold over the image of children and its alignment with Romantic ideals of childhood.40

39 Enrique Herrero, “Juegos infantiles: Las plumas,” Buenos Aires, January 31, 1897, 12–13, quotation on 12. 40 Higonnet, “Picturing Childhood in the Modern West.”

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However, Herrero’s pedagogical views were not as deterministic as these Romantic ideals, and emphasized freedom as a pedagogical value; he appealed to social reform and denounced poverty and exclusion. This becomes clear in an article he wrote on truants, “Los raboneros,” which is based on a picture that, at the Argentinean National Archives, bears the title “Contando cuentos” (Telling stories, Fig. 10.3) and that depicts a group of 15 boys in what seems to be a partly collapsed tunnel. The title may have to do with the two boys holding open books in what constitutes a rare reading scene far removed from the bourgeois depictions of silent indoor reading by well-dressed children.41 In the amateur picture,

Fig. 10.3: “Contando cuentos,” Argentina Archivo General de la Nación, Departamento de Fotografía, AR_AGN_DDF/ Consulta _INV:214.940.

41 Schorsch, Images of Childhood, 87.

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two boys are smoking; another one is holding a small bag. Some of the boys wear sailor suits while others seem to wear more humble clothes. Some boys appear to be engaged in real interaction, while others seem bored or uninterested. We know that the picture was staged by the photographer, as the boys also appeared in other photos of the series (see Fig. 10.5). This photo was not included in Caras y Caretas, maybe because it was too transgressive for a narrative about the edifying games that were usually featured in the magazine’s children’s section. Buenos Aires, however, printed it along with Enrique Herrero’s text (Fig. 10.4). This time, Herrero set the scene after the ringing of the school bell, when the truants decided to risk it all to enjoy a day of freedom. Herrero evoked the sounds of the schoolyard and the sight of good students who obey the rules and enter the building. But for some boys the classroom felt like jail. Playing with the words “aula” (classroom) and “jaula” (cage), Herrero noted that the truants were birds that wanted to fly free and escape the cage that was school. He called the truants by their last names (Murúa, Zárate, Curti, signaling Spanish and Italian backgrounds); the appeal to administrative language had the effect of an increased distance for the reader, and the reaffirmation of the white, Northern European child as the norm. In their flight, the urchins carried oranges, cheese, breads, crackers, and the cigarettes that made them feel like mustachioed soldiers or important businessmen. They went to a river and a ravine. Herrero imagined them telling dirty jokes and piquant stories, catching birds with slingshots, swimming in the river, smoking, and finally resting and chatting at the entrance to the collapsed tunnel. Herrero saw this misdemeanor as the seed of future perversion; he called this truancy a felony equivalent to deserting the army. In the end, however, this kind of behavior would never disappear, he wrote, because birds would always fly out of their cages to look for freedom. The language and motifs are very similar to the scene imagined around “Las plumas.” Herrero’s descriptions are full of sensual images. The metaphors continue to be the same: children, even truants, are like innocent birds; school is too strict, too serious. But these older boys provoke other affects. Real masculinity is developed outdoors, through rough play and transgressions, and through a camaraderie that excludes adults. The scene transpires eroticism. But when comparing the image and the words that surround it, there is a symptomatic silence: the presence of the books – outstanding as it was, considering the dominant visual discourses on silent and solitary indoor reading – went unremarked by Herrero. As a teacher, he surely would have noticed the books, celebrating the progress of literacy they represented. Were the books in this scene too implausible? Were they to remain invisible because they would contradict his view of schools as jails? Did the moral story about the truant boys require that the borrowings and connections between school children and “deserters” be denied, hidden, cut out of the picture?

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Fig. 10.4: Page layout of “Juegos infantiles: Los raboneros. Haciendo cunas,” Buenos Aires, March 21, 1897, 12. Collection of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

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Fig. 10.5: “Lucha.” Argentina Archivo General de la Nación, Departamento de Fotografía, AR_AGN_DDF/ Consulta _INV:214.901.

This construction of boyhood can also be seen in the last set of images and articles I would like to consider, which are related to a fight scene. The picture depicts the same group of boys we can see in “Contando cuentos” (Fig. 10.3) in a similarly ruined landscape; an imposing building can be seen in the back, perhaps one

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of the “palace schools” built at that time.42 The group is forming a semi-circle around two boys engaged in a wrestling match (see Fig. 10.5). We see school satchels as well as sailor suits, hats, and berets; it is clearly a socially mixed group, and the fact that the boys are standing and facing the camera highlights the social differences marked by the clothing. The picture elicited opposing narratives in Buenos Aires and Caras y Caretas. Under the headline “Juegos Infantiles” (Children’s games), Enrique Herrero created another of his impressive stories. As before, he named the main characters. Both are working-class children; Ramón’s mother is a laundress and Jaime’s father is an English blacksmith. He starts with a confession: “I know them all. They have been my students; they have spent with me the best hours of their days and I have studied them as my own issue. Are they the same students? Do I know their names? No, but it doesn’t matter: the people is homogeneous.”43 His article is patronizing but has an inflammatory tone when it comes to the living conditions of the working classes, immersed in darkness and monotony, deprived of sun and joy. Their children go to school irregularly and, without the attention of teachers, they are like plants without care, coarse and rough. Fighting is their strength and their pleasure. If a policeman or a teacher were to appear, they would all run away and keep mum. The fight would be the talk and laugh of the day; “[t]his is how our dear boys, the poor people’s children, get their pleasure.”44 Figarillo’s take on the fight in Caras y Caretas was stripped from any direct reference to class and concentrated on masculinity issues instead (see Fig. 10.6). Titled “Lucha Romana” (Roman fight), the text celebrated it as a useful exercise for boys, even better than athletic exercises on the trapeze or parallel bars. This “fight is the synthesis of a good gymnastics education and boys should not be allowed to start it without proper preparation”; they should be taught to reject “any non-classical resources.” This style of fighting required reflection; bodily strength was not enough. Once again, Figarillo stressed that fights had rules or “invariant principles that will cause the fatal defeat of those who do not observe them.”45 The images of boys’ playing rough are reminiscent of other images – for example, those of the street urchin, which contributed to the construction of a

42 Fabio Grementieri and Claudia Schmidt, Arquitectura, educación y patrimonio: Argentina, 1600–1975 (Buenos Aires: Pamplatina, 2010). 43 Enrique Herrero, “Juegos infantiles: Un concurso y un jurado,” Buenos Aires, February 28, 1897, 14–15, quotation on 14. 44 Herrero, “Juegos infantiles: Un concurso y un jurado,” 15. 45 Figarillo, “Páginas infantiles: El Uñate – Carreras con Aros – Lucha Romana,” Caras y Caretas, January 10, 1903, 62.

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Fig. 10.6: Page layout of “Páginas infantiles: El Uñate – Carrera con Aros – Lucha Romana,” Caras y Caretas, January 10, 1903, 62. Digital collection of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

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bourgeois sensibility in the nineteenth century. Art historian Marilyn Brown has argued that the image of the “gamin de Paris” became iconic through Eugène Delacroix’s painting La Liberté guidant le people (Liberty Leading the People, 1830), which depicted a young boy marching along the female incarnation of liberty and waving two pistols, while another boy held a rapier and several cobblestones.46 In Brown’s reading, the boys were ostensibly politicized, condensing images of freedom and revolution, and their depiction shows the extent to which boys played a central part in the production of the imaginaries of “the people” and “the nation” in France. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, this image of the revolutionary child was gradually domesticated, shifting towards sentimentalist visions of children. The unruly boys no longer carried “the ammunition pouch” of Delacroix’s painting but the school satchel.47 In the Argentinean pictures and texts, the boys are not associated with any political action. As a final comment, and hinting at an issue that deserves further research, it should be noted that girls, though not absent in the printed pictures, tend to occupy a marginal place as onlookers, as in the first photo in Fig. 10.6, or appear as passive “objects of admiring adult gazes,” playing seesaw or with dollhouses, or performing pretense-games such as cradling little girls.48 While boys played games that taught them how to control themselves and win over others, girls were depicted as telling stories or taking care of others.

