In slow motion. Rethinking Ronald Kay’s poetics of photography and the “American Viewpoint”

Abstract

This article offers to re-examine and discuss some of the ideas defended by Ronald Kay in Del espacio de acá, señales para una mirada americana (1980) and, more particularly, the emphasis he placed on the role played by photography in the articulation of what he defined as an “American Viewpoint”. It reconsiders two central ideas developed by Kay in the chapter “The Reproduction of the New World” in which he argued that an early American photography represented on one hand a “dyschronic” mode of registering and, on the other hand, came to replace a pictorial tradition that had failed in its ambition to represent the American landscape and face. This revision seeks to amplify and update the reception of Kay”s thesis by considering ideas of other authors such as Navarrete, Chiriboga, Kossoy y Krauss and their own, more recent, approach to the history of photography at both a global and Latin America scale.