Archive Matter: A Camera in the Laboratory of the Modern - Paperback

by Liliana Gómez (Author)

A journey through the United Fruit Company's photo archive and its documentation of corporate expansion into the Caribbean.

The establishment of the United Fruit Company as a global political agent with its banana plantations was met with considerable resistance. Now the company's photographic records are the focal point of Archive Matter as it examines photography's historical and political impact through the argument that this overlooked, but important, archive made capitalist expansion into the Caribbean possible.

Author Liliana Gómez examines the images from within their "optical unconscious" and via the archive's silences and omissions. The implication of these silences, Gómez argues, is the attempt to conceal the violence embedded within the realities of the plantations' daily operations and corporate efforts to "modernize" the Caribbean.

Author Biography

Liliana Gómez is professor of art and society at the University of Kassel, Kunsthochschule Kassel, and the documenta Institut. She is the editor of Performing Human Rights.