Final Remarks In this chapter, I have followed some images of children’s games in their travels from an amateur album to two illustrated magazines that pioneered the introduction of photographs in the periodical press in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Argentina. Both magazines were important for authorizing the value of play as a formative experience inside and outside schools, and they did it through both words and pictures. As we have seen, however, even if the images were the same, they operated very differently depending on the co-presence of different print technologies, pedagogical discourses, and narrative styles. Reconsidering Sandra Szir’s study of the “schooled” and the “consumerist” images of children in the early years of

46 Marilyn R. Brown, The Gamin de Paris in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture: Delacroix, Hugo, and the French Social Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 2017), 30. 47 Brown, The Gamin de Paris in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture, 103. 48 Higonnet, “Picturing Childhood in the Modern West,” 298.

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Caras y Caretas, my own analysis found that the boundaries between these types of images were conflated. Although Caras y Caretas was a popular, consumeroriented magazine, it was close to the “the schooled version” of childhood – for example, in its insistence on rules for proper play and fixed gender roles. At first glance, it would seem that images were more important and prominent in Caras y Caretas, where up to three photographs could be printed on the same page. However, as different examples have shown, the pictures seemed secondary to the headlines and the surrounding words. Images were used as unproblematic illustrations of the texts, and the words rarely referred to them. The texts accompanying the pictures tended to privilege a notion of children eager to learn and playing by the rules. Play was normalized; only rarely did Caras y Caretas include transgressive or ambivalent images that challenged established gender or social boundaries. In several of his articles, Figarillo stated that “normal” play was a sign of health, and that parents should remain vigilant about any deviations. The rules were fixed, and words were used to stabilize the potentially multiple meanings of the images. Enrique Herrero’s articles in Buenos Aires seem much more aware of the seductive powers of photography, to which the author himself fell prey. Herrero created small stories around the pictures, setting the scenes in motion, adding smells, colors, and tactile sensations, and giving names to the characters. His narratives, written in 1896 and 1897, already appear to be cinematic, probably due to his acquaintance with photographic innovations and the experiments with visual technologies that were often reported on in the magazine. Also, the writings of Herrero show that there was more than one version of the schooled and the playful child. Herrero, who was probably a teacher and university student at the time when he wrote these articles, articulated a critical discourse towards schooling, equating schools with cages or jails. Students – which he saw variously as little rascals, birds, or plants that needed good care – could not be expected to stay put. Unlike Figarillo, Herrero promoted pedagogical discourses valuing freedom and exploration that were then emerging all over the world.49 Play was seen as part of children’s nature and thus supported a romantic ideal of an innocent and pure childhood, which was only tainted by poverty and exploitation. Even truancy and boys’ fights were considered a normal part of (male) children’s search for freedom and autonomy. As Marilyn Brown argues in reference to the gamin de Paris, these images of boys were depoliticized yet

49 See Adriana Puiggrós’ study of the radical democratic educational current in late-nineteenthcentury Argentina: Adriana Puiggrós, Sujetos, disciplina y curriculum en los orígenes del sistema educativo argentino, 1885–1916 (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1990).

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they were also called to play a central role in building the nation. Szir is right in her observation that magazines such as Caras y Caretas privileged white, Europeanized children, but Herrero’s texts in Buenos Aires were more inclusive of different ethnic and social backgrounds, even if subordinated to the same racial hierarchies. Yet, this is not all there is to it. Herrero’s language is poetic and complex, full of affective references that are also heavily patronizing. Caras y Caretas’ narrative is drier, descriptive, direct. Intended for all kinds of audiences, the magazine was much more successful than Buenos Aires in reaching its readers. The fact that its intended and assumed readers included children is an important one for discussing the public pedagogies of these magazines. Children would have been interested in knowing the rules and tricks of the games, or the exact dialogues to follow, in order to engage in new forms of play. The inclusion of photographs would provide a concrete image of the situations, bodily arrangements and movements implied by the games. Photographs could be informative and complement the text, making explicit all that went unsaid in the articles. Thus, it is clear that the journals worked differently, but still, I would argue that they cannot be divided neatly along progressive (playful) or regressive (schooled) lines. Again, with Elizabeth Edwards, it is useful to step outside of these categories, to pay attention to the incongruities and ambivalences inherent in media, and ask what kind of experiences and positions they open up for their readers. Finally, I would like to conclude with some more general remarks about working with images in digital times. As mentioned before, the lacunae and gaps of digital archives pose new challenges that historians have to confront. If we look only at what is available online, based on curators’ decisions about what is most popular and/or effective at particular times, our historical work would be strongly impoverished. Digitalization makes it easier to decontextualize images and sever them from larger series and contexts that might provide more clues about our pasts. In my research on this photo album, I have attempted to take concrete steps towards defragmenting the digital image, trying to reinscribe photos initially found as digital files within the material co-presences, technological media, and networks of meaning that they were originally attached to. By doing this, I was not seeking for any original, “true” meaning of images; on the contrary, I was trying to understand the multiplicity they carry, and the complex and contested histories through which they have come before us. With Didi-Huberman, I believe that images, even if they are beautiful, rare, and promise access to children’s worlds, do not have the last word; in fact, they demand new words.

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Bibliography Periodicals Buenos Aires: Revista Semanal Ilustrada. Biblioteca Nacional de España. Madrid, Spain. Caras y Caretas: Semanario Festivo, Literario, Artístico y de Actualidades. Available online at http://hemerotecadigital.bne.es/results.vm?q=parent%3A0004080157&s=0&lang=es.

Secondary Sources Alexander, Abel, and Luis Priamo. “Notas sobre la fotografía porteña del siglo XIX.” In Buenos Aires, Memoria Antigua: Fotografías 1850–1900, edited by Luis Priamo, 9–27. Buenos Aires: Fundación CEPPA Ediciones, 2018. Altamirano, Carlos, and Beatriz Sarlo. Ensayos argentinos: De Sarmiento a la vanguardia. Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1997. Barthes, Roland. Camera lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. “Small History of Photography.” In Walter Benjamin: On Photography, edited by Esther Leslie, 59–105. London: Reaktion Books, 2015. Braster, Sjaak, and María del Mar Pozo Andrés. “La Escuela Nueva en imágenes: fotografía y propaganda en The New Era (1920–1939).” Historia y Memoria de la Educación 8 (2018): 97–145. Brown, Marilyn R. The Gamin de Paris in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture: Delacroix, Hugo, and the French Social Imaginary. New York: Routledge, 2017. Burke, Catherine, and Ian Grosvenor. “The Progressive Image in the History of Education: Stories of Two Schools.” Visual Studies 22, no. 2 (2007): 159–63. Caimari, Lila. La vida en el archivo: Goces, tedios y desvíos en el oficio de la historia. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 2017. Cornell, Daniel. “Camera Work and the Fluid Discourse of Pictorialism.” History of Photography, 23, no. 3 (1999): 294–300. DOI: 10.1080/03087298.1999.10443333. Cross, Gary. “Plays, Games and Toys.” In The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, edited by Paula S. Fass, 267–82. London: Taylor & Francis, 2012. Cunningham, Peter. “Picturing Progressive Texts: Images of ‘Democratic Schooling’ in the Work of John and Evelyn Dewey and Contemporaries.” History of Education 48, no. 1 (2019): 118–41. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Remontages du temps subi: L’oeil de l’histoire, 2. Paris: Les Éditions du Minuit, 2010. Dussel, Inés. “Photos Found in the Archive: An Approximation to the Work with Images Based on an Amateur Album on Children’s Games (Argentina, Late 19th Century).” Revista Historia y Memoria de la Educación 10 (2019): 51–129. DOI: 10.5944/hme.10.2019.22962. Dussel, Inés. “Visuality, Materiality, and History.” In Handbook of Historical Studies in Education: Debates, Tensions, and Directions, edited by Tanya Fitzgerald, 137–52. New York: Springer Verlag, 2020. Dussel, Inés, and Karin Priem. “The Visual in Histories of Education: A Reappraisal.” Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 6 (2017): 641–49.

