Constructing Modernity and Progress: The Imperializing Lens of an American Engineer in the Early Twentieth Century
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2018.i11.263Keywords:
Maxwell Waide Smith, photographyAbstract
Recent visual theory on the decolonization of the photographic frame offers an important alternative to thinking of photographs as artifacts of the past. Here, the authors build on Ariella Azoulay’s idea of ‘watching’ photographs—as opposed to ‘looking’—to restore and reinscribe links to the past in order to locate ‘potential histories’ in the construction of America (2008, 2013). In ‘watching’ photographs in American engineer Maxwell Waide Smith’s albums of the Kansas City, Mexico & Orient Railway (1907-1908) and the Panama Canal construction project (1913-1914), the authors explore the arena of action and actors beyond the frame of the photographs to contextualize the social and political histories in which the albums were made. Approaching photography as an event rather than an artifact enables consideration of the encounters recorded by the camera and the relations, responsibilities and repercussions generated by the photographic situation, from the perspectives of those implicated in the picture-making process. These photographic albums provide an opportunity for exploring the engineer’s perspective, contrasting it with views of laborers and local communities caught up in American nation-building activities. Between the albums, a clear transition appears through the lens of the young, naïve engineer in his first field project in Mexico, taking on a more imperialist perspective as a seasoned engineer in Panama. Presented is a reflection—founded on historical photographic analysis—on (discounted) opportunities to build a cooperative rather than competitive America, and to explore the internal cultural changes that took place within the U.S. as the nation moved from a progressive engine of modernity to an agent of expansionist imperialism.References
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Thatcher, Maurice H. “The Panama Canal – Its History and Significance.” Kentucky Historical Society. Delivered before the Alumni Association of the University of Alabama, May 26, 1930. Washington: United States, Government Printing Office, Speeches of Kentucky Congressmen, 1828-1930, Pamphlet Vol. 1, 328C749, Speech no. 26.
Winsborough, W.C. “Kansas City, Missouri: Kansas City, Mexico & Orient Railway Co.” The North American Review (March 1903): 481-86.
Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008.
Azoulay, Ariella. “Potential History: Thinking through Violence.” Critical Inquiry 39.3 (2013): 548–574. https://doi.org/10.1086/670045.
Azoulay, Ariella. Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography. London: Verso, 2012.
Berger, John. Understanding a Photograph. New York: Aperture, 2013.
Collin, Richard H. Theodore Roosevelt’s Caribbean: The Panama Canal, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Latin American Context. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.
Conniff, Michael L. Panama and the United States: The End of the Alliance. Third Edition. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2012.
Greene, Julie. The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.
Higgins, J. Wallace, III. “The Orient Road: A History of the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railroad.” The Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin 95 (October 1956): 10-46.
Hogan, Michael. The Panama Canal in American Politics: Domestic Advocacy and the Evolution of Policy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986.
Kerr, John Leeds. Destination Topolobampo: The Kansas City, Mexico & Orient Railway. San Marino: Golden West Books, 1968.
LaFeber, Walter. The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Lagae, Johan. “‘Unsettling the “Colonizing Camera’: Curatorial Notes on the ‘Congo belge en images’ Project.” Photography and Culture 5.3 (November 2012): 327-342. https://doi.org/10.2752/175145212X13415789393009.
Lasso, Marixa. “A Canal Without a Zone: Conflicting Representations of the Panama Canal.” Journal of Latin American Geography 14.3 (2015): 157-74.
Lien, Sigrid, Elizabeth Edwards and Susan Legêne. “Photographic Legacies: Addressing the Colonial Past in Europe.” Photography and Culture 5.3 (November 2012): 261–264. https://doi.org/10.2752/175145212X13415789392848.
“Life in the Zone.” The Land Divided, the World United, 2018. www.panama.lindahall.org/life-zone/.
Maxwell Waide Smith Papers, 1879-1961. “Scrapbook 1880-1920.” Kentucky Historical Society, Box 2, Folder 8.
Maxwell Waide Smith Papers, 1879-1961. “Panama Canal, 1913-1914.” Kentucky Historical Society. MSS 40, Folders 1-3, Box 2 Folder 8.
Maxwell Waide Smith Papers, 1879-1961. “Panama Canal, 1913-1914.” Kentucky Historical Society. MSS 40, Folders 1-3, Box 2 Folder 9.
Maxwell Waide Smith Papers, 1879-1961. “Panama Canal, 1913-1914.” Kentucky Historical Society. MSS 40, Folders 1-3, Box 2 Folder 10.
Maxwell Waide Smith Papers, 1879-1961. “Photo Album Mexico 1907.” Kentucky Historical Society. MSS40, Box 2, Folder 3.
Noble, Andrea. “Recognizing Historical Injustice through Photography: Mexico 1968.” Theory, Culture & Society 27 (2010): 184–213. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276410383714.
Payne, Carol. “Culture, Memory and Community through Photographs: Developing an Inuit-based Research Methodology.” Anthropology & Photography 5 (2016): 1–17. https://doi.org/ISSN 2397-1754.
Rosenberg, Emily S. Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890- 1945. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.
Sekula, Alan. “Reading an Archive: Photography Between Labour and Capital.” Mining Photograph and Other Pictures: A Selection from the Archives of Shedden Studio, Glace Bay, 1948-1968. Eds. Benjamin
Buchloch and Robert Wilkes. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983. 443– 452.
Senior, Olive. Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2014.
Sliwinski, Sharon. Seven Theses on the Photographic Situation. 2012.
https://thephotographicsituation.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/seven-theses-on-the-photographicsituation/
State of Kentucky. Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of Kentucky. Louisville: The Globe Printing Company, 1907.
Stilwell, Arthur E. Cannibals of Finance: Fifteen Years’ Contest with the Money Trust. Chicago: The Farnum Publishing Co., 1912.
Thatcher, Maurice H. “The Panama Canal – Its History and Significance.” Kentucky Historical Society. Delivered before the Alumni Association of the University of Alabama, May 26, 1930. Washington: United States, Government Printing Office, Speeches of Kentucky Congressmen, 1828-1930, Pamphlet Vol. 1, 328C749, Speech no. 26.
Winsborough, W.C. “Kansas City, Missouri: Kansas City, Mexico & Orient Railway Co.” The North American Review (March 1903): 481-86.
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