This essay is an early iteration of Tejada’s National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment. Beginning with descriptions of Mexican President Porfirio Diaz’s autocratic council of elites, called los científicos, Tejada delves deep into their implementation of social policies and philosophies, which privileged industrial progress over racial and class disparity. The writings of positivist thinker Antonio Caso were adopted into this modernization process, but were betrayed by the vast image archives that Tejada reexamines in this book.
