Juanita Solano Roa’s Negative Originals: Race and Early Photography in Colombia provides a refreshing take on nineteenth and early twentieth-century photography. The book focuses on portrait photography by Benjamín de la Calle (1869–1934) and Fotografía Rodríguez (founded in 1889 by brothers Horacio Marino Rodríguez and Melitón Rodríguez), two Medellín-based studios that witnessed the industrial boom and growth of Colombia’s second-largest city. Solano Roa studied the production of these studios not through their photographs but through their glass plate negatives housed in Colombian collections. This archival impulse and attention to the various modifications the photographers made to the gelatin dry plates led the author to theorize connections between this reproductive medium and the racial ideologies prevalent in Colombia at the time.

Negative Originals offers an important methodological intervention whereby the negative—or image in reverse—becomes the object of analysis that leads to material, symbolic, and spatial meaning. Solano Roa painstakingly studied the photographic retouching on these negative plates. This shift in focus allowed her to see how negative manipulation reinforced or subverted prevalent racial ideologies and operated through symbolic means that upheld or challenged whiteness. Close looking also revealed that the backdrops or negative space of the negative were not neutral but also encoded within racial terms. Her book argues that early photography was critical to the formation and reproduction of racial ideologies, particularly in the region of Antioquia, which considered itself among the whitest and racially superior regions of Colombia’s territory. She writes, “through the study of studio portraiture and its relation to the ideology encouraged by the intellectual elites in Colombia . . . I contend that the Latin American Other could not have been constructed without the invention of these whitening ideologies” (5). Solano Roa’s comparative approach toggles between these studios, yielding nuance and complexity to her argument.

Chapter one concerns the manipulation of photographic plates and how the practice intertwines with the discourse of la raza antioqueña. By 1910, intellectuals in Medellín had coined this phrase to refer to themselves as superior by claiming whiteness based on their Spanish descent, Catholic beliefs, hard work, and family values. The anxiety to claim whiteness was a response by Antioquia’s elite, once rural Colombians, who due to the industrial boom were now in a position of power and needed to justify the social hierarchy. Eugenicist theories (such as selective breeding to prevent degeneration) further reinforced this view which as the author argues became so widespread it informed the city’s visual culture. While acknowledging the complicity of photography in the formation of this discourse, Solano Roa is careful not to pass moral judgements; instead, she reads it as a zeitgeist that shaped the practices of retouching with graphite marks and ink to lighten the skin of sitters. In the case of Fotografía Rodríguez, negative manipulation allowed the photographers to produce an idealized, whiter version of the sitter. On the other hand, de la Calle challenged the idea that there were no Black people in Antioquia by producing portraits of Afro-Colombians and utilized retouching to enhance their resemblance and social standing. For those scholars aligned with the work of anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot and the literary scholar and cultural historian Saidiya Hartman, the superficial reading of these portraits of Black subjects, many of them named, will feel like a missed opportunity and limit the radical potential of this study to unearth and speculate on this history.

Chapters two and three are by far the finest examples of Solano Roa’s methodology and argumentation. In chapter two, she moves beyond the notion of photographers altering skin color to consider how allegory and painterly effects elevated portrait subjects through a civilizing and classical discourse. She demonstrates how Fotografía Rodríguez achieved this semblance of racial superiority by associating the classical past with members of the Antioquian community. In doing so, Solano Roa analyzes how pictorial photography and costumbrismo supported this ideology of whitening. She likewise elaborates on how gender operated within la raza antioqueña which called for traditional gender roles and associated women with Virgin Mary imagery: white, pure, innocent, and chaste. This detail sets up the inversion performed in the following chapter, where Benjamín de la Calle’s photographs of cross-dressers illuminate her metaphorical understanding of the negative. This time, rather than its materiality, she highlights how subaltern populations were regarded as negative others and the ways that photographers could challenge this notion to produce a positive portrayal. Solano Roa argues that de la Calle suspends that negativity by creating ambivalent nonbinary images. His portraits of cross-dressing men—some of the earliest perhaps in the history of Colombia—do not exoticize the subjects, who quietly and comfortably perform alterity, exercise their right to worldmaking, and challenge the conservative discourse of female modesty which I alluded to earlier. It is well known that de la Calle struggled to hide his homosexuality in Medellín’s ultra-conservative environment, and thus readers might assume that would make the cross-dressing men more comfortable before his camera. But Solano Roa complicates this facile understanding by noting how the photographer collaborated with the police on a high-profile criminal case of a suspect with a double gender identity.

Chapters four and five offer novel ways of seeing the turn toward orientalism and to think through the role of backdrops in adding significance to the ideological content of these portraits. Drawing on new approaches to orientalism, Solano Roa argues that the Antioqueño elites identified with this leading European trend, which at once distanced them from their immediate Others (Black and Indigenous Colombians) and presented them as different and independent from Europe. In this chapter, she narrows in on theatrical portraits charged with the exoticizing allure of Islamic and Asian costuming and set design. Contrasting de la Calle’s Untitled (Grupo de Odaliscas) (1915) with Fotografía Rodríguez’s Grupo árabe (1899), she shows how these group portraits implied the alleged whiteness of their subjects and aligned them with Europe’s orientalizing gaze. At times one wonders why the author insists that there was no “ill-meaning intent of models or the photographer” (206) in an image regime where everyone, especially the paying customer, was complicit in symbolic violence. The final chapter, which ends the book abruptly and without an overall conclusion, argues that the backdrops, often displaying European landscapes, bourgeois interiors, and abstraction, served to encode whiteness into the negative space of these photographs. By discussing the history of Antioquia’s early settlers (colonos), Solano Roa makes a compelling case for reading the landscape backdrops as tied to la raza antioqueña’s imaginary of territorial expansion, which is similar to Manifest Destiny. She asks readers to ponder how these foreign landscapes and bourgeois interiors allowed sitters to claim European heritage. Nevertheless, arguably the most interesting section considers the emergence of abstract backdrops as linked to Art Deco architecture and international fashion photography, prior to the arrival of abstraction in Colombia.

The book is carefully researched, well-argued, and highly accessible. It will be of interest to seasoned photo historians as well as Latin Americanists. It is a standout example of how race and image making were co-constitutive at this postcolonial juncture of Colombia’s history. Negative Originals: Race and Early Photography in Colombia is a major contribution to the history of Latin American photography.