Scholars of Latin America whose work is concerned with visual subjects often search in vain for substantive treatments of Andean themes. Once we finish admiring the photographs of Martín Chambi, we don’t know where to turn. I am happy to report that Vision, Race, and Modernity is just what we needed. Deborah Poole’s carefully argued and finely crafted book spotlights visual concerns and places them within the political, social, cultural, and historical context of their production and exchange. Not only does it serve as the benchmark against which studies of visual matters in the Andes will be measured, but it offers fresh insights into relationships between Europe and the Americas, anthropology and history, and art and science that scholars in all disciplines will find stimulating, provocative, and wholly original.
Poole has organized her book chronologically, beginning in the eighteenth century and ending in the 1940s, but her purpose is not...