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Edwards, Elizabeth. “Out and About: Photography, Topography, and Historical Imagination.” In Double Exposure: Memory and Photography, edited by Olga Shevchencko, 185–209. London: Transaction Press, 2014. Edwards, Elizabeth. “Thoughts on Photography and the Practice of History.” In The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and Twentieth Century German History, edited by Jennifer Evans, Paul Bett, and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, 23–36. New York: Berghahn, 2018. Freund, Gisèle. La fotografía como documento social. México DF: Gustavo Gilli Editores, 1981. Gamarnik, Cora. “La fotografía en la revista Caras y Caretas en Argentina (1898–1939): innovaciones técnicas, profesionalización e imágenes de actualidad.” Estudios IberoAmericanos, 44, no. 1 (2018): 120–37. DOI: 10.15448/1980-864X.2018.1.27391. Grementieri, Fabio, and Claudia Schmidt. Arquitectura, educación y patrimonio: Argentina, 1600–1975. Buenos Aires: Pamplatina, 2010. Higonnet, Anne. “Picturing Childhood in the Modern West.” In The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, edited by Paula S. Fass, 296–311. London: Taylor & Francis, 2012. Kline, Stephen. “The Making of Children’s Culture.” In The Children’s Culture Reader, edited by Henry Jenkins, 95–109. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Lafleur, Héctor. Las revistas literarias argentinas, 1893–1967. Buenos Aires: El 8vo. Loco, 2006. Malosetti Costa, Laura, and Marcela Gené, eds. Impresiones porteñas: Imagen y palabra en la historia cultural de Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2009. Ohmann, Richard. Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets and Class at the Turn of the Century. London: Verso, 1996. Priamo, Luis. “Fotografía y periodismo.” In Buenos Aires 1910: Memoria del porvenir, edited by Margarita Gutman, 208–13. Buenos Aires: Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo – Universidad de Buenos Aires/Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1999. Puiggrós, Adriana. Sujetos, disciplina y curriculum en los orígenes del sistema educativo argentino, 1885–1916. Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1990. Rogers, Geraldine. “Caras y Caretas en la ciudad miscelánea de 1900: afinidades de un semanario popular con el espacio urbano de Buenos Aires.” Iberoamericana 4, no. 14 (2004): 29–45. Rubinstein Daniel, ed. Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age. New York: Routledge, 2020. Schorsch, Anita. Images of Childhood: An Illustrated Social History. New York: Mayflower Books, 1979. Sobe, Noah. “Affect, Embodiment and Pedagogic Practice in Early-Twentieth-Century American Progressive Education: The School of Organic Education and John Dewey’s Schools of Tomorrow.” In Transformation von Schule, Unterricht und Profession: Erträge praxistheoretischer Forschung, edited by Kathrin Berdelmann, Bettina Fritzsche, Kerstin Rabenstein, and Joachim Scholz, 167–84. Berlin: Springer, 2018. Szir, Sandra, ed. Ilustrar e imprimir: Una historia de la cultura gráfica en Buenos Aires, 1830–1930. Buenos Aires: Ampersand, 2016. Szir, Sandra. “Imágenes para la infancia: Entre el discurso pedagógico y la cultura del consumo en Argentina. La escuela y el periódico ilustrado Caras y Caretas (1880–1910).” In Nuevas miradas a la historia de la infancia en América Latina: entre prácticas y representaciones, edited by Elena Jackson and Susana Sosenski, 123–52. Ciudad de México: UNAM-Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 2012. Tell, Verónica. El lado visible: Fotografía y progreso en la Argentina a fines del siglo XIX. San Martín: UNSAM EDITA, 2017.

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Chapter 11 The Enigma and Value of “Found” School Photographs for Historians of Education Introduction In 1998 Frederic Bonn and Zoe Deleu found some photographs in a street in Paris and so began the LOOK AT ME Project. Today their large collection of “lost, forgotten, or thrown away” photographs can be found online.1 LOOK AT ME represents just one of an ever expanding number of sites that present nameless images, without connection to the people they show, or the photographer who took them. These collections include, for example, a Facebook group called Lost and Found, the Museum of Found Photographs, an open-to-the-public Flickr page that pools members’ found photographs and commercial sites which are organized so as to attract the interest of collectors, and Fortepan, a copyright-free and communitybased online photography archive launched in 2010 by Ákos Szepessy and Miklós Tamási which initially contained photographs found randomly in the streets of Budapest.2 Reflecting on this collecting phenomenon immediately triggers a range of questions. What are the characteristics of a “found” photograph? What is the attraction of such “found objects” for collectors? What use value do such artifacts have for historical research? Recovered lost, unclaimed, or discarded photographs are generally characterized by anonymity. They are nameless images; images without connection to the subjects they present, or the photographer who took them. They “aspire,” as one photographic historian noted, “neither to art nor to authorship.”3 By their very nature “found” images are “volatile” as they are not disciplined by the archive. They exist outside of the linguistic grid of the archival catalogue, waiting for the moment

1 http://www.look-at-me.tumblr.com/about. 2 See https://www.facebook.com/Lost.and.Found.Cameras and https://www.flickr.com/ groups/47255139@N00/. The Fortepan site can be found at http://www.fortepan.hu/?donor= Boj%C3%A1r%20S%C3%A1ndor. The site has over 100,000 photographs available for anyone to browse and download in high resolution, free of charge. 3 Michel Frizot, Toute photographie fait énigme/Every Photograph Is an Enigma (Paris: Maison Européene de la Photographie, 2015), 9. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110634945-012

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when they can be “imprisoned . . . [and] the language of the archive” will fill in “the blank space of the photograph” and erase the “undecidable nature of the image.”4 They exist but are without a past or a future. Pondering why such objects “suddenly seem interesting,” W. J. T. Mitchell (2005) suggests it might be “a compensatory move for the sense of de-realization produced by cyberspace and virtual reality . . . a nostalgic gesture toward the revival of various forms of materialism, historical, dialectical, even empirical . . . .”5 How can we critically engage with such collections of historical artifacts when, as Michel Frizot has written, “for the eye, every photograph is an enigma,” a “source of ambiguity” rather than a point of “access to a known reality?”6 The present essay will consider the questions posed above by exploring the problems associated with the enigma of the “found” image and the natural desire of the viewer to find meaning and thereby grant “found” images a “past and a future.” It will do this by using “found” photographs acquired during visits to Latvia and Hungary between 2013 and 2018. There are 49 photographs, a mixture of studio photographs and commercially produced postcards. They form part of a larger collection of “found” images, principally of schooling, collected over several decades from street markets, brocantes, car-boot sales, antique shops, and trading outlets specializing in old postcards. The essay will focus on eleven school-related images. Three are images of school interiors and the remainders taken outside. They are all examples of group photography. Except for one photograph they all generally align with the same conventional or vernacular format of a frontal view, of placing subjects in rows, and of eyes centered on the camera. There is formality and deliberate composition. The images are both documentary and commemorative. In all cases “ . . . a touch of the finger sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were.” The images then entered the archive of memory and materially within an instant moved from an image of a present moment to being a historical document.7 What follows is both a visual and reflective journey into the history of photography and modernity.

4 Christopher Pinney, “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography,” in Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (London: Yale University Press, 1992), 90. 5 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 111. 6 Frizot, Toute photographie fait énigme/Every Photograph Is an Enigma, 7. 7 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938–1930, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 328.

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Facts and Speculations: Reading “Found” Photographs For Roland Barthes the function of the photograph was to “to inform, to represent, to surprise, to cause to signify, to provoke desire.”8 Photographs exist to be seen, but making meaning requires an active gaze “which scans their surfaces in a sporadic, apparently disorganized process, determining reference points, identifying distinct signs and establishing mental connections between them.”9 So what do our photographs tell us? Here we look in detail at four images.

Fig. 11.1: Latvia 1, unknown photographer, private collection.

Where is our gaze drawn? Is it to the blurred face of the girl who moved or to the general gaze of the girls towards the lens of the camera? Or is our attention directed to the two girls at the front involved in a simulated learning task? Or are we held by the girl at the front who looks so fixedly at the lens and at us? The theorist of the image Roland Barthes felt that “in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away . . . to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness.”10 Similarly, the curator and photographic historian Michel Frizot advised, “You have to put the found photos aside,

8 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993), 28. 9 Frizot, Toute photographie fait énigme/Every Photograph Is an Enigma, 21. 10 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 53–54.

