A Review of Negative Originals: Race and Early Photography in Colombia

Negative Originals. Race and Early Photography in Colombia by Juanita Solano Roa (Durham: Duke University Press, 2025, 307 pages)

Following in the footsteps of recent pioneering works, such as Colombian curator Halim Badawi’s Historia urgente del arte en Colombia (2019), the collaborative volume was not afraid to break new grounds in a field hitherto circumscribed by unquestioned foreign perspectives, oft-repeated chronologies, geographically limited perspectives and a few consecrated names. Some of Solano Roa’s personal contributions to the project, such as her study of Benjamín de la Calle’s 1897 photographic portrait of María Anselma Restrepo, popularly known as the “Black guerrillera,” already pointed to her ongoing interest in how visual mediums and persistently “othered” subjectivities intertwine—or, put differently, in how art functions as the material vessel and conveyor of ideology.

Negative Originals constitutes the culminating outgrowth of a prolonged preoccupation. In its luxurious pages, suitably endowed with high-quality illustrations, Solano Roa seamlessly incorporates individual cases such as that of the Black guerrillera into a wider examination of how race and photography intersected, shaped and reinforced each other in the Colombian region of Antioquia at the turn of the 20th century.

In order to do so, she delves into the archival repositories of Medellín’s Biblioteca Pública Piloto, more specifically the extant collections of Benjamín de la Calle and Fotografía Rodríguez, two of the city’s foremost photographic studios. Her methodological approach to the archive, however, is far from customary. In lieu of restricting herself to “positive prints,” or the photographs sensu stricto, she focuses on the latter’s “negative originals,” in whose very surface she discovers the occluded traces of image manipulation, from whitening interventions to pictorial additions and contrived mise-en-scènes. In these inverted doppelgangers of the photographic print, she recognizes the “retouching” gestures of an all-too-human impulse, still present in Instagram’s filters and Photoshop’s editing tools, to artificially enhance the circulating images of ourselves. In short, she “reveals” —in Spanish, interestingly enough, “revelar fotos” means to develop them— what those negatives keep hidden from view.

Yet the material is just one aspect of the “negative,” as Solano Roa understands it. From the outset, she elevates the word to productive conceptual heights, enriching it with both metaphoric and spatial meaning. The negative, in her view, is not only the suppressed physical double of the photographic print. It recalls, simultaneously, the scarcely noticed backdrops and scenarios that, serving as marginal framing spaces, encircle and sustain the subject portrayed. The negative is conceived, in addition, as “a metaphor for those categorized as ‘Other,’” be it “the poor, Black, Indigenous, or any other nonnormative bodies.” By bringing together these distinct facets of the negative —the material, spatial and metaphoric connotations—, Solano Roa calls attention to the smooth dovetailing between materiality and ideology, regardless of whether the latter is consciously assumed or not. It is in the unequal “duplicity of the photographic image,” she tells us, that one can identify a society’s inverted image of itself. More often than not, such inherent duality becomes an index of our regrettable tendency to define ourselves in opposition to a whole cast of stereotyped, excluded, and invisibilized “others.” And it could also serve as a springboard for questioning the dualistic thinking still sustaining our social realities.

All of the above reaches historical concreteness in the book’s five chapters, each devoted to a specific instantiation of the “methodology of the negative.” In the first chapter, Solano Roa focuses on the relationship between the studio portraiture practiced by both Benjamín de la Calle and the Rodríguez brothers and the pervasive myth of the “Antioquian race [raza antioqueña].” As she expounds, the swift economic development of Medellín at the end of the 19th century, fueled by a substantial influx of Spanish immigrants in the region and the concomitant growth of its coffee industry —a vigorous historical process known as the “Antioquian colonization”—, gave rise to a new and prosperous elite in search of a powerful narrative whereby its newly acquired status could attain legitimacy. The remarkable flourishing of Antioquia, it was consequently argued, stemmed from the unquestionable superiority of the so-called raza antioqueña, a pure Spanish casta, unique and unmatched in its alleged whiteness, patriarchal values, adherence to unwavering Catholic beliefs and hard-working habits.

