Photography in Latin America

"La fotografía, lenguaje universal, puede colaborar para que comprendamos en qué medida nuestros destinos están entrelazados, más allá del color, la clase social o la raza, en qué medida nuestra esperanza -la esperanza del género humano -depende sólo de nuestra profunda toma de conciencia." (Sebastião Salgado)

This website, Zona Latina, carries several hundreds of photographs about Latin America.  Those photographs were taken by many people during many trips to Latin America over the years.  Our interest in photography is by no means anomalous.  According to the 1998 Los Medios y Mercados de Latinoamérica study, 41% of Latin Americans between the ages of 12 and 64 own a camera.  In the following table, we show the demographic characteristics of the camera owners.  The camera is not a daily necessity and a good camera can cost a lot, and so it is not surprising to find that camera ownership increases with socio-economic level.

 Demographic Characteristics of Camera Owners

Demographic Characteristics / Classes % Owned Cameras
Region
     Argentina
     Brazil
     Chile
     Colombia
     Mexico
     Venezuela
     Balance of Central America / Caribbean
     Balance of South America
52%
42%
40%
34%
45%
34%
32%
31%
Sex
     Male
     Female
41%
41%
Age
     12-17
     18-24
     25-34
     35-44
     45-54
     55-64
45%
42%
44%
37%
36%
32%
Socio-Economic Level
     Level A
     Level B
     Level C
     Level D
77%
58%
44%
20%
     TOTAL 42%

(source: Los Medios y Mercados de Latinoamérica 1998)

A camera is a piece of equipment that requires camera film in order to take photographs.  According to the 1998 Los Medios y Mercados de Latinoamérica study, 33% of Latin Americans between the ages of 12 and 64 had purchased camera film in the past 12 months.  We should note that camera ownership is neither necessary nor sufficient to purchase camera film.  According to the study, 71% of camera owners purchased camera film in the past 12 months.  Among those do not own a camera, 7% purchased camera film, either as a gift or to be used on a borrowed camera or in the form of disposable cameras.  

In the following table, we show the demographic characteristics of camera film buyers.  Given the typical cost of camera film is high relative to the average wage, purchasing increases with socio-economic level.  However, the cost of camera film is not prohibitively expensive as to be completely out of reach.  For special occasions (such as baptisms and weddings), it is worthwhile to take photographs to commemorate.

Demographic Characteristics of Camera Film Buyers

Demographic Characteristics / Classes % Bought Camera Film in Last 12 Months
Region
     Argentina
     Brazil
     Chile
     Colombia
     Mexico
     Venezuela
     Balance of Central America / Caribbean
     Balance of South America
41%
34%
38%
24%
37%
19%
27%
26%
Sex
     Male
     Female
33%
33%
Age
     12-17
     18-24
     25-34
     35-44
     45-54
     55-64
34%
37%
44%
30%
25%
18%
Socio-Economic Level
     Level A
     Level B
     Level C
     Level D
61%
48%
33%
17%
     TOTAL 33%

(source: Los Medios y Mercados de Latinoamérica 1998)

In terms of market share, the leading camera film brand is Kodak by far at 76% share, followed by Fuji at 15%.  Fundamentally, this is not an easy business because one has to have an extensive network to sell a product that requires a trained technician to process on special equipment.


Kodak products for sale
Afogados de Ingazeiro, Pernambuco (population 29,617)
(photo credit: GAP)

The average camera film buyer will purchase more than 3 rolls of film per year.  This makes for a huge business that involves the sales of hundreds of millions of rolls of film per year.  What do Latin Americans take photos of?  There is no simple answer to this question.  Whereas people eat food to quell hunger and drink liquid to quench thirst, there is no single reason why people take photographs.  In fact, we can probably list an indefinitely long list of reasons: news photos, wedding photos, birthday and  quinceañera celebrations, funeral processions, family portraits, baby pictures, pet photos, tourist photos, postcards, celebrity photos, social commentary, photographic memoirs of vanishing cultures and peoples, photographic art of various forms and styles, book/magazine illustrations, advertising copies, identification photos, judicial evidence, medical records, insurance documentation, ethnographic records, political propaganda, pornography, etc.

The reasons why people take photographs are numerous as well as subtle.  We cannot ask people to report their reasons directly, as those responses are likely to be quite superficial because people may not be cognizant of the underlying motivations (e.g. social pressures, psychological defense mechanisms, etc).  To demonstrate this, we will just make a couple of points in the following.

FAMILY PORTRAITS


Guatemalan girls
(photo credit: N. Thomas)		 Here are two paragraphs from Susan Sontag's book:

"Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing  --- which means that, like very mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art.  It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

Memorializing the achievements of individuals considering as members of families (as well as of other groups) is the earliest popular use of photography.  For at least a century, the wedding photograph has been as much a part of the ceremony as the prescribed verbal formulas.  Cameras go with family life.  According to a sociological study done in France, most households have a camera, but a household with children is twice as likely to have at least one camera as a household in which there are no children.  Not to take pictures of one's children, particularly when they are small, is a sign of parental indifference, just as not turning up for one's graduation picture is a gesture of adolescent rebellion." (Sontag (1977), p.8)
And here is anthropologist Deborah Poole describing what happens when she was called upon by peasants in the southern highland Peru to take family photos: 

"I also marveled at the poses they chose.  They were, of course, familiar with photographic portraiture.  Calendars with photographs of everything from nude gringas to plumed Incas graced the walls of their houses.  Newspapers, books, and magazines were treasured objects brought from Cusco or Lima.  Some people had studio portraits or relatives or ancestors wrapped carefully in old scraps of textiles or tucked away in the niches of their homes' adobe walls.  Despite the diversity of the photographs they had seen, the poses they chose for their own portraits were remarkably uniform.  They stood stiffly with their arms down at the side, facing the camera, with serious faces.  Photographs with smiles were usually rejected, as were the unposed, or what we would call 'natural' photographs I took on my own.  My subjects were also committed to being photographed in their best clothes.  I did a good deal of my interviews and other fieldwork while hanging around houses waiting for them to wash and braid their hair, scrub the baby, and even trim the horse's mane in preparation for the family portrait."  (Poole (1997), p.4)


Farewell at El Dorado Airport,
Bogota, Colombia
(photo credit: P. Donato)

TOURIST PHOTOS

To quote Sontag (1977) again,

"... photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of human activities: tourism.  For the first time in history, large numbers of people regularly travel out of their habitual environments for short periods of time.  It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera.  Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had ...

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it --- by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting the experience into an image, a souvenir.  Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.  The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.  Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter.  Unsure of other responses, they take a picture.  This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on.  The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic --- German, Japanese and Americans.  Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun.  They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures."  (p.9)


"Been there.  Did that."
Sugar Loaf, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (photo credit: P. Verdin)

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(posted by Roland Soong on 12/20/99)

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