Abstract
In this article, I discuss the notion of agency in relationship to Julio Cordero’s photographs. Julio Cordero (1879-1961) owned a photography studio in La Paz in the first half of the twentieth century and produced an array of images both inside and outside of the studio. I also offer a sense of the rich documentation that exists in the complete Cordero archive as well as the insights that it opens up concerning the interventions in self-representation made possible by photographic portraiture. Essentially, these interventions lead us to conceptualize image culture as a prime space for enacting agency in Bolivia and Latin American more broadly.
Highlights
In this article, I discuss the notion of agency in relationship to Julio Cordero’s photographs
The Oficialía Mayor de Culturas of the city of La Paz announced the purchase of 17,000 images from the Cordero archive, in order that it become “patrimonio cultural” available to paceños and presumably all, at first online and eventually at a dedicated museum of photography (Anonymous)
It is the combination of both visual images as well as business documents in Cordero’s archive that is unusual for Andean photography and rare enough to make it unique, to my knowledge, for the study of early twentieth century photographic portraiture in the region
Summary
I discuss the notion of agency in relationship to Julio Cordero’s photographs. The photographer Julio Cordero Castillo’s archive, including but in no way limited to these 17,000 pictures, stands out among the many extraordinary examples of Andean photography of the early twentieth century.
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