Paper short abstract:

This presentation discusses the ways in which 19th century dominant mass-media visual forms of understanding the experience of Fin-de-Siècle modernity resisted, retreated and survived the rise of new ways of seeing brought by photo-cinematic technologies.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation discusses the rapid loss (or withdrawal) of 19th century ways of imagining and understanding that served as background to deep changes in Fin-de-siècle visuality. It focuses on the apparent detriment of contemporary visual orders, based on the conceptual structures behind conventional artistic representation (painting, drawings, prints) and page layout, caused by the uneven rise of another visual order brought by the conceptual structures of photo-cinematic images. The presentation explores the ways in which this conflict appeared as the simultaneous production of visual information that supported as well as challenged progressive discourses that were shaping Spanish American urban middle class readers' perception and understanding of mass society. Its corpus is formed by the illustrations published between 1892 and 1920 in the Uruguayan-Argentine Caras y Caretas magazine.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the relationship between cinema and modernity in Peru by analysing the textual and visual presence of cinema in early twentieth-century illustrated magazines.

Paper long abstract:

At the turn of the nineteenth century, cinema, alongside other new technologies, produced crucial changes in the ways in which people experienced, represented and imagined the world in which they lived. Though keeping important links with nineteenth-century visual and entertainment culture, early silent cinema offered spectators new manners of perceiving time and space as well as a new sense of verisimilitude. In Latin America, as cinema became institutionalised, periodical press established itself as the core textual place for discussions about the new technology in terms of science, aesthetics, leisure, politics and culture. In the early twentieth century, Peruvian intellectuals used cinema as a metaphor for modernity while writers had already been incorporating cinematic devices into literature since the 1910s. Rather than focusing on the explicit theorization about cinema and modernity, this paper will investigate this latter relationship through articles, columns, photographs, caricatures and other illustrations that appeared in popular illustrated magazines, in particular in Variedades. It will also explore the magazine's uses of photography (for example, in the reproduction of crime or the Kodak advertising), in order to examine certain aspects of the rising of mass culture in Peru.

Paper short abstract:

The presence of images and text that seek to capture sporting events and practices is a pervasive part of the (post-)modern world. This paper will explore the emergence of this phenomenon in early twentieth-century Peru.

Paper long abstract:

At the end of the nineteenth century and turn of the twentieth the convergence of various technological developments in printing and photography coincided with the emergence of sport as a mass-based practice in Peru and elsewhere. With common origins in western Europe and the United States, technology and sport alike offered symbolic capital as a means to engage with notions of modernity. By examining various illustrated magazines from the era, such as Variedades and El Sport, this paper will consider the ways in which sport constituted an important element in the construction of a sense of modernity.

Paper short abstract:

The paper will analyse early 20th century representations of Afro Cubans in illustrated magazines and newspapers, focusing on adverts, pictures, graphic humour and comics.

Paper long abstract:

The paper will consider early 20th century representations of Afro Cubans in illustrated magazines and newspapers at a time when Cuba, a newly established republic since 1902, was undergoing the process of nation building, which ran parallel to the development of the mass media. With the 1912 rebellion against the Morúa Law (1909), which forbade any political movement to be formed on the basis of colour, and the subsequent violent repression in the background, the paper focuses on a wide sample of primary sources, ranging from adverts, pictures, graphic humour and comics, in order to shed light on how the new black urban population experienced not only the contradictions of a more general discourse around modernity and progress as free citizens, but the internal Cuban politics too which restricted Afro Cuban participation on the public sphere to very specific roles.

Paper short abstract:

The paper will discuss the visual strategies adopted by early twentieth-century Brazilian illustrated magazines to cater for a mass readership. I will focus specifically on the use of Commedia dell’Arte characters as symbols of the combination of popular entertainment and modern art.

