Retratos de província:

fotografias de estúdio, invenções do eu e arquivos da memória

Abstract

By selectively exploring the collections of three photographers — Manuel Jesús Serrano (1882-1957), Chichico Alkmim (1886-1978), and Baldomero Alejos (1902-1976) —, we examine studio photographic portraits from the 1920s until the 1950s. In the provincial cities where they worked as portrait artists, photographic studios provided a theater of poses, modern self-fashioning, and photographic pacts between subjects and photographers. These photographic greenhouses mostly privileged bourgeois portraits imbued with the connotations of possession and individualism. However, the photographic studios of Serrano, Alkmim, and Alejos also made possible a range of desired self-fashioning revealing ethnic variations, subjective expressions, and cultural hybridizations. In this essay, we analyze images of these gifted portrait artists highlighting the intertwining between affective memories and the archive; the relevance of the photographic studio as a scenographic space for modern, conventional, and also fanciful imaginaries; and finally, we explore these studio images in relation to the urban imaginary of these provincial cities.