The photographers’ gaze: the Mobile Radioisotope Exhibition in Latin America (1960–1965)

ABSTRACT

During the IAEA’s Mobile Radioisotope Exhibition (1960–1965) through the eventful roads of five Latin American countries (Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia), a variety of photographs were taken by an unknown Mexican official photographer, and by Josef Obermayer, a staff driver from Vienna. The exhibition carried not only bits of nuclear sciences and technologies, but also the political symbolism of the ‘friendly atom’ as a token of modernization. The photographs embarked on different trajectories, though all of them ended up at the training and exchange official’s desk in charge of the exhibition, Argentinian physicist Arturo Cairo. The ones taken in Mexico also had a local circulation as propaganda intended to promote radioisotope applications. The two sets of images were intended to show the contrast between modernity and traditional society, but they did it from different gazes. Our paper argues that, in the case of Mexico, the photographer reinforced representations of the country which were already popularized by Hollywood for foreign and local audiences. On the other hand, the Viennese photographer’s gaze delivers an autoethnography of his dutiful journey. We also argue that Obermayer’s projection is one of what Roger Bartra has conceptualized as the ‘salvage on the mirror’.

KEYWORDS:

• Latin America
• radioisotopes
• photography
• modernity
• landscape
• auto-ethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2007).

2 See, among others, Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Jennifer Tucker, ‘The Historian, the Picture, and the Archive’, Isis, 97 (2006), 111–20; M. Norton Wise, ‘Making Visible’, Isis, 97.1 (2006), 75–82; Soraya De Chadarevian, ‘Portrait of a Discovery: Watson, Crick, and the Double Helix’, Isis, 94 (2003), 90–105; Soraya De Chadarevian, ‘Chromosome Photography and the Human Karyotype’, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 45 (2015), 115–46; Peter Galison and Caroline A. Jones, Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York: Routledge, 2014).

3 John Berger, ‘Understanding a Photograph’, in Selected Essays of John Berger, ed. by Geoff Dyer (New York: Pantheon Books, 2014), p. 216.

4 Bordieu Pierre, ‘Introduction’, in Photography. A Middle-Brow Art, trans. by Shaun Whiteside. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1965/1990), pp. 1–12, p. 6.

5 Susan Sontag, ‘Plato's Cave’, in On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), pp. 1–19, p. 1.

6 There is a growing literature on nuclear development. See John DiMoia, ‘Atoms for Sale? Cold War Institution-Building and the South Korean Atomic Energy Project, 1945–1965’, Technology and Culture, 51 (2010), 589–618; Elisabeth Roehrlich, ‘The Cold War, the developing world, and the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 1953–1957’, Cold War History, 16 (2016), 195–212; Jacob Darwin Hamblin, ‘Aligning Missions: Nuclear Technical Assistance, the IAEA, and National Ambitions in Pakistan’, History and Technology, 36 (2020), 437–51; Gisela Mateos and Edna Suárez-Díaz, ‘Creating the Need in Mexico: The IAEA’s Technical Assistance Programs for Less Developed Countries (1958–68)’, History and Technology, 36 (2020), 418–36; Kenji Ito and Maria Rentetzi, ‘The Co-Production of Nuclear Science and Diplomacy: Towards a Transnational Understanding of Nuclear Things’, History and Technology, 37 (2021): 1–17.

7 W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Imperial Landscape’, in Landscape and Power (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 5–34; Itty Abraham, ‘Landscape and Postcolonial Science’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 34 (2000), 163–87; William John Thomas Mitchell and William John Thomas Mitchell, eds. Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); John Mraz, ‘Analyzing Historical Photographs: Genres, Functions, and Methodologies’, Estudos Ibero-Americanos, 44 (2018), 6–16.

8 Mitchell, ‘Imperial Landscape’.

9 Ibid., p. 10.

10 Tucker, ‘The Historian, the Picture, and the Archive’, 112.

11 Gisela Mateos and Edna Suárez-Díaz, Radioisótopos Itinerantes En América Latina. Una Historia de Ciencia por Tierra y por Mar (México: Ceiich-Ciencias, UNAM, 2015); Mateos Gisela and Edna Suárez-Díaz, Radioisótopos Itinerantes En América Latina. Una Historia de Ciencia por Tierra y por Mar (México: Ceiich-Ciencias, UNAM, 2015).

12 José Ortíz Tirado, to Sterling Cole, IAEA Director General IAEA October, 29, 1959 (our translation).

13 Gisela Mateos and Edna Suárez-Díaz, Radioisótopos Itinerantes en América Latina’; Augusto Moreno y Moreno, ’Escuela de Ciencias Físico Matemáticas’, Boletín de la Sociedad Mexicana de Física, 4 (1990), 58–59; Interview with Eugenio Ley Koo, August 19, 2020.

