Chapter 21 - Visual Technologies

Summary

The turn of the century saw the emergence of a host of different entertainment media through which visual culture was industrialized, commodified, and otherwise modernized. New visual technologies, from photography, moving panoramas, stereoscopes, and cinema, to new image-delivery systems in advertisement and the illustrated press crystalized new forms of social organization and transformed visual perception. Following the modern crónicas of modernista writer Rubén Darío, the article explores the ways in which literary writing faced the challenge of the new mass culture and developed new languages and forms to reach a growing readership in the Latin American modernizing cities. Bridging both sides of the Atlantic and crossing over from the aesthete poet to the popular chronicler, Darío’s writing registers not just the intertwinement of high and mass culture, but above all the forms of spectatorship that delineated “the era of the mechanical reproducibility.”