Natalia Baquedano Hurtado

Pareja, ca. 1900

Linda Atach, Claudia Flores Lobatn, Claudia Pretelin (Posgrado UNAM)


Born in the state of Quertaro in 1872 and deceased in Mexico City in 1936 at age 64,
Natalia Baquedano is considered a pioneer female photographer in Mexico. Natalia
moved to the capital of the country where she enrolled at the San Carlos Academy to
study Art. In 1898 she opened her studio, one of the first woman-owned photography
workshops, at Alcaiceria #6 and Cinco de Mayo streets. Historians have described
Baquedano as an independent woman who did not get married and did not have
children, challenging feminine ideals of her time. However, this allowed her to have a
professional career as a photographer. According to Griselda Pollock referring to the
art scene in Parisian bourgeois society Women were meant to be mothers and
domestic angels who did not work and certainly did not earn money.
1
Although
women seeking professional careers in the fine arts were restricted in their
opportunities, in Mexico photography became a more socially accepted profession for
those female apprentices that learned from their fathers or their husbands. By 1900
there were 30 women photographers in the country, 4 were located in Mexico City
2
;
it is within these historical and social limitations that Baquedanos work developed. In
this photograph, Pareja, 1900 we observe a married couple posing for the camera. We
can safely assume they are thus due to the handwritten dedication on the back of the
image which includes the signature of L. Sotomayor and his wife Concepcin R. De
Sotomayor. Being a portrait, in the strong sense of the genre, the photographer offers
us a glance into the inner character of the subjects. The efficacy of representation in

1
Griselda Pollock, Intervenciones feministas en las historias del arte en Visin y Diferencia.
Feminismo, feminidad e historias del arte, Buenos Aires, Fiordo, 2013, p. 36.
2
Censo General de Poblacin en 1900. En Mara de La Luz Parcero. Condiciones de la mujer en el
Mxico del Siglo XIX. Mxico, INAH, 1992. p.79.
this photograph enacts what Pollock addresses in her studies on photography; the
image [] codes the body through the rhetoric of posture, gesture, position in space,
and in relation to a viewer. It positions the body in representation, which is to say it
produces a body for representation.
3
We can observe a happy couple, relaxed and
comfortable sharing their intimacy with us, inferred from the husband gently leaning
his head on his wifes, an unusual characteristic in portraits of this period. In the
photograph the wife seems to be taller than her husband.
In this image, Baquedano activates the sexual difference
4
in a visual operation
that evidences the closeness of the photographer with the photographed a camaraderie
which is not appreciated in the stiff portraits of her male colleagues, with the
recreation of a relaxed environment, where the loving, submissive and even devoted
male figure is rid of his natural and forced pose to let his head lean close to a self
assured womans face. Her work operates as a communicating vessel among the
women-segregating and restrictive traditional discourse of the time, and the authors
point of view. The photographs of this Queretan woman confirm the existence of a
feminist discourse among the practices of the time. Baquedano has attained
recognition for her evocative portraits of her sister Clemencia with an aesthetics that
depicts grace and great sensibility. Her style merged studio portrait-making with
deliberately aesthetic techniques that are a characteristic of Pictorialism.


3
Griselda Pollock, Feminism/Foucault-Surveillance/Sexuality en Norman Brysson, Michael Ann
Holly, Keith Moxey (ed.), Visual Culture. Images and Interpretations, Middletown, Connecticut,
Wesleyan University Press, 1994, p.20.
4
Ver Laura Malosetti, "Introduccin" en Griselda Pollock, op. cit., pp. 11-18.