The researcher and art historian Santiago Londoño Vélez writes a thorough account of the life and work of the well-known Colombian photographer Melitón Rodríguez. Londoño describes various economic and sociocultural aspects of the development of photography in Antioquia and of Rodríguez’s social environment, which explain this photographer-artist’s modern perspective. The article also documents the important role played by Horacio Marino Rodríguez, the photographer’s brother, in the history of photography in that part of the country. Horacio is the author of the book, Diez y ocho lecciones sobre fotografía [Eighteen Lessons on Photography] (published in 1897), a work of incalculable value for understanding the development of photography in Colombia. Londoño talks about the creation of the Rodríguez and Jaramillo photography and painting studio, discusses Rodríguez’s early artistic accomplishments while he was involved with this art group, and recalls the important influence of the painter Francisco Antonio Cano. This chapter, which includes Londoño’s analysis of the valuable document Cuaderno de caja de la Fotografía de Rodríguez [Rodríguez Photography Notebook], reveals that Melitón Rodríguez was a photographer-artist in the modern sense of the term. He was in a constant state of creative inquiry—exploring technical and aesthetic questions—that inspired him to use photography as an artistic form of expression in the midst of financial difficulties and unique daily circumstances.             

Testigo ocular. La fotografía en Antioquia, 1848-1950 [Eye Witness: Photography in Antioquia], the book by Santiago Londoño Vélez (b. 1955) that includes the chapter “Foto Rodríguez” [Rodríguez Photography], is an exceptionally useful document for those who wish to study the development of photography in Colombia. Londoño completes a project that he began two decades earlier, participating in the preparation of two photographic exhibitions in Medellín (in 1988 and 1993). He relied on research done at the University of Texas at Austin and at the Agfa Photo-Historama at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany. Londoño had already published a preview of his project in the article “Pioneros de la fotografía en Antioquia” [Pioneers of Photography in Antioquia] in the magazine Credencial Historia [History Document] in 1996. He had also studied various artistic phenomena and cultural practices in that particular region, as well as in the rest of the country.   

Londoño’s book should be viewed within the context of the development of photographic archives in Medellín, which began in 1981 with the exhibition 100 años de la fotografía en Antioquia [100 Years of Photography in Antioquia] and the subsequent creation, with the Fundación Antioqueña para los Estudios Sociales (FAES) [Antioquian Foundation for Social Studies], of the Centro de Memoria Visual de Medellín [Visual Memory Center of Medellín]. These early steps later led to the creation of the photographic archive at the Biblioteca Pública Piloto [Pilot Public Library], one of the largest and most important resources of its kind in Latin America. Londoño’s book clearly makes serious and creative use of the documentation that this cultural and institutional enclave has managed to preserve in the last thirty years. It provides a highly localized account—brimming with people’s names and everyday details—of the story of photography in the region of Antioquia. It relies on analytical details (of great conceptual importance) that help to explain concepts, such as the modern photographic perspective, the relationship between economics, technique, and aesthetics, the influence of sociocultural contexts, and the perception of photography as the eye witness of a range of transcendental social phenomena.      

It should be noted, in the case of the chapter reviewed here, that the work of Melitón Rodríguez (1875–1942) occupies a venerable position in Latin American photography. Rodríguez’s photographic work belongs in a canon—developed by the North Americans in the early twentieth century—that achieves a unique aesthetic synthesis between direct photography and pictorial photography. Rodríguez was aware of his constant experimenting due to the way in which painting had influenced his photographic work and that had made him acutely conscious of beauty and the artistic feeling involved. He worked in several genres, such as portrait, documentary photography, and an artistic form of experimenting that included allegorical images.