Photography and memory in Mexico

Icons of Revolution

By (author) Andrea Noble

Hardback - £85.00

Publication date:

01 September 2010

Length of book:

200 pages

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Dimensions:

240x170mm

ISBN-13: 9780719078422

Photography and memory in Mexico traces the ‘life stories’ of some of the famous photographic images made during the 1910 revolution, which have been repeatedly reproduced across a range of media in its aftermath. Which photographs have become icons of the revolution and why these particular images and not others? What is the relationship between photography and memory of the conflict? How do we construct a critical framework for addressing the issues raised by iconic photographs? Placing an emphasis on the life, afterlife and also the pre-life of those iconic photographs that haunt the post-revolutionary landscape, Andrea Noble approaches them as dynamic objects, where their rhetorical power is derived from a combination of their visual eloquence and their ability to coordinate patterns of identification with the memory of the revolution as a foundational event in Mexican history.

Richly-illustrated, this book will be of interest to all those interested in photography, memory studies, and Mexican cultural history.

Throughout the book, Noble's interpretive dynamism, structured as a photographic counter-memory, finds the image surplus of one historic moment displaced and repeated over time in others. Her close visual analyses uncover a structure whose 'feedback' and 'feed forward' challenge historical conventions by fastening a panoramic sweep to a visually discursive point of view.