On Chilean artist, researcher and curator Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo’s expansive exhibition, Mänk’áčen, which presents historical photographs, archival documents, museum and ethnographic collections, scientific reports, field notes and other visual ephemera as an exploration of the camera’s geneses.
By Tejal Pandey
Photos courtesy Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo
The year 2026 marks a mere 200 years since the oldest surviving photograph was believed to have been made by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, as he exposed a coated pewter plate to the shifting sun at Le Gras, his estate in eastern France. However, artist Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo’s research-led project shows that photography, or the mechanics that eventually led to the creation of the camera as a tool for viewing and record-making, might have taken root much earlier.
Lenses from antiquity and polished stones as mirrors were some of the oldest objects humans used for looking—both at the world around them and to study themselves. One imagines lakes and rivers to have been the first reflective surfaces where our ancestors caught fleeting glimpses of themselves. However, documenting the world they experienced, as pre-historic cave art proves, meant recreating from memory. Between these primeval instances and the introduction of the camera, lie several unrecorded histories of seeing and sensing. Organic to native populations from regions often referred to as ‘ends of the world’, unique belief structures that relied on traditional customs and rituals as sources of experience and learning emerged.
Valenzuela-Escobedo’s project Mänk’áčen, meaning ‘shadow’ or ‘image hunter’ in the Yahgan language of South America, developed over five years of his doctoral research. It shows how the camera, as a colonial tool forced upon local cultures, irrevocably altered, sometimes erased, these indigenous trajectories; how it was perceived as an alien tool misaligned with inherent systems. It also traces how the many histories of photography across the world evolved, but hardly on equal footing.
What piqued Valenzuela-Escobedo’s initial interest in what transpired when photography reached the farthest corners of South America were two phrases. One, the Selk’nam expression ‘Toumayacha Alakana’, meaning ‘to look with a veiled head’, used to describe a photographic act, and second, the Yanomami term ‘Noreshi Toway’, meaning ‘to take a person’s double’. With these dual beacons lighting his trail, he set out to build upon his “hypothesis about the atavistic fear surrounding photography” while, in the process, also debunking the common colonial myth of the camera being a soul stealer. “The reasons for refusing the camera were, in reality, far more complex and varied, rooted in distinct cosmologies, moral systems and ways of understanding the relationship between images, bodies, memory and the dead,” explains Valenzuela-Escobedo.
Like a window opening onto a parallel universe, Valenzuela-Escobedo recalls feeling “the need to fully understand a conception of photography that completely escaped the dominant Western understanding of the medium.” The project became a juxtaposition of endemic knowledge systems and colonial perspectives, of tradition and modernity, of resistance and appropriation, and of spirituality, ancient philosophies and progress. Or the ‘myth of progress’ as art critic and curator Justor Pastor Mellado’s essay on ValenzuelaEscobedo’s work describes what remains a relevant discussion. Technological applications, seen as growth and development amongst nations in the grip of globalisation, without adaptation to local conditions continue to be devastating.
Around 1840, when the camera arrived with explorers to places like Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago on the tip of South America, it brought with it diseases and ways of life alien to the Fuegians. ‘When the camera arrived in the Americas, it contributed to a modernist vision that placed civilisation and wilderness in opposition and presented metal and glass as opportunities for progress compared to the forests, deserts, rivers and mountains that dominated the local landscape,’ elucidates Mellado. It wasn’t just about making portraits of an exotic people, but also about controlling the terrain in a bid for ‘civilisation’. ValenzuelaEscobedo echoes Mellado, stating, “One technology colonises the territory, the other the soul,” indicating how the introduction of two major symbols of industrial modernity in Chile—the camera and the railroad—forever altered the Chilean landscape, as it did all else.
To engage with Valenzuela Escobedo’s research is to realise that photographic history, as we’ve known it, is inseparable from the history of civilisation: be it the early astronomical expeditions or world wars, industrial revolution, technological inventions and everything within the gamut of documented world history. Mänk’áčen is a retelling of these histories, only with the inclusion of all the chapters left out of the colonial syllabi.
