ABSTRACT
Latin America most dramatically and most powerfully contains both the West and its Other within itself. Drawing on aesthetic practices and cultural theories that engage with the complexities that follow from this, above all on Aimé Césaire’s use of “Miraculous Weapons” and Nestor Garcia Canclini’s concept of “Cultural Hybridity”, this chapter examines photographic work which transgresses the norms of photographic realism and disdains the separations of art and documentary, and of avant-garde and popular in order to produce the epistemological turbulence and formal differences from which the necessary beauty and meaning of Latin America’s multiple cultural spaces can be made to appear. It includes discussions of post-colonial theory, the modern and pre-modern image, the use of fiction to deepen the sense of the real and facilitate the representation of different temporalities and cultural mentalities within the single image.
