Toward Agency

Abstract

While the work of the photographers of the so-called Cuzco School of Photography was at times instrumentalized by the elite practices of lettered indigenismo that dominated regional and national intellectual culture in the early twentieth century, it presented ways of envisioning the future of everyday Andean subjects that went beyond and contradicted the articulation of regional and national models through the figure of the indio. In effect, the archive of everyday life that this photographic production provides documents how ordinary Andeans negotiated their selves and their environment as they were swept up in modernization's massive transformation of their world. Focusing on the images contained within this archive and the photographic technology that enabled them helps to correct aporias in the cultural history of representational practices in the Andes and in so doing to locate an important site for the construction of subalterns' agency.