Photography

This bibliography reflects the multifaceted relationship between Latina/os and various photographic traditions. As individuals and groups placed in front of the camera lens, Latino/as have often found themselves stigmatized, marginalized, or criminalized. Photographs taken by reformers, the police, and documentarians since the late 19th century, for instance, have often generated harmful or homogenizing visions of the US Latina/o population that frame them as racially different or otherwise problematic. Since the early decades of the 20th century, however, Latino/a photographers have produced bodies of work that challenge these limited visions to craft new images of identity, community, and history. Some of these individuals have harnessed the capacity of photography to fulfill an evidentiary or realist function as either social documentation, a political organizing tool, or a challenge to exclusionary mainstream media coverage. Others have explored the aesthetic and formal potential of photography by engaging in conceptual art practices, crafting speculative reimaginings of history, using it as an extension of performance, integrating it into other media, or mobilizing it as a complex mechanism of community- or self-representation. This bibliography covers the major works of scholarship that have attended to these key photographic tendencies and the places where they overlap, considering works that discuss Latina/os both in front of and behind the lens. Also included here are key exhibition catalogues and photographic essays that provide a representative sampling of visual tendencies or traditions mobilized by practicing Latina/o photographers, with particular attention to regional and ethnic diversity.