Errant Modernism

“Errant Modernism is outstanding. Esther Gabara effortlessly navigates between avant-garde literary texts and modern print culture to reveal an ethic of ‘that which errs.’ In the process, photography becomes both the fact and metaphor enabling her theory of Latin American modernist cultural production.”—Roberto Tejada, author of National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment

“With subtlety and rigor, Esther Gabara deftly expands the horizon of photographic history and redefines the contours of twentieth-century modernism in the Americas. Focusing on the social and cultural ‘ethos’ of aesthetic practice in both Mexico and Brazil, she provides a provocative corrective to formalist definitions that dominate the field and demonstrates that the full story of photographic modernism has yet to be told.”—Jennifer A. González, author of Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art

“Errant Modernism attends to a broad set of enthusiasms with a sustained attention that is both rigorous and creative. It is an interdisciplinary monograph that will indelibly mark the field of visual culture studies while proving equally useful to art historians; it speaks to communications studies as much as to comparative literary histories. Gabara’s work has significance that reaches beyond the Latin American context to arrive in conversation with the growing body of international scholarship addressing transnational and ‘peripheral’ modernities the world over. Finally, Gabara’s is not a nostalgic memorial to modernism but a cross-temporal examination that will continue to inform visual discourses of our own times.”

“Errant Modernism is an impressive feat of archival research, and it brings to light much photographic material that will alter our vision of twentieth-century Mexican cultural history. . . . This is an exciting new contribution to the field of Mexican photography. Gabara strikes the perfect balance between theoretical sophistication and a keen sensibility for the material at hand.”

“Errant Modernism’s strength is its comparative frame. . . . [Gabara’s] introduction does a nice job of outlining key figures and critical issues germane to the study of modernist photography across Latin America, while the epilogue considers some of her arguments in relation to contemporary art photography. Trained in comparative literature, Gabara fluently places literary and visual representation in dialogue, appreciating that most vanguardists did not work within a single media, toting journals along with cameras on their travels.”

“[Errant Modernism] offers a rich, highly nuanced and stimulating rereading of modernism and Latin America. . . . Overall this is a fascinating and deeply satisfying excavation which will do much to enhance our understanding of the dynamics and discourses of specific modernisms and of the fluid ways in which photography was simultaneously a cipher, metaphor and realization of those ideas. But above all Gabara gives us a strong sense of the possibility of another, differently nuanced account of photography . . . and one whose trajectory had profound and intellectual and aesthetic legacies.”

“In this work, Esther Gabara provides an innovative interpretation of modernist literary and artistic movements of the 1920s and 1930s in Brazil and Mexico, successfully arguing that their radical aesthetic experimentation and ethical commitment retain their relevance in the vastly changed circumstances of today. The work establishes an elaborate interdisciplinary dialogue between word, image, and context that will be of interest to those working in literary studies, art history, and visual culture for many years to come.”

“Through more than 70 plates and figures, Errant Modernism offers rich insights into the modernist ethos by which aesthetic innovation and ethical concerns intertwined that emerged from the overlap of literary texts and modern print culture.”