By publishing the work under review, the family of the prominent Czech traveler Albert Vojtech Frič (1882-1944) makes a portion of the photographic legacy of the Italian artist Guido Boggiani (1861-1901) available to the international community. At the turn of the twentieth century, Boggiani spent several years among the Chamacoco Indians and members of other tribes in the territory of Gran Chaco. There he not only painted a number of canvases, but also took several hundred photographs that captured these indigenous peoples at a time when European civilization was rapidly penetrating the region, quickly destroying not only the traditional features of the Indian communities but also significantly altering the appearance of the landscape itself. It was this vanishing world that was recorded with an artist’s sensitive eye by a man who in the end was himself killed by the Chamacoco in 1901.
Thanks to his good relations with the native inhabitants of the region where Boggiani worked, after 1904 Albert V. Frič was able to rescue part of the artist’s material, which then remained in his possession with the permission of Boggiani’s family. Over the years, Frič used some individual pieces to illustrate his own work, but it was the traveler’s grandson, a professional photographer himself, who finally processed the entire photographic collection. For the present edition he selected more than 80 of the best shots, dividing them into four categories: landscape, documentation, reportage, and portrait (this latter section is the most extensive, constituting about half the book), which together offer a fascinating view of the inhabitants, as well as of life and nature, in the Río de la Plata region at the turn of the century. Anthropologists will appreciate the photographs from the section of portraits, while photographs in the reportage section, such as the Torpedo Boat (p. 57) or Wagons Loaded with Maté (p. 58), will captivate any historian dealing with Latin American history in general, and not just those who specialize in the period covered by Boggiani.
The reproductions are accompanied by a short introductory essay (pp. 7-35, translated into Spanish, English, Italian, and Portuguese) by Yvonne Fričová, in which the author briefly acquaints the reader with the figure of Guido Boggiani, whom Italian historians of photography consider to be one the founders of documentary photography in their country. But even more significant than this textual portrait of Boggiani is the information regarding this man’s material that remains in the Frič estate, and toward whose use both editors have taken the first important step. Moreover, the book constitutes further proof that there still exist little used and yet valuable sources that have the potential to offer a better understanding of the myriad facets of Latin American society. Many such caches might be deposited outside the traditional centers of research, a situation that does not in any sense diminish their value, only their availability. The meticulous edition of Boggiani’s documents shows that publications of exceptional significance and wide-ranging relevance can be issued from institutes and places that are not always considered the principal sources for material on Latin America