Abstract
Camera Lucida Mexicana: Travel, Visual Technologies, and Contested Objectivities
This essay discusses three nascent visual technologies—the
camera lucida, the panorama, and the daguerreotype—as often stubborn and
defiant agents in quests for both scientific rationality and picturesque
image-making in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. Through a
series of case studies, it also details how the agency of such technologies
emerged in the complex circuits of transatlantic intellectual and artistic
exchange formed in order to represent, and thus claim access to or ownership
of, Mexican history and archaeology across Europe and the Americas. This
suggests the possibility of recasting the genesis of these technologies not
as a fixed point, but as a process of transatlantic exchange oriented toward
the New World and the south, in this case, Mexico.