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let them settle out and then observe the changes each time the gaze comes back to them.”11 Returning to the image do we now see the girl who does not appear to be looking? Are our eyes drawn to the detail of a lace collar or the bare arms of a girl nearby? What about the materiality of the classroom – the desks, books, paper, the isolated reproduction painting on the wall depicting a scene in the countryside, the strange shadow shapes on the back wall? Turn the card over and there is a professional stamped inscription: “Foto J Stanko Riga, 1. Kalejuiela.” Someone has written “class VI” and “1940 maijs [May].”

Fig. 11.2: Latvia 2, unknown photographer, private collection. Where is our gaze drawn? Is it to the boy with the white shirt or the girl with the patterned blouse? What about the different ways in which the children position their hands? Do we at first notice the girl resting her head on the teacher’s shoulder? Or are we drawn to the lone girl in the front row or the boys positioned at the edge of the image? Are our eyes drawn to the images of men on the wall as we construct a material inventory of schooling? Is this the main school hall and is that an audio-speaker fixed to the wall? Does that mean that the school has access to radio programs?

11 Frizot, Toute photographie fait énigme/Every Photograph Is an Enigma, 216.

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Fig. 11.3: Hungary 1, unknown photographer, private collection. Where is our gaze drawn? The bodily positioning of the boys and the different directions in which they are looking is immediately intriguing as it disrupts the expected unity of the image. Or are we drawn to the two boys at the back on our right who display a greater degree of physical intimacy than the others? Two boys sitting at the front are wearing shoes, a third wears boots, and the rest are bare footed. Is this an indicator of status or of an aesthetic decision by the photographer? The materiality of schooling is on display – open and closed exercise books, writing slates, open and closed reading books, a drawing, and possibly a holy picture? Two boys are separately given the responsibility of locating the moment in time, each holding a slate with information written in chalk: “II. oozt[?]” and “1928.” Twelve of the boys are holding small bunches of flowers and the boy nearest the teacher holds a bouquet, his expression one of uncertainty. The female teacher is dressed in religious apparel. Is the photograph intended to mark a religious festival, the coming of spring?

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Fig. 11.4: Latvia 3, unknown photographer, private collection.

Where is our gaze drawn? The eyes are initially drawn to the girl in the floral dress. Individuals are either sitting/kneeling on the ground or standing. The teacher kneeling on the right catches the eye because of his size compared to the children. No one is smiling. The hands again attraction attention: a boy rests both hands on another’s shoulder, while standing at the back three girls are connected as one by the placement of their hands. Several of the children are holding or wearing a small bunch of flowers/foliage. Does the image delineate and reflect ideas of authority, hierarchy, and subordination? Again we turn the card over and try to decipher different handwriting. There is a date. Is this a school excursion into the countryside in 1936?

As with all images, these group portraits involve the camera, the photographer, and the subject[s] being participants “in a simultaneous . . . interactive venture” of which the result is a photograph.12 Looking is always followed by questioning. In these short commentaries on five “found” photographs there is a mixture of observable “facts” and speculative observations. The former is a product of the evidential value of photography; as one early reviewer of photographic practice noted: “The minute truths of the many objects, the exquisite delicacy of penciling,

12 Frizot, Toute photographie fait énigme, 10.

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if we may be allowed the phrase, can . . . be discovered with a magnifying glass.”13 With its association with objectivity and truthfulness, photography was quickly recognized as a new and vital tool for capturing the ‘real’ and circulating it as data. For the Swiss photographer and criminologist and disciple of Alphonse Bertillon, Rodolphe A. Reiss, a photograph was more than a faithful replication of reality – it was “a sort of artificial memory . . . a permanent reconstruction of the observation.”14 This belief in photography offering truth to reality is a consequence of the chemical/photographic process that is both intrusive and inclusive. Photographs indeed have an evidential force that exceeds what we can at first see.15 As William Henry Fox Talbot noted in the first book of photographs ever published, The Pencil of Nature (1844), “It frequently happens . . . . – and this is one of the charms of photography – that the operator himself [sic] discovers on examination, perhaps long afterwards, that he has depicted many things he had no notion of at the time.”16 In other words, photographs may capture a moment in time, but what is captured “exceeds the intention of the photographer.”17 Benjamin has spoken of the tiny spark of contingency: “No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed the subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment of the future nests so eloquently we, looking back, may rediscover it.”18 More recently Christopher Pinney noted, following Benjamin, “however hard the photographer tries to exclude, the camera lens always includes.”19 The photographic image inventories reality and magnifies the detail of the social and

13 The Athenaeum, February 2, 1839, quoted in Sarah Greenough, “The Memory of Time: Introduction,” in The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, ed. Sarah Greenough and Andrea Nelson (London: Thames and Hudson, 2015), 2. 14 Rodolphe A. Reiss, quoted in Vincent Lavoie, “Displaying Forensic Pictures in Court,” in The ‘Public’ Life of Photographs, ed. Thierry Gervais (Toronto: RIC Books, 2016), 82. 15 See Katherine Biber, “The Rules of Evidence,” in Evidence, ed. Brook Andrew (Sydney: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences Media, 2015), 26–35. 16 William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1844), caption to Plate X111, “Queen’s College, Oxford: Entrance Gateway.” 17 Esther Leslie, “Introduction: Walter Benjamin and the Birth of Photography,” in On Photography: Walter Benjamin, ed. and trans. Esther Leslie (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 19. 18 Walter Benjamin, “A Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2: 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 510. 19 Christopher Pinney, “Introduction: How the Other Half . . ., ” in Photography’s Other Histories, ed. Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Peterson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 7.

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natural world, and it is in the excess of information of the image and the evidence it contains that history awaits the viewer. The excess of information and its random inclusiveness can potentially render photographs “illegible” for the viewer.20 Further complexities can be generated for the viewer by a photograph’s genre. Alan Trachtenberg particularly commented on the “complexity” of the group portrait genre: “Group portraits arouse more questions than they can answer, and thus they seem paradoxically open and closed, easy to understand and utterly inscrutable.”21 The speculative observations presented above are both a reflection of Trachtenberg’s concern and of the viewer’s need to construct a hypothetical reality, a history of the moment before the photographic process is completed in order to understand what is before their eyes. The “interactive venture” that resulted in these images of schooling “remembers only the slightest trace of . . . [an] abundantly discursive past: the moment of the pose.” We have no evidence of the “before” and the “after,” just the single moment frozen in time.22 What did the photographers say to these children? How did they go about organizing them? Were there processes of negotiation? Were compromises made? What of the temporal dimension associated with organizing the frame? What happened after this captured moment?23 We can only speculate.

Ritualizing the Schooled Body Attention has been drawn already to how the children in these photographs hold their bodies and relate to others.24 How does their being part of a group affect our perception? Are groups in photographs something more than the sum of their parts? Reflecting on the nature of group photographs, the art historian Richard Brilliant has written of the idea of “occasionality” as the “cause of the image coming into being.”25 Such images have a social function that visually locates subjects in place and time. Leslie Tonkonow has described this function

20 Elizabeth Edwards, “Entangled Documents: Visualised Histories,” in Susan Meiselas: In History, ed. Kristen Lubben (Göttingen: Steidl, 2008), 333. 21 Alan Trachtenberg, “The Group Portrait,” in Multiple Exposure: The Group Portrait in Photographs, ed. Marybeth Sollins (New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1995), 16–17. 22 Frizot, Toute photographie fait énigme/Every Photograph Is an Enigma, 19. 23 See Kate Rousmaniere, “Questioning the Visual in the History of Education,” History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 117–28. 24 See Catherine Burke, “Feet, Footwork, Footwear, and ‘Being Alive’ in the Modern School,” Paedagogica Historica 54, nos. 1 & 2 (2018): 32–47. 25 Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), 8–9.