Paper long abstract:

From a structure dependent upon local consumers in the late nineteenth century, magazines became consolidated in the beginning of the twentieth century in Brazil as media enterprises focused upon consumers nationwide. This new model of magazine publishing was to become more apparent at the beginning of the 1900s, especially with regard to magazines with a considerable focus on graphic arts, photography, and popular literature. One of the first successful illustrated magazines was O Malho, launched in 1902, followed by many others, including Fon-Fon in 1907, and Careta in 1908.

Conducted on business lines from its very beginning, these magazines lasted for more than five decades surviving the competition with cinema in the 1920s and radio in the 1930s and 1940s, but not with television in the 1950s.

Appealing not only to the cariocas but, more emphatically, to a wide and diverse range of readers who wanted to be in contact with the current events in Rio visually, these magazines depicted new ways of seeing in Brazil.

The paper will discuss the visual strategies these magazines adopted to cater for a mass readership. I will focus specifically on the use of Commedia dell'Arte as a symbol of the modern imagination, combining entertainment and complex artistic expressions. The paper will include analysis of the magazines' representations of characters such as Pierrot, Columbine, Harlequin, and their connections with modernity and popular culture.

Paper short abstract:

The main goal of this paper is to present how science and technology were taken as the ideal way to develop products in Mexico. It analyses illustrated advertising in newspapers and magazines between 1920 and 1960, a period of modernization after a ten-year armed struggle known as the Mexican Revolution.

Paper long abstract:

In the early 20th century Mexico experienced a major armed struggle - known as the Revolution -against longtime autocrat Porfirio Díaz. Once it ended, an opportunity to restructure the country presented itself in many fields. Mexican society could then spend time and income attending social events and in the consumption of goods. Because of this, illustrated advertising in printed media became a profitable way to present new products, playing key roles in the adoption of modern ideals. Soon hygiene products appeared in newspapers and magazines claiming, firstly, the importance of hygiene for the new modern society; and secondly, the value of science and technology in the innovation of products. Illustrations showed two ways of living: the pre-revolutionary way emphasized as rural, naïve, ignorant, and unsanitary; and the post-revolutionary modern way as urban, cultured, literate, and hygienic. To be healthy meant to be modern, idea promoted by vitamins, nutritional supplements, medicine and so on. A modern woman should take pills to avoid menstrual cramps: pain, sickness and malnourishment were problems of the past and grandma's remedies were antiquated. Instead, if a product was developed thanks to scientific and technological innovations, it was accurate, precise, harmless and effective. These dichotomies presented the machine as a higher level of efficiency and manual labor as old-fashioned and risky, submitted to human mood changes and to "human error". Illustrated advertising became a protagonist in the transition of the country ideals, from the traditional and armed, to the modern, democratic Mexico in the 20th Century.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will consider how Mexico/This Month created an imaginative geography of Mexico at the height of the so-called miracle by invoking, sustaining and contesting particular regimes of visual and discursive representation. It will attend above all to the function of the magazine’s centrefold maps.

Paper long abstract:

From the late 1920s onwards, the magazine played a key role in the efforts of Mexico's burgeoning tourist industry to lure the tourist dollar south, through both visualizing the country for potential visitors and counteracting prejudicial views of it circulating in the US press at the time. Indeed, magazines, which included photographs and maps, were deployed by state and private actors as a central part of the 'image-making machinery of tourism' (Thomson 2006): they ranged from the Department of Tourism's inaugural English-language brochure of 1929; William Furlong's monthly newsletter, 'The Furlong Service', during the 1930s; to the AMT's brochures of the post-WWII period when North-South travel benefited from increasingly 'neighbourly' geopolitical relations. Taking into account this context (which has already been well documented in the work of Berger 2006), this paper will consider the role and ramifications of the country's illustrated travel magazines in the 1950s, at the height of the so-called miracle. Focusing on the particular case of Mexico/This Month (est. 1955), this paper will consider how the magazine continued to fashion an imaginative geography of Mexico during this period of accelerated modernisation and growth by invoking, sustaining and contesting particular regimes of visual and discursive representation. In this respect, the paper will attend to the function of what would become in the early years of Mexico/This Month its trademark centrefold maps.