As scholars continue to question how (or if) the subaltern can speak, Jorge Coronado argues that to hear them we should focus on the medium in which each source is worth a thousand words: photography. Coronado's Portraits in the Andes asserts that photography, and photographic portraits in particular, offers an important source for understanding the agency of everyday people in the Andes to self-fashion their identity and relationship to modernity. Coronado's book is a cultural analysis of photography as well as a broader call to rethink the ways we find agency.
The book is divided into six thematic chapters. The first, “Practice: Photography in the Southern Andes, 1900–1950,” sets the historical stage between 1900 and 1950, when advances in technology allowed the proliferation of affordable photo studios across the Andes. The chapter also stakes out the book's central claim: many Andean people of mestizo and indigenous descent posed for portraits...
