Imaging Latin America: The Kodachrome Slide Project of Florence Arquin

Florence Arquin (1900-1974), has been recognized for the color photos she took of Kahlo and Rivera in Mexico in the 1940s. Still, until now, her work as the leader of the Kodachrome Slide Project, one of the projects sponsored by the federal government in the 1940s, has not been recognized. Using the novel color Kodachrome, she was the first woman to employ this technique to document scenes of the Mexican art community and daily life in Mexico. Upon her return to Chicago, Arquin played an essential role in expanding American cultural diplomacy by offering the Kodachrome slides she took in Mexico to several government agencies in Washington, DC. She envisioned the slides to become educational material for American schools and drew the attention of the American Council of Education and the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA). She became the Director of the Kodachrome Project and traveled to several countries in Latin America. In Arquin’s own words, the project aimed to “provide visual aids to stimulate the study of Latin America and to contribute to the development of a discriminating appreciation of the cultural patterns existing in these countries today.” She took over 20,000 Kodachrome slides in two years, creating an extensive imaging archival that had never been published or presented in art historical meetings. Using photographic slides and a slide projector, this presentation will delve into the importance of Arquin’s images for the study of Latin American art today by seeing the photos in the way that was first intended.