Snapping Suits: Whitewashing Extractive Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon

In 1910, on the cusp of the rubber fever that gripped South America, New York photographer Dana B. Merrill was hired to document the transnational construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, built deep in the Brazilian Amazon. Merrill was assigned under the premise that he must capture the speed and “progress” of its concluding stages, chronicling the hasty developments that would support U.S. and British economic interests in the face of media reports detailing the monumental loss of human life that had garnered public attention. His camera acted both as witness to, and abettor in, this imperial project of US capitalist expansion and exploitation of South America. Although Merrill was not employed to document the clothing culture of the transient frontier society that sprang up around the construction of the railroad, his commissioned photographs overflow with visual information on fashion – what people wore, and how they wore it, documented in extraordinary detail.

This paper digs beneath the whitewashed surface of the streamlined white suits sported by the North American administrators in charge of the railroad, which were used to generate a visible hierarchy of race and rank deep in the jungle. Tailored, tucked in, streamlined, and pristine in appearance, these men were the ideal sartorial ambassadors for the unfettered progress of the project. Merrill’s camera amplified the symbolic qualities of whiteness; by capturing a momentary state that could be preserved for posterity in the photographic record, he smoothed over the lived and material realities of fashion by ensuring that these bodies remained, in the words of Richard Dyer, ‘literally but also figuratively enlightened’ (Dyer 1997, p. 101). Yet white clothing was also easily soiled, difficult to maintain, and required frequent laundering by the Caribbean women who toiled in the Steam Laundry on site. This paper foregrounds their hidden labour to yield new insights into fashion’s histories as well as those of photography at its intersection with global extractive capitalism.