Fashion on The Devil’s Railroad: History, Temporality and Modernities in the Brazilian Amazon

In 1910, on the cusp of the rubber fever that gripped South America, New York photographer Dana Merrill was hired to document the transnational construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, built deep in the Brazilian Amazon. His assignment was to 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. The railroad was intended to speed up the global exportation of rubber and tropical commodities from landlocked Bolivia, by providing an efficient route via Brazil to the Atlantic Ocean, to fuel U.S. markets. Of the numerous projects of extractive capitalism that materialised at the turn of the century, ‘The Devil’s Railroad’, as it became known in popular parlance, captures the imagination. By the time of its inauguration on 1 August 1912, the speculative boom for Amazonian rubber had crashed in favour of cheaper supplies from the Far East, rendering the railroad not just a late arrival, but already obsolete.

If railroad tracks, much like fashion, typically serve as a signifier of capitalist modernity – symbolizing the speed of industrial progress that propels modern time forward – then Merrill’s photographs of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad are a force of arrest. His camera acted as both an agent of modernity, and an eyewitness to its contradictions, both literal and ideological. Merrill’s gaze underlines the antagonist forces at play between the imperial and nationalistic ambitions to speed up the movement of capital that coalesced in the railroad, with the reality of going around in circles, of the various delays, interruptions and repetitions that serve as a metaphor for history’s selective memories and lacunae. His photographs overturn the cumulative march of time represented by railroad tracks, with a logic that is worthy of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982).