Imágenes de indígenas con pasaporte abierto: Del Gran Chaco a Tierra del Fuego

Abstract

This work is devoted to expound the thoughts and analyses we have been carrying out from a group of photographs of the late XIXth and early XXth centuries, which show two cultural realities that, though extremely distant if seen from a geographical point of view, are really close if focused from their ways of producing and interpreting the visible world. Our hypothesis is that, thanks to a group of images of natives that were subjected to what we have called 'an iconographic transhumance', there has been a contribution to the modelling and construction of the ethnic and social identities regarding the so-called 'Chaqueño' and 'Fueguino' natives. We state that the ways in which the visual 'otherness' of these groups have been defined are subjected to certain mechanisms of construction and interpretation of identities and ethnicities, as well as to others of transmission of pre-moulded memories, in which certain specific visual features become manifest in order to organize the difference and, thus, the ways of 'imaginaryzing' them. Photography can be thought of as a cultural production where the social or collective memory looks for referents, traces, and retaining frameworks. These images are memories that were outlined over the 'other' within dissimilar spaces, which have nonetheless been interchanged through the circulation they have been subdued to.