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as “a kind of ritualistic punctuation mark, attesting to the unification of the participants in time and purpose.”26 Frizot in turn writes of a “ritual of immobility.”27 What is clear is that this ritual made a mark on the body by calling into being new poses and postures as types and collectives which were caught on film. It has been argued that participation in group portraits can be read as an “outward expression of each actor’s personhood by virtue of . . . [their] participation in the group,” a willingness to share an element of the self for the benefit of the “integrated ensemble.”28 Here that ensemble is representative of the institutional power of the school, of the deliberate process of bringing visually into being the body of the schooled child. Further, as Chapell, Chapell, and Margolis observed, the formal class photograph is a trace of a social function that schooled the body; it was a public performance of discipline, displaying unity and group order which in turn shaped a child’s behavior.29 Of course, institutional power or not, all the subjects will have had an awareness of the camera and as Barthes wrote about his own experience, “once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing.’ I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.”30 The extent to which the individual disappears within the schooled collective or projects some degree of separateness over togetherness will vary, but whatever the degree each child will have represented themselves for the benefit of a picture together and also will have received something in return from belonging in some measure to others – their fellow students. The photographs can thus be read as ritual emblems of a shared identity and of children being located within the collective that is the school. It is possible that we should also consider the extent to which the social dimension of this ritualistic production of the schooled child also gave meaning to a child’s sense and experience of place.31 Of course, we

26 Leslie Tonkonow, “Multiple Exposure: The Group Portrait in Photography,” in Multiple Exposure: The Group Portrait in Photographs, ed. Marybeth Sollins (New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1995), 9. 27 Frizot, Toute photographie fait énigme/Every Photograph Is an Enigma, 114. 28 Brilliant, Portraiture, 94–6. 29 Drew Chapell, Sharon Chapell, and Eric Margolis, “School as Ceremony and Ritual: How Photography Illuminates Performances of Ideological Transfer,” Qualitative Inquiry 17, no. 1 (2011): 60. See also Sander L. Gilman, Stand Up Straight! A History of Posture (London: Reaktion Books, 2018). 30 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 10. 31 For a discussion of the meaning and sense of place, see Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).

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should remember that it is possible that some children would never see the final image but only have the experience of the moment of its taking.

Time and the Image, or “Clocks for Seeing” “Time,” as the curator Sarah Greenough recently noted, is “at the root of photography’s association with truth.”32 Benjamin wrote of how the technology of early photography created a new time-space: “The procedure itself caused the subject to focus his [sic] life in the moment rather than hurrying on past it; during the considerable period of exposure, the subject (as it were) grew into the picture, in the sharpest contrast with appearances in a snapshot.”33 Photographs belong to a different time as soon as we view them. The notion of “that’s the way it was” is transformed into “it will never be the same again” and “the absence of a body is exchanged for the presence of an image.”34 Taken collectively, internal clues enable us to see that our photographs range across time, with the camera capturing time passing. In this sense, they come close to Barthes’ characterization of cameras as “clocks for seeing,” but as such they are limited by the tiered temporal layers of the singular moment – the moment of exposure, the moment of viewing, and the moments in between.35 The American photographer Gregory Crewsdon, when interviewed about his practice, replied: “Each artist inherits a tradition and reinvents it in one way or another, and in turn extends it, just to be reinvented again by the next generation of artist.”36 His comments could have been directed at the work of Julian Germain. Motivated by absences in his daughter’s school photographs that did not show the actual rooms or the groups within much of school life happens, Germain embarked on a project between 2004 and 2012 to create an archive providing a “global typological record” of the school environment and of the children who were experiencing it in the early part of the twenty-first century.37 His photographs were made at the end of lessons, from a fixed viewpoint, with the students determining their individual pose and holding their positions for a couple of

32 Greenough, “The Memory of Time: Introduction,” 2. 33 Benjamin, “A Little History of Photography,” 514. 34 Hans Belting, Face and Mask: A Double History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 158. 35 Barthes, Camera Lucida 15. 36 Thurston Moore, “Making the Scene: Thurston Moore in Conversation with Gregory Crewsdon,” Loose Associations 3, no. 2 (2017): 16. 37 Julian Germain, Classroom Photographs (London: Prestel, 2012), 7.

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Fig. 11.5: Langston Middle School, St Louis, Missouri, USA. Grade 8, Basic Skills. October 25th, 2006. From the series Classroom Portraits 2004–2015 by Julian Germain. © Julian Germain.

minutes. Trachtenberg has written of the postmodern deconstruction of the group portrait and there is certainly evidence of the subjects in Germain’s photographs being self-conscious about convention and of identity projected as performance. Nevertheless, there are at the same time certain tropes in Germain’s work that mirror some of those in our “found” photographs – sitting, often in rows, artifacts on display – and in both we can see archetypal features of past and present classroom practices. The question to ask is to what extent is the school of modernity as presented in our “found” photographs and in Germain’s archive under threat from the development of new learning technologies and associated pedagogies, new technologies of display, increasing individualism, and growing popular suspicion of the state and its institutions?

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Looking and Meaning-Making “In every act of looking there is an expectation of meaning”38 – and this is a theme that constantly has to be re-visited when we work with photographs. Siegfried Kracauer argued that photographs only made sense as long as there was still a living memory of what they presented and that once memory fades the rootedness of the image is lost and the true nature of photographs as “archives of disconnected signifiers” was revealed. He writes, “If one can no longer encounter the grandmother in the photograph, the image taken from the family album necessarily disintegrates into its particulars.” For Kracauer a photograph did not present the past or history, but rather marked “indexically the moment of its own production.”39 Benjamin makes a similar point in the Arcades Project: “For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time . . . Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each ‘now’ is the now of a particular recognizability.”40 It may be that memory and personal experience fall out of time and what assigned fixity to a photograph’s meaning comes unstuck, but the properties of a photograph do not change over its material existence. Instead it accrues different meanings as it enters into relationships with new contexts and audiences.41 John Berger pointed to an “abyss” between the moment recorded in a photograph and the moment of looking and noted that “an instant photographed can only acquire meaning in so far as the viewer can read into it a duration extending beyond itself,” and it is when we find a photograph meaningful that we lend “it a past and a future.”42 As found objects our photographs have been “ripped from that original context, denuded of their descriptions,” and as they enter into relationships with new contexts and audiences they can “assume new, often multiple and unrelated meanings that can allow for a rereading and a rewriting of history.”43

38 John Berger, “Appearances,” in Understanding a Photograph, ed. Geoff Dyer (London: Penguin Books, 2013), 88. 39 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 55–56. The original essay was published in 1927. 40 Walter Benjamin, “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 462–3. 41 See John A. Walker, “Context as a Determinant of Photographic Meaning,” in The Camerawork Essays, ed. Jessica Evans (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1997), 57. 42 Berger, “Appearances,” 63–64. 43 Greenough, “The Memory of Time: Introduction,” 3.

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They are more open to interpretation and evidential truths and the mode of their presentation will always have an effect on the viewer. So, coming upon our “found” school photographs for the first time, what avenues are available for the curious visual scholar? How can meaning be made as the totality of the image is absorbed? How can the ‘everything’ of the image, the excess of data, and the plurality of tiny signs be disentangled? We can seek clues about place, date, circumstance, photographer, subject, but “facts . . . do not in themselves constitute meaning”44 and knowledge of these will not necessarily provide answers to questions which are posed after the moment of production, questions which originate with the eye absorbing unexpected data. Looking nevertheless animates the viewer, and, following Barthes, we looked for semiological clues to offer a reading of the “found” images – bodily pose and gestures, facial expressions, photographic framing – but this reading will always be shaped by what has elsewhere been termed “a knowing gaze.”45 Over the years of collecting, many such photographs as these have been viewed and consequently familiarity and a particular coherence of understanding are brought to reading these “found” images. It is a reading which is relational, a gaze that connects images across place, space, and time.

Found Images in the Digital Archive The most recent work of the American photographer Steven Chandler involved the creation of a series of images made by merging his own negatives together with blank film that was intentionally damaged by leaving it outside. His aim was to “utilise the found snapshot aesthetic of degraded analogue film, towards the possibility of increasing the emotional and psychological resonance of the image.”46 Chandler had been a collector of found images “from pavements, bins, boot sales” since 2001, but each year the number found was less and less due to “the ubiquity of digital cameras and camera phones.”47 Chandler’s experience (and experiment) is reflective of the status of photography as ‘always in flux’ because of the instability of technology – “from plates to film, paper to pixels, to more people carrying more cameras more of the time” – and these

44 Berger, “Appearances,” 64. 45 See Ian Grosvenor, “The School Album: Images, Insights and Inequalities,” Educació i Història 15 (2010): 156–60. 46 https://www.stevenchandlerimages.portfoliobox.net/. 47 https://www.stevenchandlerimages.portfoliobox.net/.

