In this article, we ask what makes photographs different from other kinds of historical source material. What can photographic images do that other documents cannot? And what traps lie in wait for the historian using the visual record? Our more fundamental concern, however, is with the capacity of photography to capture labor and capital. Photographs are of the concrete and specific; but capital abstracts, rendering equivalent that which was once concrete. Can photographs help us to see how capitalism works? Here we consider the ways that photography has been central to both the expropriation and exploitation of labor and to the artistic critique of these practices. We argue that photography documents and artistically refigures the various things—nature, work, and caring communities—that capitalism needs to continue generating surpluses in a finite world.
Drawing on photographs of the 1954 banana workers' strike in Honduras, this article seeks to demonstrate the potential of the visual archive for recovering the historical agency of the working class. Photos from the archive of a studio photographer named Rafael Platero Paz enable me to rethink the role of United Fruit Company workers in staging an event that brought the Honduran worker into being as a new political subject. The fact that every photograph is its own certificate of a that-was-there can be drawn upon to radically historicize moments when the shutter opened to capture a particular image. After attending to the ways that the striking workers self-consciously and photographically asserted themselves — as employees, citizens, and devout Catholics — I outline a methodological framework for historians of Latin America who wish to engage with photographs, a source material of unique evidentiary and poetic force.
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