From photojournalism to the archive: women photographers in Latin America

This course is based on a conceptual axis that articulates visual culture, political culture and the idea of the archive in photography. As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay defends in Potential History, undoing the colonial logic also involves questioning the use of political concepts such as citizens, sovereignty, human rights, art and archives, as well as categories such as the new and the neutral, which reinforce the imperialist drive to ‘progress'.

The women photographers discussed in this course propose original and diverse approaches to the notion of the archive, whether it be the archive of the present, produced by journalistic work, or questioning and re-signifying institutional or private photographic archives, and therefore producing new ones. In this way, they challenge official historical narratives related to moments of social and political conflicts in Latin America in the second half of the 20th century.

Through the photographic work of women like Susan Meiselas, Lucila…