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changes effect “who makes images, where, why, how often, and for whom.”48 According to Michael Carroll, we are now living in “The Third Age of Photography”: after black and white (1826–1970) and color film (1970–2000), the norm is now digital color photographs, which exist virtually rather than being stored “in physical photo-albums, sleeves, boxes and drawers.”49 Images are no longer solid but liquid as the physical properties of the visual have been replaced with the electronic particles of the digital. This has been accompanied by a fundamental shift from the photograph as a stand-alone artifact to “a unit of communication.”50 Photography has become an interface for visual communication, a cultural practice which Nathan Jurgenson has described as “social photography,” a way of “ seeing, speaking and learning ” that is less about capturing memories as sharing the “experience” of the moment.51 This in-the-moment communication has generated an abundance of images which have become part of an ever-expanding digital archive, and the same image can now be instantly accessed at any computer terminal connected to the worldwide web. Moreover, the status of the virtual and its associated network of interconnections mean that the sensory and emotional significance of photographs are dispersed. What was once physically found, touched, collected, and given significance, once digitized is lost within the ever expanding archive. The optical inscription associated with photography has been replaced by digital replication and internet dispersal. In sum, the digital revolution has transformed the ways in which we engage with images, they “often reach us as their own representations, stored in machines and shorn of their own physical mediality. We retrieve them from machines to recall them and stage them in the new media” and the relationship between artifact and imagination “has shifted . . . in favor of imagination.”52 Digital photography has brought us to an “age of memory abundance,” and one consequence of this is “the progressive devaluing of such memories and severing of the past’s hold on the present.”53 What is the significance of all of this for the found image? It may be that there are, as Chandler observed, less and less found photographs awaiting the collector. Certainly, more and more recovered lost, unclaimed, or discarded

48 Nathan Jurgenson, The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (London: Verso, 2019), 7. 49 Michael D. Carroll, Retrographic: History’s Most Exciting Images Transformed into Living Colour (London: Carpet Bombing Culture, 2017), 7. 50 Jurgenson, The Social Photo, 9. 51 Jurgenson, The Social Photo, 10. 52 Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 41. 53 Michael Sacasas, quoted in Jurgenson, The Social Photo, 51.

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photographs are being digitized for all to see on open access sites. In the process practices have emerged whereby archivists, historians, curators, philanthropists, and amateur collectors have been encouraged to voluntarily upload their ‘found’ images, share their knowledge and collectively engage in meaning-making. For example, at the Fortepan website, descriptions attached to images are compiled and edited by volunteers, utilizing information contributed at the Fortepan Forum. On such open access sites the original image remains with its ‘owner,’ while its digitized counterpart starts its own life independently of any disciplinary restrictions, professional requirements, archiving canons, and institutional hierarchies. Once online and openly accessible, what was found can be readily de- and re-contextualized for subsequent use. All this can be seen as a process for democratizing engagement with the past, but also one in which the past is commodified, and for historians working with the visual it raises issues around how we address “the multiple rather than the unique photograph” and how we understand the collective practices of image sharing and the resulting mobility of photographs from one context to another.54

Final Thoughts This essay has presented a series of stopping-off points for reflection on a visual journey. Found photographs are indeed an enigma, but this does not mean they have no place in our visual practice as historians of education. Indeed, their very nature has triggered reflections not only about their status as evidence but also on their production and what this means for our understanding of photographic practice in general. Indeed, we might characterize our ‘found’ photographs as offering a gallery of instruction. Photography was a mechanism for “communication with others and communion with the world”55 and as documentation made visible for the first time the collective face of the schooled body – a collective that, because of photography’s reproducibility, could be consumed by new publics.56 Reduced to visual representation, the schooled child became an object for the modernist gaze. The ‘found’ photographs point to the value of thinking about developing a “grammar” of the schooled body, of the schooled body as a temporal sign of identity, as a site of representation, and as a product of society and its history. This is the

54 Thierry Gervais, “Introduction,” in Gervais, The ‘Public’ Life of Photographs, 11. 55 Pierre Bourdieu, Photography (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 94. 56 See Joel Synder, “Making Photographs Public,” in Gervais, The ‘Public’ Life of Photographs, 37.

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benefit of bringing found images into conversation with each other so as to generalize about schooling, rather than trying to locate individual images in time and place, in Riga and Budapest. Joan Schwartz has argued that photographs are not objective images but should instead be seen as “social constructs capable of performing ideological work,” as they are “products of historically-situated observers – of the photographers who made them, the patrons who commissioned them, the entrepreneurs who published them and the audiences who consumed them.”57 As such photographs evidence ways of seeing the world historically, culturally, and socially, and for Schwartz to understand the meaning of photographs is to “understand them in terms of the action in which they participated.”58 However, it also follows that if the meaning of a photograph resides both in its making and subsequent use, then, as Gillian Rose posits, “the same argument must extend to contemporary deployments of photographs too.”59 In other words, our use of historic photographs of schooling must be characterized not only by critical engagement with images as discursively produced cultural artifacts, but also by reflection on our own discursive practice and the specificity of our own ways of seeing. Our practice needs “to be problematised also.”60 In doing so, we should, where appropriate, not forget the “narrative of selfhood” associated with being a collector. Mitchell, after pondering why there is an interest in collecting “found” objects, asked why “found objects have not found themselves an adequate theory.”61 His answer was to draw on Douglas Collins’s account of the found object by asking what is not a found object and then answering: “the sought object, the desired object, the sublime or beautiful object, the valued object, the aesthetic object, the produced, consumed, or exchanged object, the given or taken object, the symbolic object, the feared or hated object, the good or bad object, the lost and vanishing object.”62 Elsewhere he notes, “the secret of the found object is thus the most intractable kind: it is hidden in plain sight,” it is “ordinary, unimportant, neglected, and (until its finding) overlooked” and its finding “must be accidental, not deliberate or planned.”63 More recently, Sophie Berrebi has argued

57 Joan Schwartz, “The Geography Lesson: Photographs and the Construction of Imaginative Geographies,” Journal of Historical Geography 22, no. 1 (1996): 35. 58 Schwartz, “The Geography Lesson,” 36. 59 Gillian Rose, “Practising Photography: an Archive, a Study, Some Photographs and a Researcher,” Journal of Historical Geography 26, no. 4 (2000): 556. 60 Rose, “Practising Photography,” 556. 61 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 114 . 62 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 116. 63 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 114.

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“there are no such things as ‘found objects,’ but only ‘objects’ that are ‘set aside,’ selected and re-contextualised.”64 In both cases the found object/photograph can be said to exist prior to “fetishization” and “commodification,” but once found everything changes. They are no longer overlooked but are “discovered,” “revealed,” and “reframed” and put on display as in this essay, given a past and a future, and consequently becoming fetishized and foundational “for a whole series of new findings and appropriations.”65 It is clear that photographs will always be “the starting point for inquiry rather than its end,”66 but perhaps the true value of the “found” photograph for the historian sits with Benjamin’s idea that access to the past can only ever be regained through fragmented moments evoked by an image or object. Collecting what was lost, mislaid, set aside, or left in plain sight was a means of grasping hold of past experience, of arresting memory loss and allowing stories to unfold.

Fig. 11.6: France 1, unknown photographer, private collection.

64 Sophie Berrebi, The Shape of Evidence: Contemporary Art and the Document (Valiz: Vis-àvis, 2014), 41. 65 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 116. 66 Darren Newbury, Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2009), 318.

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Finally, any critical argument must of necessity be tested, reviewed, and, where appropriate, redefined. To this end this essay closes with one final “found” image for you, the reader, to scan, determine reference points, identify signs, establish connections, and make meaning. Figure 11.6 was found in a street market in Aups, France in 2018.67

Bibliography Websites http://www.fortepan.hu/?donor=Boj%C3%A1r%20S%C3%A1ndor http://www.look-at-me.tumblr.com/about https://www.stevenchandlerimages.portfoliobox.net/

Secondary Sources Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage, 1993. Belting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Belting, Hans. Face and Mask: A Double History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Benjamin, Walter. “A Little History of Photography.” In Selected Writings. Vol. 2: 1927–1934, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 507–30. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In Selected Writings. Vol. 4: 1938–1930, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 313–55. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress.” In The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, 456–88. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Berger, John. “Appearances.” In Understanding a Photograph, edited by Geoff Dyer, 61–98. London: Penguin Books, 2013. Berrebi, Sophie. The Shape of Evidence: Contemporary Art and the Document. Valiz: Vis-à-vis, 2014. Biber, Katherine. “The Rules of Evidence.” In Evidence, edited by Brook Andrew, 26–35. Sydney: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences Media, 2015. Bourdieu, Pierre. Photograph. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.

