Episode 5: Other Histories of Photography

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About Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo

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Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo is a Chilean artist, researcher, curator and educator based in Paris. His practice lies at the intersection of artistic research, curatorial practice and education. Alongside Mänk’áčen, his curatorial projects include Mapuche at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation and Bosques Geométricos at Les Rencontres d’Arles, among others.

His recent writing has also examined the renewed visibility of Indigenous photographers within European and international art institutions, asking how attempts at decolonisation can avoid reproducing exoticisation, tokenism and existing structures of power.

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 “Excluded or Exoticised? The European Gaze in Indigenous Spaces” - Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo

 

Show Notes

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00:15  Two hundred years of photography?

Kaamna opens the episode by taking the bicentennial as a point from which to think about modernity, photographic history and the episodes of Glass Eye to come. The NCPA frames 2026-27 as the Bicentennial of Photography, while Mänk’áčen deliberately complicates the usefulness of any single photographic “birthday”. Its larger question is not simply who invented photography, but what histories of optics, image-making and seeing become invisible when the story begins in nineteenth-century France.

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New Histories of Seeing - NCPA

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03:18  The artist as researcher.

Sergio calls the exhibition tables “stations”: arrangements of the material accumulated while writing his doctorate. He insists that what is on display is not simply an artwork illustrating a thesis; the relationships and tensions between pieces of archival material constitute the research itself. The first state of Mänk’áčen was presented at ENSP in 2021 as part of Sergio’s doctoral research and creation.

The first state of Mänk’áčen at ENSP Arles

 

04:29  The Nimrud or Layard Lens.

The small rock-crystal object that begins the walkthrough was excavated by Austen Henry Layard at the North-West Palace at Nimrud, in present-day Iraq, and dates to approximately 750-710 BCE. Although commonly known as the “Nimrud Lens”, the British Museum catalogues it more cautiously as a polished rock-crystal inlay, noting that it has been interpreted as a lens but would have had little or no practical optical use. That uncertainty is useful to Sergio: the object opens the possibility of thinking about a genealogy of optics without simply declaring another definitive “first”.

 The Nimrud / Layard Lens - British Museum

 

06:05  Maxime Du Camp, Egypt and Hadji Ismael.

Maxime Du Camp travelled through Egypt, Nubia and Palestine with Gustave Flaubert in 1849-51, producing more than 200 calotypes. In a number of his architectural photographs a Nubian sailor named Hadji Ismael appears as a human scale marker, almost disappearing against ancient monuments. Du Camp later recounted that he persuaded Ismael to remain motionless by telling him the brass lens was a cannon that would fire if he moved - an anecdote that makes the seemingly technical act of establishing scale inseparable from photographic power and coercion.

Maxime Du Camp and Hadji Ismael - British Library

A Du Camp photograph with Hadji-Ishmael - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

09:15  An Amazonian waterlily and the Crystal Palace.

Sergio’s genealogy makes an unexpected jump from glass optics to botany and architecture. Joseph Paxton’s experiments with glass-and-iron greenhouse construction - including the Lily House at Chatsworth - fed directly into his design for the Crystal Palace. The building housed the Great Exhibition of 1851, a spectacular display of international industry, manufacture and empire. It becomes part of Sergio’s constellation of glass, iron, modernity, extraction and the circulation of forms between continents.

 The Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Crystal Palace - V&A

 

13:22  Astronomy and the Transit of Venus.

Astronomy repeatedly appears in Mänk’áčen. Nineteenth-century observations of the Transit of Venus were part of international attempts to determine the scale of the Solar System, particularly the Earth-Sun distance. Sergio follows the movement of astronomical instruments alongside the photographic apparatus, until the transit of Venus and the photographing of human bodies occupy the same colonial expedition.

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15:39  François Arago and photography’s official history.

On 19 August 1839, astronomer and politician François Arago publicly presented the daguerreotype process at the Académie des sciences in Paris. The date became extraordinarily powerful in subsequent histories of photography because it provides a convenient public “point zero”: a stable process, a public announcement and rapid international circulation. Sergio’s project is interested precisely in what disappears when this moment becomes the beginning of everything.

Histoire(s) de la photographie - Académie des sciences

 

16:04  L’Oriental-Hydrographe and the camera’s journey to Chile.

Months after the announcement of the daguerreotype, the French training ship L’Oriental-Hydrographe reached Valparaíso in 1840 carrying a daguerreotype camera. In Sergio’s exhibition the voyage becomes a story about the astonishing speed at which a new apparatus travelled through global maritime networks. The ship subsequently wrecked off the Chilean coast, producing another layer of speculation around photography, disappearance and archives. Historical accounts differ over whether photographs were actually made in Chile during this visit, so the “lost daguerreotypes” remain more tantalising possibility than established fact.

Early photography in Chile - Universidad Diego Portales

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21:30  Hercule Florence: another origin.

