Margin of Life: Post-war Concerned Photography in Mexico and Guatemala, 1947–1960

In chapter 2, Andrianna Campbell and Ileana Selejan focus their attention on photography as, in their words, ‘a means of collective witnessing’ in ‘Margin of Life: Post-war Concerned Photography in Mexico and Guatemala, 1947–1960’. In the West, in the wake of the post-war devastation and atrocities, photography served multiple purposes, one of which was to relay and interpret the horrors of war and the struggles of reconstruction and nascent peacetime. This chapter charts the ways in which photographers instigated new modes of production and formatting layouts and examines the emergence of organisations such as Magnum Photos that supported socially engaged independent photographers. The photographer Cornell Capa, whose 1973 audio-visual presentation and book Toward the Margin of Life: From Primitive Man to Population Crisis for the Center for Inter-American Relations provides the title of this chapter, coined the term ‘concerned photography’ to indicate this focus on purportedly honest, truthful, and human-centred work in the medium. As the authors point out, concerned photography moved away from a focus on those on the social peripheries of the United States (the subjects of Jacob Riis, Walker Evans, and Dorothea Lange) to populations in rural settings in Central and South America, seeking out success stories of people of colour who had expatriated to these areas. Campbell and Selejan’s essay interrogates American photography of this vein, exploring the utopian aims of the foreign photographic gaze in Latin America and the ways in which the resulting images were instrumentalised in popular magazines such as Life, Color, and Ebony. The ‘concerned photography’ project was, they argue, an investigation of the post-war yearning for human kinship, manifested in magazine spreads and museum exhibitions, that blurs what might be traditionally considered the ‘social margins’ and explicates the projection of racial identity in the United States, Mexico, and South America at a period critical to their post-war synthesis of national identities.