67 This image is presented in its original form on the book cover. There is trace of past engagement with the image where for reasons unknown someone decided to ‘deface’ the image by colouring the teacher’s face in red and marking some of the students with a short blue line.

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Brilliant, Richard. Portraiture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. Burke, Catherine. “Feet, Footwork, Footwear, and ‘Being Alive’ in the Modern School.” Paedagogica Historica 54, nos. 1 & 2 (2018): 32–47. Carroll, Michael D. Retrographic: History’s Most Exciting Images Transformed into Living Colour. London: Carpet Bombing Culture, 2017. Chapell, Drew, Sharon Chapell, and Eric Margolis. “School as Ceremony and Ritual: How Photography Illuminates Performances of Ideological Transfer.” Qualitative Inquiry 17, no. 1 (2011): 56–73. Edwards, Elizabeth. “Entangled Documents: Visualised Histories.” In Susan Meiselas: In History, edited by Kristen Lubben, 330–41. Göttingen: Steidl, 2008. Fox Talbot, William Henry. The Pencil of Nature. London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1844. Frizot, Michel. Toute photographie fait énigme/Every Photograph Is an Enigma. Paris: Maison Européene de la Photographie, 2015. Germain, Julian. Classroom Photographs. London: Prestel, 2012. Gilman, Sander L. Stand Up Straight! A History of Posture. London: Reaktion Books, 2018. Greenough, Sarah. “The Memory of Time: Introduction.” In The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, edited by Sarah Greenough and Andrea Nelson, 1–15. London: Thames and Hudson, 2015. Grosvenor, Ian. “The School Album: Images, Insights and Inequalities.” Educació i Història 15 (2010): 149–64. Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Jurgenson, Nathan. The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media. London: Verso, 2019. Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, translated by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Lavoie, Vincent. “Displaying Forensic Pictures in Court.” In The ‘Public’ Life of Photographs, edited by Thierry Gervais, 75–95. Toronto: RIC Books, 2016. Leslie, Esther. “Introduction: Walter Benjamin and the Birth of Photography.” In On Photography: Walter Benjamin, edited and translated by Esther Leslie, 7–51. London: Reaktion Books, 2015. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Moore, Thurston. “Making the Scene: Thurston Moore in Conversation with Gregory Crewsdon.” Loose Associations 3, no. 2 (2017): 10–18. Newbury, Darren. Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa. Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2009. Pinney, Christopher. “Introduction: How the Other Half . . . .” In Photography’s Other Histories, edited by Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Peterson, 1–6. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Pinney, Christopher. “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography.” In Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920, edited by Elizabeth Edwards, 74–95. London: Yale University Press, 1992. Rose, Gillian. “Practising Photography: an Archive, a Study, Some Photographs and a Researcher.” Journal of Historical Geography 26, no. 4 (2000): 555–71. Rousmaniere, Kate. “Questioning the Visual in the History of Education.” History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 109–16.

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Schwartz, Joan. “The Geography Lesson: Photographs and the Construction of Imaginative Geographies.” Journal of Historical Geography 22, no. 1 (1996): 17–38. Synder, Joel. “Making Photographs Public.” In The ‘Public’ Life of Photographs, edited by Thierry Gervais, 17–38. Toronto: RIC Books, 2016. Tonkonow, Leslie. “Multiple Exposure: The Group Portrait in Photography.” In Multiple Exposure: The Group Portrait in Photographs, edited by Marybeth Sollins, 7–14. New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1995. Trachtenberg, Alan. “The Group Portrait.” In Multiple Exposure: The Group Portrait in Photographs, edited by Marybeth Sollins, 17–23. New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1995. Walker, John A. “Context as a Determinant of Photographic Meaning.” In The Camerawork Essays, edited by Jessica Evans, 52–63. London: Rivers Oram Press, 1997.

Notes on Contributors Tim Allender is professor and chair of history and curriculum at the University of Sydney. He has published extensively on colonial India over the past twenty years. His most recent monograph Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820–1932 is part of the “Studies in Imperialism” series published with Manchester University Press. This book won the Anne Bloomfield book prize, awarded by the HES (UK) for best history of education book written in English and published between 2014 and 2017. Tim has also since published edited works on History Didactics. He is currently working on projects including Roman Catholic religiosity in colonial and independent India, and he has just published a co-edited book with Stephanie Spencer on femininity, feminism, and women’s history. Tim has recently held visiting professorships at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, at Birmingham University, UK, and at Nanyang Technical University, Singapore. Nicolás Arata coordinates the graduate program at Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO), Argentina. He teaches History of Argentine and Latin American Education at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Universidad Pedagógica and has previously researched and taught in Spain, Germany, and most of Latin America. He holds doctorates from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, and DIE-CINVESTAV, Mexico. He has published books, chapters, and articles in both domestic and international journals and was the academic director of the Argentine Society for the History of Education Yearbook. Sandra Camarda is a researcher at the C2DH – Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History. She holds an MA in Museum Anthropology and a PhD in Anthropology from UCL (University College London), with a specialization in visual culture and in the history of photography. In the past, she has conducted extensive research on American and European collections exploring the use of photographs in the history of science and anthropology. Her research interests focus on visual and material culture, edutainment, and the strategies of use and display of museum collections in both real and virtual environments. She teaches cultural heritage at the University of Luxembourg and is involved in the development of digital public history projects and museum exhibitions. She is the curator and project coordinator of Éischte Weltkrich, a digital platform on the history of the Great War in Luxembourg. Raquel Cercós is a researcher and associate professor at the University of Barcelona and a member of the university’s research team GREPPS (Group Paedagogical and Social Thinking). The focus of her current research is on postcolonial studies, gender and the body, while being centered in the history of education. She has participated in different international conferences including ISCHE and CIMIE. Her most recent publications are: with Jordi Brasó, “Pere Vergés Farrés (1896–1970): un pedagogo de la competición ludicodeportiva,” Apunts: Educació física y deportes 137 (2019); with Jordi Braso, “Filosofia de l’educació cinquanta anys després del Maig del 68,” Temps d’Educació 56 (2019); with Eulália Collelldemont, “Ordenaciones sintéticas: cronología y relaciones conceptuales,” in Pedagogías y prácticas educativas contemporáneas, ed. Joan Soler and Eulàlia Collelldemont (Barcelona: Horsori, 2018); with Conrad Vilanou, “Francis Scott Fitzgerald, entre el puritanismo pedagógico y la moral postmoderna,” Historia de la Educación: Revista interuniversitaria 37 (2018); and, with Isabel Vilafranca and Jordi García, “Los ‘padres’ pedagógicos de Europa: Discursos educativos fundacionales para la integración europea, cien años después de la Gran Guerra,” Revista Española de Pedagogía 76, no. 270 (2018).