14 Nancy J. Membres, ‘El peón y la muerte: el caso transnacional de Macario 1960’, Latinoamérica, 44 (2007), 27–58.

15 On Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Casasola brothers, Gabriel Figueroa, Guillermo Kahlo, Tina Modotti, Paul Strand and Edward Weston, see Robin Rice, ‘Tina Modotti & Edward Weston: The Mexico Years’, Woman’s Art Journal, 27 (2006), 59–62; Edward Weston, The Daybooks of Edward Weston, ed. by Nancy Newhall (New York: Aperture, 1990); Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, ‘Guillermo Kahlo and Casasola: Architectural Form and Urban Unrest’, History of Photography, 20 (1996), 196–207; Margaret Hooks, Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary (New York: Harper-Collins, 1993); Sarah Margaret Lowe, ‘Tina Modotti's Vision: Photographic Modernism in Mexico, 1923–1930’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, City University of New York, 1996); John Berger, ‘Paul Strand’, in Selected Essays of John Berger, ed. by Geoff Dyer (New York: Pantheon books, 2001); Olivier Debroise, Mexican Suite: A History of Photography in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Genevieve Waller, ‘Manuel Alvarez Bravo, 1902–2002’, Afterimage, 30 (2003), 2; Shelley Rice, ‘The Daybooks of Edward Weston: Art, Experience, and Photographic Vision’, Art Journal, 36 (1976), 126–29; James Krippner and others, Paul Strand in Mexico, 1932–34 (New York: Aperture, 2010); Evan Lieberman and Kerry Hegarty, ‘Authors of the Image: Cinematographers Gabriel Figueroa and Gregg Toland’, Journal of Film and Video, 62 (2010), 31–51; Paul Henri Giraud, ‘«Pruebas de lo invisible»: sur quelques photographies de Manuel Álvarez Bravo’, L’Âge d’or. Images dans le monde ibérique et ibéricoaméricain 5 (2012) <https://doi.org/10.4000/agedor.891>; Alejandro Kelly Hopfenblatt and Silvana Flores, ‘Problematizing Film and Photography’, in The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema, ed. by Marvin D’Lugo, Ana López and Laura Podalsky (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 297–315.

16 Seth Fein, ‘Hollywood, US-Mexican Relations, and the Devolution of the «Golden Age» of Mexican Cinema’, Filmhistoria online, 4(2) (1994), 103–135.

17 Leslie Deveraux, ‘Introduction’, in Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography, ed. by Leslie Deveraux and Roger Hillman (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p. 7.

18 A number of other photographs taken while in Guanajuato recorded the radioisotope courses and the experimental practices taking place inside the MRE truck. We have written before about the character of those scenes, which reveal the standardizing character of the training courses regardless of the geographic location (Gisela Mateos and Edna Suárez-Díaz, Radioisótopos Itinerantes; Gisela Mateos and Edna Suárez-Díaz, ‘Technical Assistance in Movement’). Many of these photographs – showing the same choreographed scenes – were taken in the two MRE tours, either in Mexico and Bolivia (MRE Unit 2), or in Vienna, Vietnam, Korea, and Taiwan (MRE Unit 1).

19 IAEA Archives, Guanajuato Mexico. Taken on 19 February 1960.

20 IAEA Archive, MRE Exhibition in Latin America (unclassified).

21 Leslie Deveraux and Roger Hillman, Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); John Collier and Malcolm Collier, Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research method (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986).

22 Obermayer had indeed received training in the basic radioisotope techniques in Vienna, and often acted as a trainer. He and Häuptl (the driver of Unit 1) traveled together during the first phase of the trip in Greece and Yugoslavia. Memorandum to Arturo Cairo, IAEA Director of Training and Exchange. 15 December 1959.

23 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 5.

24 Ibid., 205.

25 Eduardo Subirats, El continente vacío: la conquista del Nuevo Mundo y la conciencia moderna (México: Siglo XXI, 1994).

26 Letter from Mr. Obermayer to Mr. Cairo, Aracatuba 25–27th July 1963, Aracatuba, Brazil. On the contingencies involved in this case, see Mateos and Suárez-Díaz ‘Technical Assistance in Movement’.

27 Obermayer to Cairo, Santa Cruz Bolivia, 11 August 1963. IAEA Archives.

28 Tucker, ‘The Historian, the Picture, and the Archive’; Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 4–7.

29 John Krige, ‘Hybrid Knowledge: The Transnational Co-Production of the Gas Centrifuge for Uranium Enrichment in the 1960s’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 45 (2012), 337–57; John Krige ‘Introduction: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology’, in How Knowledge Moves, ed. by John Krige (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), pp. 1–32.

30 Letter from Obermayer to Cairo, 8 October 1963. Santa Cruz, Bolivia. IAEA Archives.

31 Pratt, Imperial Eyes.

32 On gifts see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. by W.D. Halls (New York: Routledge, 1950/2002); Maria Rentetzi, ‘With Strings Attached: Gift-Giving to the International Atomic Energy Agency and US Foreign Policy’, Endeavour, 45 (2021), 100754.

33 Berger, ‘Understanding a Photograph’, 218.

34 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7.

35 Bartra, Wild Men, 4–7.

36 Berger, ‘Understanding a Photograph’, 207.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by CONACyT [grant number 53351].