El proyecto fotográfico de las Naciones Unidas en América Latina (1945-1980).: Una primera caracterización.

Abstract

This text offers a preliminary approach to the photographic production with which the United Nations and its specialized agencies documented their technical assistance programs in Latin America during the postwar decades. The analyzed material comes mostly from reporting missions organized from the headquarters of entities such as Unesco, WHO, or FAO, and deployed on a global scale as part of ambitious public information campaigns that sought to give legitimacy to the multilateral development model promoted by the UN. The result of these missions was the consolidation of large visual archives, the contents of which circulated actively in various formats such as magazines, traveling exhibitions, albums, and official reports. Both the production and the massive distribution of these images are understood in the text as elements of the same photographic project in which the different agencies agreed from their particular organization charts, and which seeks to thematize aspects such as its historical background, its operational dynamics, the humanitarian rhetoric about the Americas that predominated in the collections, among others. The writing stems from an ongoing investigation that aims to reflect on the way in which certain visual languages – typical of mass culture – contributed to conceptualizing a disputed notion such as development in a geographical space still neglected by literature as it is Latin American. The recorded annotations are based on a methodological triangulation between the official resolutions of the analyzed agencies and the partial observations of a photographic database still in the process of elaboration.