Antoine Hercule Romuald Florence, a French-born artist and inventor living in Brazil, conducted independent experiments with the camera obscura and light-sensitive silver salts at Vila de São Carlos, present-day Campinas, in 1833. Instituto Moreira Salles preserves examples of his experiments and scientific manuscripts. IMS dates his use of the word Photographie in his diaries to 1834 - well before Daguerre’s public announcement in Paris. Florence therefore offers a particularly powerful example of why the history of photography becomes more complicated as soon as we look beyond its canonical centres.

 Hercule Florence - Instituto Moreira Salles

 The discovery of Florence - Instituto Moreira Salles

 

23:13  The French Scientific Mission to Cape Horn, 1882-83.

A central archive for Sergio’s research comes from the Mission scientifique du Cap Horn, which combined astronomy, meteorology, natural history and ethnographic documentation in Tierra del Fuego. Four surviving albums held by France’s Service historique de la Défense contain 320 albumen prints, including many photographs of Fuegian people. The photographs make visible the proximity between scientific measurement, ethnography and the photographic encounter.

Mission scientifique du Cap Horn, 1882-83 - Service historique de la Défense

 

27:39  “To look with a veiled head”.

Toumayacha Alakana lies at the origin of Sergio’s research and is translated within the project as “to look with a veiled head”. The phrase redirects attention from the resulting photograph towards the strangeness of the apparatus and its operator: a human being disappearing beneath a cloth in order to look. Alongside it, other expressions in Sergio’s research describe photography through doubles, shadows and images of the dead. The familiar story of the camera “stealing the soul” therefore becomes not an answer but a question: where did the myth originate, and what more complex histories of photographic refusal has it obscured?

 Mänk’áčen - first state at ENSP Arles

 

28:29  Camera, railway and modernity.

In Sergio’s diagram, the arrival of photography in South America coincides with the spread of railways, iron, glass, steam and industrial infrastructure. He describes the railway as participating in the conquest of territory and asks whether the camera might perform a related conquest at the level of representation. Later in the episode this becomes a larger debate over whether photography can be “decolonised” without thinking about the industrial apparatus that produces it.

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33:49  Vilém Flusser and the black box.

Sergio invokes Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser, whose Towards a Philosophy of Photography thinks of the camera not merely as a passive tool but as an apparatus governed by programmes that structure what its user is able to do. It offers an important background to Sergio’s distinction between the history of photography as a medium and the genealogy of the camera as a technical object.

 Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography - Reaktion Books

 

39:36  Science, magic and the danger of romanticising the Indigenous.

Claude Lévi-Strauss enters the exhibition through his refusal to treat magical thought as merely an immature stage on the path towards Western science. Yet Sergio is equally suspicious of the inverse move: a contemporary romanticisation in which Indigenous or animist worlds become fantasies through which Europeans hope to recover an imagined ecological purity. His recent writing on Indigenous photography extends this concern to contemporary curatorial practice.

 Sergio on the European gaze in Indigenous spaces - 1000 Words

 

42:45  Who is allowed to photograph whom?

The conversation moves from nineteenth-century encounters towards an argument very much in the present: how can photographers negotiate difference without reproducing extraction, and what happens when ethical caution hardens into the idea that one should only photograph within one’s own community? For Sergio, the question is not whether an “other” exists, but how the photographer approaches them; Akshay connects this to solidarity across otherwise very different histories.

 

45:30  The India station.

The Mumbai iteration introduces material through which Sergio begins cautiously testing correspondences between South America and South Asia. One of these is an image of a protective object from the Nicobar Islands containing the figure of a photographer beneath a black cloth. Sergio deliberately leaves the interpretation unresolved: an archival trace becomes the beginning of another question rather than proof of a universal response to photography.

 

46:56  Ruh Khitch: “spirit pulling”.

Photographer Malcolm Hutcheson’s research into Pakistani street box cameras provides one of the episode’s most delightful linguistic turns. Ruh Khitch translates literally as “spirit pulling”, but rather than referring to a camera stealing someone’s soul, Hutcheson explains that it describes the photographer physically placing a hand inside the combined camera-darkroom and pulling out the photograph after processing it. Akshay connects it to the Hindi/Punjabi expression tasveer khinchna: we do not literally “take” an image, we pull it.

 Malcolm Hutcheson - Ruh Khitch / Spirit Pulling

 

48:43  Octavio Paz and a South-South imaginary.

Mexican poet Octavio Paz served as Mexico’s ambassador to India from 1962 to 1968, and his encounter with India became an important part of his later writing. In Light of India approaches India through comparison as much as description, repeatedly allowing Mexico and India to illuminate one another. Sergio brings Paz into Mänk’áčen as one possible precedent for thinking across Latin America and South Asia without routing every comparison through Europe.

Octavio Paz, In Light of India

 

50:38  Copies, doubles and Trishanku’s world.

Akshay responds with a half-remembered Indian story of a sage creating another world filled with imperfect doubles. The story belongs to the mythology around Trishanku and Vishvamitra, and A. K. Ramanujan uses a version of this shadow-world in his extraordinary essay “Where Mirrors Are Windows: Toward an Anthology of Reflections”. It becomes an unexpected but apt companion to Mänk’áčen: photography too produces doubles whose meanings refuse to remain subordinate to their originals.

