Between Topographical Groundwork and Neocolonial Aspirations: The ‘Best Practice’ of Survey Photography in the Chilean-Argentine Boundary Case of 1902

Abstract

This article investigates photography as a tool of neocolonial territorial politics in the Cordillera of the Andes Boundary Case of 1902, in which Chile and Argentina re-negotiated their border in Patagonia. To avoid an impending war, they brought their case to the English King for arbitration. Scientists from all three sides compiled reports, maps and notably, photographs, providing proof for each country’s interpretation of the border. In a first step, I argue that the images of the hitherto uncharted land posed a challenge to the understanding of this land as national territory, having first to undergo a process of overcoming the uncertainty of empty space and acquiring scientific meaning during the arbitration. In a second step, I trace how the photographs and the case itself were resignified as expressions of neocolonial modernity and nation building. In this process, the previously limited capacity of photography was extended to support legal claims. The analysis of the development of the visual material in the trilateral negotiation distills the key factors that made the survey photography of this case successful in terms of contemporary imperial standards, or in other words, an example of ‘best practice’.