In this essay, Rita Ferrer discusses photography based on an international critique of several periods. She refers to authors such as Roland Barthes, Charles Baudelaire, and the Chilean artist Carlos Leppe, claiming that they all share a “touching love for their mother.” Ferrer notes that Barthes shows a photograph of his mother at the beginning of his book, Cámara Lúcida. She mentions Baudelaire’s distrust of photography, as reflected in a quote from a letter he wrote to his mother. She explains that, given the absence of a family album, Leppe asked his mother, “What is a photograph?” Ferrer also discusses the opinions of the critic Ronald Kay, who undertook a reading of photography in Latin America.

In 1997, the journalist and essayist Rita Ferrer wrote “La madre fotografía,” which appeared in the Arts & Letters section of the Santiago newspaper El Mercurio. It was subsequently published in her book Yo, fotografía [I, Photography] (2002 edition) along with fourteen essays that approached the subject of photography from different perspectives ranging from theory to the visual arts (with a special interest in Chilean art). The subjects and artists reviewed include the poetic-visual work of Juan (“Xuan”) Luis Martínez (1942–1993), as well as the works of Carlos Altamirano (b. 1954), Eugenio Dittborn (b. 1943), and the photographer Paz Errázuriz (b. 1944), among others.

Since the 1980s, Ferrer has written many essays about art, with a focus on photography. In 2010 she published her second book, ¿Quién es el autor de esto? [Who is the Author of This?], which includes eleven interviews with photographers, performers, and artists, plus three articles that discuss the connection between performance, photography, and authorship. In her essay “La madre fotografía,” Ferrer discusses the work of Carlos Leppe (1952–2015), who created performance and installation projects from a biographical perspective, including subjects that addressed heteronormativity and the most traumatic aspects of the sociopolitical situation in Chile during the military dictatorship (1973–90). His work was produced during the early stages of the contemporary experimentation movement and was reviewed as part of the Escena de Avanzada by the theorist and cultural critic Nelly Richard (b. 1948) in “Rhetoric of the body” (doc. no. 744815), a chapter of her book Margins and Institutions. Art in Chile Since 1973 that was published in Australia in 1986.

Ronald Kay (1941–2017), the theorist quoted by Ferrer, made an important contribution to the conversation about photography in Latin America through his work with the artist Eugenio Dittborn that appeared in the book Del espacio de acá. Señales para una mirada americana (1980). [On the subject of Kay’s book, see: “Addenda” (doc. no. 749244)].