A. K. Ramanujan, “Where Mirrors Are Windows” - History of Religions

 

52:53  Judith Mara Gutman and Through Indian Eyes.

The final station turns back onto the institution hosting the exhibition. American photo historian Judith Mara Gutman curated Through Indian Eyes: An Exhibition of 19th and Early 20th Century Photographs from India at the International Center of Photography in New York in 1982. Her project argued for forms of photographic seeing in India that could differ substantially from European pictorial conventions. The exhibition subsequently inaugurated the Piramal Gallery at the NCPA in 1988. NCPA’s own institutional history says that Gutman later donated the exhibited photographs to its archives, beginning the institution’s permanent photography collection.

Through Indian Eyes - International Center of Photography

 

55:36  Who owns an archive?

Sergio reveals that the seemingly museum-like objects throughout Mänk’áčen are largely reproductions. Digital access allows him to “sneak into” institutional archives, copy material and reassemble it into another history. That gesture raises questions about who is permitted to see, reproduce and interpret museum collections - and who gets to write history from them. The conversation then jumps forward: if so much contemporary photography now resides in social platforms, corporate servers and AI datasets, what will an archive of our present look like in another two hundred years?

 

1:01:37  After the walkthrough: Adira and Akshay on artistic research.

Adira returns to the form of the exhibition itself. What happens when a doctorate is not simply translated into a book or academic argument, but made spatial and experiential? Artistic research, she suggests, allows uncertainty, ambiguity and speculation to remain visible rather than forcing every archival fragment towards a definitive answer.

 

1:13:15  The photographed subject looks back.

The discussion turns towards the asymmetry of colonial archives and Homi K. Bhabha’s idea of the returned look. Sergio has described this as a way of recognising that the colonial photograph is not entirely a one-directional act: curiosity, resistance, indifference and confrontation may also remain visible in the photographed subject’s gaze.

 Tejal Pandey, “New Histories of Seeing” - NCPA

 

1:22:29  “amer/indian” and the violence of naming.

The typography used throughout Sergio’s project deliberately scars the term “Amerindian” as amer/indian. In Justo Pastor Mellado’s accompanying text, the slash separates two worlds, while the intervention draws attention to the absurd colonial genealogy of the word itself: “America” derived from Amerigo Vespucci, and “Indian” from Columbus’s mistaken belief that he had reached India.

 

1:22:29  National Geographic and the persistence of the colonial visual template.

Akshay and Adira discuss how the nineteenth-century structure of explorer, camera and exoticised subject survived long after photography had become ubiquitous. In 2018, National Geographic asked historian John Edwin Mason to investigate its own archive; editor Susan Goldberg subsequently acknowledged that decades of the magazine’s coverage had reproduced racist and exoticising representations of non-Western peoples.

“For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist” - National Geographic

 

1:26:33  What happens when the camera changes hands?

The episode closes by complicating the distinction between the colonial camera and photography itself. In South Asia, photographic technology was taken up by local practitioners relatively early and absorbed into portraiture, family photography, painted photographs, devotional images and other existing visual cultures. Adira asks whether the apparatus may carry one history while the medium begins to escape it once it is appropriated and transformed by its users.

 

1:36:14  Shadow hunters and multiple histories.

Returning to the title Mänk’áčen - translated within the project as “shadow hunter” or “image hunter” - Akshay and Adira find a metaphor for the exhibition itself. Photographs are doubles, but histories can double too. An image may be fixed chemically or digitally while its meaning remains unsettled, continually altered by the archive, the institution, the viewer and the moment in which it is encountered.

 

A note on the NCPA photography archive

Towards the end of the episode, Akshay and Sergio speculate about what happened to the collection associated with Judith Mara Gutman and Through Indian Eyes. The conversation is intentionally speculative: neither knows its present status while recording. The source we have subsequently been able to verify is the NCPA’s own institutional history, which states that Gutman donated the exhibits from the 1988 show to the NCPA archives and that this donation began the permanent collection. It does not support the suggestion made in passing during the recording that the collection was destroyed in a fire. Its present location, condition and accessibility remain a very interesting subject for further investigation.

 NCPA institutional history (PDF)

 

Further reading

For readers who want to follow the ideas beyond the episode, we particularly recommend Sergio’s Mänk’áčen book and doctoral material; Tejal Pandey’s essay on the Mumbai exhibition; Vilém Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography; Judith Mara Gutman’s Through Indian Eyes; A. K. Ramanujan’s “Where Mirrors Are Windows”; Malcolm Hutcheson’s Ruh Khitch; and Sergio’s recent essay on Indigenous photography and European exhibition-making.

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• Mänk’áčen - Palais Books

•  Sergio’s doctoral project - ENSP Arles

• Tejal Pandey, “New Histories of Seeing”

• Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography

• Judith Mara Gutman, Through Indian Eyes - ICP

• A. K. Ramanujan, “Where Mirrors Are Windows”

• Malcolm Hutcheson, Ruh Khitch

• Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo, “Excluded or Exoticised?”