ABSTRACT
This paper analyses three specific episodes in the photographic and literary construction of Seri women’s identity. Its pre-text is a self-portrait of Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide identified as Seri Indian because she is displaying their facial painting. The axis is thus Seri women’s use of facial decoration and how it became part of a gendered ethnic regime of ethnicity. This abridged genealogy of Seri images of women charts the constructed character of ethnic identity, the complex mediations that photographers, ethnologists, and their anthropological subjects establish in their encounters, and how much is at stake in the photographic invention of identity.
