Instances of Agency: Julio Cordero’s Archive and Photographic Portraits

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the notion of agency in relationship to Julio Cordero’s photographs. Julio Cordero (1879-1961) owned a photography studio in La Paz in the first half of the twentieth century and produced an array of images both inside and outside of the studio. I also offer a sense of the rich documentation that exists in the complete Cordero archive as well as the insights that it opens up concerning the interventions in self-representation made possible by photographic portraiture. Essentially, these interventions lead us to conceptualize image culture as a prime space for enacting agency in Bolivia and Latin American more broadly.

Keywords

• agency
• photography
• portrait