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Image and Memory: Photography from Latin America, 1866-1994. Edited by WENDY WATRISS and LOIS PARKINSON ZAMORA. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiii, 450 pp. Cloth, $65.00.
For decades a wide gap has persisted between the ways historians, on one hand, and photographic historians and critics, on the other, "read" images. Historians have discovered that photographs are documents that offer a wealth of information that goes beyond material culture and the perspectives of photographer and client. For their part, photographic historians and critics have shown a greater concern with the "pedigree" of photographer and image: reputation, genre, and such technical details as format, exposure, texture of paper, and printing process. I learned this rudely: at a presentation at FotoFest I992 in Houston, in which I had been invited to speak on historical photographs as documents for social history, I was literally shouted down by three irate members of the audience when I stated my opinion that for the purposes of social history, the...