A Camera in The Garden of Eden

Abstract

In an unpublished image from the 1930s, studio photographer Rafael Platero Paz embraces a white North American man near a river in El Progreso, Honduras. Both men are stark naked and cover only their genitals with leaves. They look directly into the camera.

This essay examines Platero Paz's self-portraits, found in a visual archive made up mostly of photos of peasants and banana laborers, new mothers and local merchants. Invoking Jean-Paul Sartre's phenomenology of sight, I argue that in his traditional self-portraits, Platero Paz posed for an eventual Other. He was there, waiting for the Other's recognition and approval. And insofar as the Other was posited as the destination and ideal viewer of these portraits, Platero Paz was declaring: “I am the Other.” In contrast, in the Garden of Eden photo, Platero Paz incorporates the Other into his landscape and declares “I am we,” establishing a homosocial, if not homoerotic, subject-subject relation in the hypermasculine space of a banana plantation.

Acknowledgements

This essay would not have been possible without the generosity and zest of Profesora Aída López de Castillo, daughter and first biographer of Rafael Platero Paz. Not only has she scrupulously preserved the photographs and negatives made by her father, she also dedicated countless hours to discussing them with me. Back home, three close friends – Sebastián Carassai, Joby Taylor, and Brian Morton – helped me develop many of the ideas presented here. I can only hope to engage with their work as thoughtfully as they've engaged with mine. This essay also benefited from the critical comments of Daniel James, Jeffrey L. Gould, Peter F. Guardino, Darío A. Euraque, John Howard, and the two anonymous reviewers at the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.

Notes

 1 Geoffrey Batchen explains how the aesthetic canon tries to coopt the ubiquitous genre of family snaps but, in doing so, closes off other potential ways of reading such images (2004: 121–42). The focus on avant-garde photographies is also a staple of social histories of photography in Latin America, see seminal work by Esther Gabara (2008) and Roberto Tejada (2009).

 2 Pete Sigal (2009: 1353) specializes in the sexual beliefs and practices of the pre-Columbian peoples of Mesoamerica and although he does not explicitly mark his work as focusing on the countryside, inevitably that is his focus.

 3 See, for example, ‘Sumaria instruida contra Onesiforo Escobar Lazo, por disparo de arma de fuego seguido de lesiones en las personas de Victor Manuel Mendoza Galindo y Paula López, respectivamente; y contra el citado Mendoza Galindo, por disparo de arma de fuego seguido de lesiones en dicha señora López.’ El Progreso, D.L. 7 diciembre 1941. Departamento de Yoro, Honduras. Archivo del Juzgado de Letras. ‘Archivo Muerto.’ For a study of gender and sexuality in a Costa Rican banana-company town, see Lara Putnam (2002).

 4 Aída López de Castillo (2000). For the coffee economy and the Department of La Libertad in El Salvador, see Robert G. Williams (1994: 69–79).

 5 Joby Taylor, e-mail message to author, July 1, 2010.

 6 ‘Honorable Discharge from the United States Army,’ RPP, box 10.

 7 Ibid.

 8 For the specifics of Platero Paz's migration, see his passport, RPP, box 10.

 9 In her biography of Platero Paz, his daughter Aída writes that he died at age eighty-six, but she does not give the exact date of his death; see Aída López de Castillo (2000: 4). I infer that he died in either 1984 or 1985, depending upon the month in which he passed away.

10 The most important study to date of Honduran masculinity is Rocío Tábora's Masculinidad y violencia en la cultura política hondureña (1995). Darío A. Euraque subsequently noted that Tábora neglects to analyze how the patriarchal masculinity that she deconstructs and which oppresses women fails to consider how this same ideology of gender also oppresses gay men (2003: 177–97).

11 Sebastián Carassai, e-mail message to author, April 9, 2010.

12 Martin Jay's (1993) incisive tome on the ubiquity of ‘ocularcentric’ and ‘anti-ocularcentric’ discourses in French intellectual history provides the most exciting account of the reception of Sartre's work by subsequent theorists. With respect to my study of early twentieth-century Honduran portraiture, Merleau-Ponty's response to Sartre's work is the most relevant. According to Jay, Merleau-Ponty refused to separate (as Sartre had) the ‘derealizing’ imagination from the mundane world of perceptual observation because, by his account, perception, scientific and rational intellect, and artistic imagination are intertwined. Merleau-Ponty also went against Sartre's concept of ‘unreciprocal social relations’ that followed from his dualist ontology of subject and object. Instead, as Jay observes, ‘his insistence on mingling the viewer with the world on view meant an ecstatic decentering of the subject, an acknowledgment that however active perception may be, it also meant a kind of surrender of the strong ego, a willingness to let things be’ (309). Finally, whereas, for Sartre, intersubjective relations were constituted by a duel of objectifying gazes, for Merleau-Ponty, intersubjective communication is ‘embodied’ communication that cannot be reduced to the visual component alone.

