Anthropological photography as witness and builder of history

Abstract

The article addresses anthropological photography as a dual agent, material witness of cultural processes and builder of historical narratives in Latin America, with emphasis on Cuba. The identified problem is the instrumentalization of the mentioned photography as a tool of power that distorts, silences, or hegemonizes cultural-historical narratives, especially in the Latin American and Cuban context. The study’s objective is to demonstrate its function as a critical historical document that transcends the ethnographic record, revealer of power relations, and generator of counter-archives against hegemonic narratives. Diverse research methods are used, such as comparative analysis of approaches between photojournalists (social testimony) and artists (symbolic deconstruction), case studies, and genre classification to define and differentiate the anthropological portrait, the psychological portrait, and the representative portrait. The achieved results validate the anthropological portrait as a genre that situates subjects in significant contexts through ethical negotiations, aspects developed in the Anthropological Portrait Workshop at the University of the Arts (ISA), under a pedagogical model that prioritizes ethics over aesthetics, and co-authorship over the unidirectional
gaze. It concludes by reaffirming the historical duality of images as material testimonies and active builders of history, their complementarity, both photojournalism and photographic art: one documents processes while the other interrogates meanings, and the decolonial key demands practices based on ethical co-construction, recognizing subjects as co-participants of memory.