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Eulàlia Collelldemont is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Vic – Central University of Catalonia (UVic-UCC) and director of the Museu Universitari Virtual de Pedagogia (MUVIP). She is a member of the research team GREUV (Education) at UVic. The focus of her current research is on visual history (documentary film, visual art, and photography) while being centered in the history of education. She wrote her doctoral thesis on aesthetic education (Universidad de Barcelona, 1999) and has directed different research projects on the subject sponsored by the Spanish government (Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades). She has participated in international conferences, including ISCHE, and organized a number of national conferences. Her more recent publications include, with Jordi Garcia and Conrad Vilanou, “Introductory text,” in Textos fundamentales en el exilio: Pedagogía culturalista y educación viva, ed. Joan RouraParella (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 2020); with Isabel Vilafranca, “Viatges mentals a Europa des de l’escola: Europa a través de les plàques de projecció,” Educació i Història 33 (2019); with Ian Grosvenor and Nicola Gauld, “De la commemoració a la ‘transmemoració’: el World War One Engagement Centre: Voices of War and Peace,” Temps d’Educació 55 (2019); with Raquel Cercós, “Ordenaciones sintéticas: cronología y relaciones conceptuales,” in Pedagogías y prácticas educativas contemporáneas, ed. Joan Soler and Eulàlia Collelldemont (Barcelona: Horsori, 2018); and with Conrad Vilanou, “Inhabiting Culture: Spanish Anarchists’ Vision of Cultural Learning through Aesthetics in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 3 (2017). Inés Dussel, Ph.D. (University of Wisconsin-Madison), is professor and researcher at the Department of Educational Research, CINVESTAV, Mexico. Dussel served as director of the Education Area, Latin American School for the Social Sciences (Argentina), from 2001 to 2008. She has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Paris 8, Melbourne and Humboldt in Berlin. In 2018 she received the Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (Germany) in recognition of her research trajectory. She has published extensively on the history of education and pedagogy. Her research interests focus on the relationships among knowledge, school, and politics, using a socio-historical approach. She is currently studying the history of visual technologies, particularly of children’s media. Juliana Enrico holds a PhD in Educational Sciences and is a researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) of the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Productive Innovation of Argentina, based at the Center for Advanced Studies (CEA) of the National University of Córdoba (UNC). She is a professor at the School of Educational Sciences in the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities of the UNC and a researcher in both the Studies of Memory Program, and the Gender Studies Program at CEA. Enrico specializes in the intersection of transdisciplinary theoretical lines, such as political discourse analysis, cultural studies, studies of memory, and gender studies, seeing them as perspectives from which to study educational history. Her current line of research investigates “Trans-formations in the contemporary Argentinian educational-cultural space: articulations between new languages, new politics, and new historical subjectivities.” Daniel Friedrich is an associate professor of curriculum at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is co-editor of Resonances of El Chavo del Ocho in Latin American Childhood, Schooling, and Societies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). His work is located at the intersections of Curriculum Studies, Comparative and International Education, and Teacher Education.

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Eduardo Galak holds a PhD in Social Sciences and is professor of physical education at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina, and researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET). His research focuses on the history of education of the body, mainly in the following areas: sports, embodiment, aesthetics and politics of body education, and physical education. At present he is studying the link between cinema and the education of the body in documentary filmmaking. Ian Grosvenor is professor of urban educational history at the University of Birmingham, England. Books include Assimilating Identities: Racism and Education in Post 1945 Britain (1997); Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom (1999) with Martin Lawn and Kate Rousmaniere; The School I’d Like (2003), School (2008), and The School I’d Like Revisited (2015), all with Catherine Burke; Materialities of Schooling (2005) with Martin Lawn; Children and Youth at Risk (2009) with Christine Mayer and Ingrid Lohmann; The Black Box of Schooling (2011) with Sjaak Braster and María del Mar del Pozo Andres; and Making Education: Governance by Design (2018) with Lisa Rasmussen. Previous roles include Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor for Cultural Engagement and Head of the School of Education, University of Birmingham; Secretary General of the European Educational Research Association (EERA); and convenor of EERA’s Network 17. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Frederik Herman has been a lecturer at the School of Education of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (PH FHNW) since March 2018 and at the Schwyz University of Teacher Education (PH Schwyz) since June 2019. He is specializing in the social and cultural history of education, with a strong emphasis on histories of educational mentalities and realities and on socio-cultural and socio-material practices. He completed his doctorate on twentieth-century school culture at the University of Leuven, Belgium, in 2010. Frederik joined the University of Luxembourg as a postdoctoral researcher in March 2013 and was a member of the Institute of Education and Society (InES) and later of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH). His publications have dealt with topics such as school culture and materialities of schooling; mind-body issues in education; psychophysiology, professional orientation, and vocational training; cultural learning, heritage making, and identity construction. Núria Padrós-Tuneu is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Vic – Central University of Catalonia (UVic-UCC). She is a member of the research team GRAD (Attention to Diversity) at UVic. Her main lines of research are developmental and educational psychology from a cultural perspective, visual history, and inclusive education. She has participated in different research projects sponsored by the Spanish government (Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades). Her recent publications include, with Eulàlia Collelldemont and Pilar Prat, “El registro de documentales y noticiarios, una oportunidad para incrementar la documentación del patrimonio histórico educativo,” RIDPHE_R Revista Iberoamericana Do Patrimônio Histórico-Educativo 5 (2019); “L’experiència de l’escola en temps de la pedagogia intuïtiva a Espanya,” Temps d’Educació 55 (2019); with Verònica Jiménez and Mila Naranjo, “Las pedagogías del aprendizaje,” in Pedagogías y prácticas educativas contemporáneas, coord. Joan Soler and Eulàlia Collelldemont (Barcelona: Horsori, 2018); and, with Josep Casanovas, “La història de l’educació a través dels films: una mirada des de la contemporaneïtat pedagógica,” Educació i història: Revista d’història de l’educació 31 (2018).

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Gyöngver Pataki is a research fellow and lecturer at Corvinus University, Budapest. She has a background in science and the social sciences and an ongoing interest in interdisciplinary research. Her research to date has focused on student participation and the institutional integration of youth in Central Europe. She represented the Hungarian Educational Research Association (HERA) on the European Educational Research Association (EERA) Council between 2010 and 2015 and was the project lead when Budapest hosted the European Conference in Education Research in 2015. Her involvement with EERA also included a project documenting the visual history of EERA for its 20th anniversary. She has also been involved in transnational research and writing projects and has led a project on cultural learning and education which involved partners from Spain, Latvia, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the UK. She has published in international journals, including the European Education Research Journal and Paedagogica Historica. Her current research interest is in the past and future development of Artificial Intelligence, its impact on education and attitudes in civic society. Karin Priem is professor at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) at the University of Luxembourg and visiting professor at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. A former president of the German History of Education Research Association (2007–2011), she is currently president of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE). Karin Priem’s research focuses on visual and material history; the history of media and technology; the history of humanitarian organizations; and the history of entrepreneurship and social-educational reform. She is co-editor of the book series Public History from European Perspectives, Studies in the History of Education and Culture, and Appearances: Studies in Visual Research and also serves as a member of the international scientific boards of Pedagogia Oggi, Paedagogica Historica, and of the book series Thesaurus Scholae: Fonti e studi sul patrimonio storico-educativo of the Italian Society for the Study of Educational Heritage (SIPSE). In addition, Karin is a corresponding international member of the DOMUS Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Histories of Education and Childhood at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is the author and editor of numerous publications, including “Seeing, Hearing, Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Things: On Silences, Senses, and Emotions during the ‘Zero Hour’ in Germany,” Paedagogica Historica 52 (2016); with Frederik Herman, eds., Fabricating Modern Societies: Education, Body, and Mind in the Age of Steel (Leiden: Brill, 2019), and, with Giovanna Hendel and Carol Naggar, eds., They Did not Stop at Eboli: UNESCO and the Campaign against Illiteracy in a Reportage by David “CHIM” Seymour and Texts by Carlo Levi (Paris: UNESCO; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). Siân Roberts is a lecturer in Education and Social Justice at the School of Education, University of Birmingham, UK. She completed her doctorate in 2010 at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests include British Quaker women active in education and humanitarian issues, refugee educationalists who arrived in the UK in the first half of the twentieth century, and educational interventions with children and young people in contexts of war or displacement. Siân is a member of the Executive Committee of the History of Education Society (UK). Maria Silvia Serra holds a PhD in Social Sciences (FLACSO) and is a professor of pedagogy at the Faculty of Humanities and Arts of the Universidad Nacional de Rosario (UNR), Argentina. She has been working on the relationship between education and culture, with a special focus on cinema. She also works on the aesthetic dimensions of pedagogical discourses in the educational space.

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Pablo Toro-Blanco is a researcher and professor of history of education at Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Santiago, Chile). He has served as secretary of the Chilean Society for the History of Education. His recent research focuses on educational history and emotions, specifically the study of Chilean secondary school “emotional regimes” during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His publications have dealt with topics such as corporal punishment in schools, student movements at Chilean universities under reformist and authoritarian regimes, the history of youth, educational nationalism, and the historical analysis of textbooks.