Gomes Casseres y su Banana series (1907-1920): Imaginación fotográfica en postales de Costa Rica
Ciudad de México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Investagaciones Sobre América Latina y el Caribe, 2020. First Edition. Paperback. 440p., photos, facsimiles, bibl., indices, wrps. New. Item #78127
ISBN: 9786073035095
"Gomes Casseres y su Banana Series (1907-1920)" is the perfect book to put on the reading list of any beginning PhD student, but senior researchers will no less take great benefit from it. It is an inspiring and perfectly didactic work on how to investigate an object that at first sight resists any “real” research, while gradually appearing as a fascinating topic, first written in invisible ink and then slowly making itself known as a crucial document and testimony. At the beginning, the corpus in question is no more than this: a single image belonging to a larger set of 12 postcards documenting but probably also advertising the banana trade, made by an unknown amateur photographer (Gomes Casseres), working on behalf of a company that has changed name for quite some time (the United Fruit Company, now Chiquita Brands International) and centered on a currently somewhat neglected place and time (Costa Rica in the first decades of the 20th century). At the end, the picture will have changed dramatically, with the reconstruction of the whole series (including the still materially missing gap of post card number 11, only available as an internet image), the biography of its author (although the authorship of the images themselves remains a very tricky issue), and a fine-grained analysis of both the images and the context (the larger context being that of a pseudo-independent “banana republic”).
Price: $75.00