Portrait of a Man, Portrait of a Woman?

Race, Gender, and Misapprehensions in the Peruvian Photographs Collection at the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen

The Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen’s collection includes a small assortment of nineteenth-century photographs from Peru, each featuring a similarly generic catalogue description such as “Portret van een Peruviaanse man in traditioneel kostuum” (“Portrait of a Peruvian Man in Traditional Costume”), or “Portret van een Peruviaanse vrouw” (“Portrait of a Peruvian Woman”). The descriptions impose an anthropological function on the images, as though their value rests in their visual representativeness of local male and female human types. And yet there are differences in the circumstances of the images’ creation that have bearing on their significance. While some were produced by foreign visitors to the region who were interested in cataloguing its human landscape, others were produced by local photographers for local patrons wanting to pose for posterity. Keeping present Peru’s own deeply-entrenched history of African slavery, a fact which makes the “South American” label a subtle – and strange – act of erasure that severed many of the descriptions’ connection between those portraited in the photos and the place of birth of their ancestors, this article probes the implications of removing the images from their local socio-historical contexts and placing them within a new, display-oriented one with its own set of racial and gendered codes.