Disseminated in genealogical treatises and pseudo-scientific works, this self-serving myth permeated the visual arts with comparable force. Above all, it left its mark in the rapidly evolving photographic medium, where it was either reproduced or subtly contested through “negative retouching,” a painstaking technique utilized to smooth and lighten the sitter’s skin. Whereas the Rodríguez’ studio openly catered to the local notables’ tastes, altering negatives to reinforce their racial-thinking, Benjamín de la Calle engaged in what Solano Roa calls “dignifying portraiture.” That is to say, he portrayed Medellín’s “erased subjectivities” as full, individual human beings, not as mere background props or disposable examples of a general, scientifically observed “type.” Either to fulfill rightful aspirational desires, capture the essence of personality, or adequately render black skin —the cameras of the era were technically unfit for doing so—, De la Calle’s praxis countered the Rodríguez’: with defiance, the former visibilized what the ideology of the raza antioqueña, so dear to the latter’s privileged clients, endeavored to exclude.

Questioning once again photography’s presumed transparency, the book’s second chapter unpacks the Rodríguez’ honing of pictorialism, an in-vogue style that sought to raise the new medium to artistic heights. Fully exploiting the possibilities of the negative, the Rodríguez experimented with “the allegorical, poetic, and expressive qualities of the photographic image.”  At the same time, they adapted its features to their customers’ ambivalent needs: the studio’s virginal madonnas, produced alongside portraits loaded with European signifiers, mirror the interest of the well-to-do in striking a balance between the local and the international; between religiously-tinged costumbrista scenes and bourgeois cosmopolitan yearnings. In this cosmopolitan regionalism, as it were, the raza antioqueña appears as the ideal transmitter of what Solano Roa calls “traditional modernization.” Pictorial photography thereby became an aestheticized space where peripheral elites could avail themselves of modernity’s symbols without ever relinquishing their idiosyncratic roots or succumbing to the civilizational anxieties of the era —that recurrent uncertainty regarding the global status of the country as well as Latin America as a whole.

In the next chapters, the suppleness of Solano Roa’s notion of the negative appears in full view. It is equated, in the third, with all those “deviant subjects” who, apart from posing for De la Calle’s lenses —himself a gay man amid a notoriously machoistic society—, managed to disrupt the entrenched gendered roles of the raza antioqueña: the cross-dressers, for instance, non-binary individuals whose “coming out” resembled, in a way, the process of developing a photograph from a negative print.

Another type of negativity emerges in the fourth chapter, as Solano Roa inspects the Rodríguez’ and De la Calle’s dabbling in Orientalist photography, another fashionable genre by means of which the Antioquian upper classes grappled with their equivocal identity. In disguising themselves as Orientals, they not only engaged in playful appropriation but seemed to embrace a more horizontal, “Amerasian” continuum as well, to use global historian Elizabeth Horodowich and art historian Alexander Nagel’s term.

While the adoption of European tropes seemed to differentiate them from the local, “othered” subjectivities, their own peripheral position as South Americans and Spanish descendants brought them closer to the Near East. One wonders, in this regard, how the proponents of the raza antioqueña dealt with the ubiquitous Orientalization of Spain itself, at the time considered as barely belonging to “Europe.” Although Solano Roa does not elaborate on the full complexities of the subject, her research can certainly be put into dialogue with recent works on Ibero-American Orientalism such as that of  University of Miami Professor Christina Civantos or John Hopkins’ Nadia Altschul.

As it concludes with a thorough inspection of photographic backdrops as negative space, Negative Originals ends, fittingly, in the medium’s very margins. As Solano Roa underlines, it was in those disregarded regions where the “Traditional Modernity” of the antioqueños surfaced: in what appears to be, at first glance, a jarring juxtaposition of local outfits and an anachronistic Mediterranean scenery, she uncovers a conciliation of peasant origins and Western affiliation evincing the landscape’s pivotal role in Colombian art; and in the deliberate usage of Art Deco stylization, common back then in international fashion photography, she pinpoints a “visual rhetoric predating modern art in Colombia,” habitually dated to the mid-20th century. With this final destabilizing of High and Low Culture, Solano Roa concludes her groundbreaking invitation not merely to think about, or think with, but rather to “think through” photography. As a “negative history” of the medium, Negative Originals may serve as a guiding blueprint for future investigations along similar lines.

Alejandro Quintero Mächler is a Research Scholar and half-time Lecturer in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.  He is the author of Perder la cabeza en el siglo XIX: Ensayos sobre historia de Colombia e Hispanoamérica (2023).  

A Review of The Brazil Chronicles

En los 80s