ABSTRACT
In his study of the “Chicano/a photographic,” Colin Gunckel claims that Chicano/a visual culture scholars often neglect photography in favor of film, posters, and mural art. Yet photographers remain some of the most experimental and pioneering image makers: they have been responsible for turning the medium into a weapon of activism during the Chicano Movement, influencing the broader direction of Chicano/a visual culture, and developing an alternative archive that has enabled Chicano/as to see themselves beyond the racialized stereotypes perpetuated by the mass media (377-8). While many movementera photographers engaged the documentary mode, they also recognized its limitations in terms of relaying impartial images, noting in particular its capacity to objectify the ethnic subject. The 1993 exhibition From the West: Chicano Narrative Photography took the subjugating force of the camera as its cue, highlighting some of the important strategies used by contemporary Chicano/a photographers to expose the constructedness of the image and its underlying ideology. In their accompanying essays, Chon A. Noriega (12-14) and Jennifer A. González (18-21) found Chicano/a photographers replaying dominant modes of visual representation, namely documentary and landscape photography, ethnographic portraiture, and the Western film genre, in order to turn exclusionary narratives about the West and Chicano/a culture upside down.
