This session examines how photography participated in the production, circulation, and contestation of race in Latin America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From its emergence, photography played a central role in projects of classification and racial legibility, appearing in anthropological expeditions, ethnographic documentation, studio portraiture, and commercial forms such as cartes de visite, souvenirs, and postcards. These images often reinforced visual hierarchies tied to empire, labor, nation-building, and modernity. At the same time, photography also provided spaces in which racialized subjects fashioned self-representations, asserted dignity and belonging, and challenged dominant visual narratives. This session therefore approaches photography not as a fixed instrument of domination, but as a dynamic social practice through which racial meanings were produced, negotiated, and transformed.

The rationale for organizing a session on this topic lies in the growing importance of visual culture and photography to scholarship on race in Latin America. Recent publications such as Afro-Atlantic Histories and The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art have helped foreground the centrality of visual archives to the study of Black representation, slavery, diaspora, and racial formation in the region. Studies of racialized photographic archives, meanwhile, have shown how images naturalized difference and sustained exclusionary understandings of race, while more recent work has drawn attention to sitterly agency, self-fashioning, and the instability of photographic meaning. This panel brings those approaches together.

The session builds on foundational scholarship such as Deborah Poole’s Vision, Race, and Modernity, which demonstrated the centrality of visual culture to the making of racial difference in the Andes, as well as more recent work by scholars such as Jorge Coronado and Juanita Solano Roa, who have emphasized studio practice, self-representation, and the instability of racial meaning in photographic archives. In dialogue with this scholarship, the panel expands the conversation by placing Afro-descendant, Indigenous, and Asian diasporic histories in dialogue across Peru, Mexico, and Colombia.

The four presentations were selected because each contributes to the session’s central argument while addressing a distinct archive and historical problem. Paula Park’s “Circulating and Contesting Difference: Photographic Traces of Chinese and Polynesian Migrants in 19th-Century Peru” examines cartes de visite of Chinese and Polynesian labor migrants in post-abolition Peru. Her paper shows how these portable images participated in the construction of racial “types,” while also tracing visual details that unsettle classificatory logics. Bianca Morán’s “Afro-Atlantic Ecologies: Marriage, Portraiture and Worldmaking” turns to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century studio portraits of Afro-Mexicans to argue that photography not only recorded racialized subjects but also visualized kinship, belonging, and forms of Afro-Mexican worldmaking that challenge narratives of absence and erasure. My paper, “Photography and Afro-Colombian Self-Representation in the Thousand Days War” examines images of Afro-Colombian belligerents to show how photography enabled claims to dignity, patriotism, and citizenship that challenged racist written discourse. Finally, Romeo Di Loreto’s “Silence, Punctum, and the Photographic Awakening in the SomeWhereLands of Latin America” offers a theoretical reflection on photography, race, memory, and perception grounded in Latin American photographic history. Drawing on Roland Barthes’s concept of punctum and on historical studio practices such as those of Martín Chambi, his presentation serves as a conceptual coda to the panel.

The session is designed as a coherent conversation. The first three presentations offer historically grounded analyses of photography’s role in shaping and contesting racial meaning in Peru, Mexico, and Colombia. The final paper draws out broader conceptual questions raised by those case studies and helps frame the discussion in comparative terms. In a seventy-five-minute session, I will offer a five-minute introduction, each of the four speakers will present for twelve minutes, and the remaining twenty-two minutes will be reserved for unstructured discussion.

The panel brings together scholars from different institutions and includes participants of different genders at different points in their careers, including a PhD student, two assistant professors, and one associate professor. In addition, one of the presenters is also a practicing photographer, bringing a valuable creative perspective to the discussion. Together, these differences strengthen the session by bringing multiple forms of expertise to a shared conversation on race and photography in Latin America.