13 Jay (276, n. 39) notes that according to Alain Buisine (1986: 103), there are over seven thousand references to ‘the look’ in Sartre's work.

14 Brian Morton, conversation with author, January 30, 2010.

15 Sebastián Carassai, e-mail message to author, April 9, 2010.

16 Joby Taylor, e-mail message to author, July 1, 2010.

17 For an account of the construction of the ‘liberal oligarchic state,’ see Marvin Barahona (2005). In a classic essay, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (1999: 2, 13) critiqued ways of understanding the discourse of modernity, as societal modernization and as cultural modernism. He also called for site-based readings of alternative modernities, constructed through the exigencies of local histories as communities in a shrinking world negotiated the impetus to sameness and the forces that made them different.

18 Archivo de Gobernación, Departamento de Yoro. 1924—Actas reglamentos Dep. de Yoro, ‘Sessión Extraordinaria, 7 Sept 1925,’ pp. 69-78. And Archivo Municipal, El Progreso. Libro de Actas—1925, 15 June 1925, p. 244; 1 August 1925, p. 231; 15 August 1925, p. 235, emphasis mine.

19 For a detailed historical ethnography of this immigrant group that was often seen as ‘pariah entrepreneurs,’ see Nancie González (1992). For a discussion of the visual construction of ethnic identity by Palestinian Hondurans, see chapter two of my dissertation.

20 Mark Anderson (2009: 8) makes a similar point in his study of the politics of race and culture among the Garifuna in Honduras. For more on the official racial discourses of Honduras, see Darío A. Euraque (2004).

21 In 1934, Salvadorans made up 56 percent (1,840) of the immigrants to the Department of Yoro, Registro especial de extranjeros residentes en Honduras: 1934 (Archivo de Gobernación, Departamento de Yoro).

22 Interview with Aída López de Castillo, El Progreso, 12 August 2008. See, also, author's interview with Ricardo Arturo Platero López, El Progreso, 20 Nov 2008.

23 ‘I agree with you on all of this. [You can interpret and publish this photo], provided that you include the circumstances, right, that supposedly the gringo wanted to try the waters, which were immense at that time. It's not like the [River] Ulúa of today. And he accompanied him, so that there is another explanation. And from there, you launch into what you say. I agree with you. History, things of this type, one cannot conceal them, right. One cannot say, these things no.’ Interview with Aída López de Castillo, El Progreso, 22 April 2010.

24 These questions were posed to me by Joby Taylor, e-mail message to author, July 1, 2010.

25 The expression ‘landscapes and livelihoods’ is John Soluri's (1998). ‘Phallogocentrism’ is Jacques Derrida's (1997) name for a Western discourse of masculinity that has limited and deformed our ongoing attempts to open up the concept of democracy and to realize it, however partially, in history. The quote is from Gen. 1:28.

26 For more on the United Fruit Company photographs, see chapter one of my dissertation.

27 In an oral history interview with his daughter Aída, she recounted: ‘He used to tell us that he would take soup and bread from one of the cars in New York. For this, he loved the North Americans. He adored them. He said that he was always well received and welcomed by the North Americans.’ Also, ‘All of the North Americans that came with the Tela [Railroad Company] and all of the Jesuit priests that were North Americans, everybody arrived at his shop, because he only spoke to them in English. He was very well liked by all of them.’ Interview with Aída López de Castillo, El Progreso, 12 August 2008.

28 ‘Human salvation was but a device for the self-revelation of God,’ was how Martin Jay put it (1993: 38).

29 Joby Taylor, e-mail message to author, July 1, 2010.

30 Family photo album, from The Private Collection of Aída López de Castillo, El Progreso, 11 August 2008.

31 Peter Guardino, e-mail message to author, April 26, 2010.

32 I take the circulation figures from ‘Life Magazine and LOOK Magazine Popularize Photojournalism in the 1930s’ from http://www.things-and-other-stuff.com/magazines/life-magazine.html (23 Feb 2010). As the sources for their article, they cite: Philip B. Kunhardt Jr. (1986) and John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman (1991).

33 Deborah Poole (1997: 85–106) interprets a similar kind of fetishization by eighteenth-century Europeans who were both captivated and disturbed by the criolla women of Lima who concealed their faces, except for their eyes, with shawls and roamed freely through public spaces. The Life photo of The Garden of Eden also invites the viewer to imagine what is hidden.

34 This is the price to use this single image inside a retail book as of 17 February 2010. http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/3070203/Hulton-Archive.

35 Sebastián Carassai, e-mail message to author, April 9, 2010.

36 Peter Kosso (2001: 171–7) examines the hermeneutic negotiation between theory and evidence in historical arguments.