UC Riverside

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the leaders of Mexico’s governmental and imperial regimes employed French photographers to produce official imagery for the country. François Aubert (1829-1906) created thousands of cartes-de-visite portraits for Maximilian I (1832-1867) within the Second Mexican Empire (1864-1867). Aubert also photographed ethnographic ‘popular Mexican types’ and upon Maximilian’s execution in 1867 by firing squad, captured historical views of Maximilian post-mortem. In 1880-1910, left-wing dictator Porfirio Díaz (1830-1915) furthered Maximilian’s tradition of state-sponsored photography and commissioned Alfred ‘Abel’ Briquet (1833-1936) to produce albumen prints of his regime’s success; photographs of landscapes, ethnographic portraits, railroads, and Mexica sculpture within Porfirio’s new Gallery of Monoliths epitomized the regimes slogan of ‘order and progress’. The images created by Aubert and Briquet provided views of Mexico to a wide audience who would construct an imaginary image of Mexico that shaped the nation’s reception and perception thereafter. Through historical and formal analysis and calling upon post-colonial methodologies, I critically engage with the works of François Aubert and Alfred ‘Abel’ Briquet as propagandistic productions of Mexican views during their respective historical moments. I argue that these photographs venerated imperial and governmental control over Indigenous Mexicans and Mesoamerican visual culture. Throughout this Master’s thesis, I work towards a connected art history by laying out multiple visual lineages centering around Aubert and Briquet’s imagined views of Mexico during the Second Mexican Empire and the Porfiriato to consider the relationship between their propagandistic photography and imperial power.