The bicentennial moment then becomes a pivotal point in revisiting these lost journeys, which, in being many-layered and complex, are as intriguing as they are violent and as extensive as they are similar. Through Mänk’áčen, the artist pushes the audience to actively participate in and reflect upon many crucial ideas. In a multitudinous world, can there really be just a singular historical perspective? What would a world based on pluralism in technology, social orders, economic structures and political outlooks have looked like?
In drawing from transcultural methodologies across histories, astronomy, science and magic, photography, for Valenzuela-Escobedo, becomes a portal to conversations far beyond it. And with every iteration of the show as it travels, from France to Norway to Japan and now to India, parts of these absent archives are revived through shared learnings between him and regional researchers. Fears shared by the Sámi from Arctic Norway, Egyptians and South Americans about the camera capable of causing harm, to terms like ‘Ruh Khich’, meaning ‘spirit pulling’, popular in the early 20th century in what is now Pakistan, reveal deeply complex but strangely connected cultures.
The display of the Indian iteration scheduled to open in August at the Dilip Piramal Art Gallery at the NCPA is a museum-like set-up, with several glass-topped tables holding within them a diverse collection of visual material and supporting notes. Valenzuela-Escobedo gathered these by retracing “the journeys of missionaries, scientists, photographers and artists, searching not only for photographs but also for notebooks, testimonies, correspondence and scientific reports that revealed how photography was understood during its first encounters with indigenous communities in South America in order to understand the genealogy of the apparatus.” If language were a cue, then Valenzuela-Escobedo’s usage of terms like ‘apparatus’ or ‘genesis of the photographic machine’ becomes a searing reminder of the very laboratory-like experiments colonisers subjected native lands and peoples to. He adheres to a similar code of conscience when accessing information from state archives and institutions. “Museum collections are never neutral repositories; they are embedded in political histories that continue to shape how objects circulate, who has access to them, and under what conditions,” asserts Valenzuela-Escobedo.
Studying testimonies of local photographers, ethnographers and visual historians as ways to transform his understanding and “extend the research” is preferred instead. “Reading Roberto Bolaño alongside historical accounts from colonial India, I was struck by recurring references to telepathy and invisible forms of communication. While 19th-century British writers often dismissed these accounts as superstition or mystical exoticism, they also reveal a deeper colonial anxiety: the possibility that systems of communication and memory might exist beyond imperial control. These questions resonate with my long-standing interest in archives that are embodied, relational and transmitted through communities rather than institutions,” he stresses.
Interestingly, photography reached India around the same time that it did South America. And to ValenzuelaEscobedo’s intrigue, it was “…enthusiastically embraced by colonial officials, amateur practitioners and commercial photographers” even as a ‘cure’ to painting’s subjectivity, according to anthropologist and visual cultural theorist Christopher Pinney. Art historian Judith Mara Gutman in Through Indian Eyes, her study of 19th- and early 20th-century photography from India, points to how the language of photography for Indian lensmen was strikingly different from what it was for colonial practitioners or those in colonial employ. A flatter multi-perspective plane, reminiscent of Indian miniature paintings, distinct from Western concepts of single point perspective and image formation was what startled her foremost. ‘The eye rarely moves through an Indian photograph…With no “invitation” into the picture, my eyes did not know how or where to enter. There were no leads, as you find in Western imagery, to other parts of the image,’ she writes in her introduction describing ‘Women at Sipi Fair’, a 1905 image by S. Bindra. Exchanges with Indian colleagues during research taught Gutman about the representation of animals, on how they are perceived in Indian culture and mythology, similar again to South American animist tendencies. Interestingly, the NCPA’s photography gallery opened in 1988 with an exhibition by Gutman, titled after her study. It showcased her collection of photographs taken across India between the 1850s and 1920s.
For Valenzuela-Escobedo, critical theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of the ‘returned look’, when the ‘photographed subject looks back’ is of increasing interest. “Rather than treating colonial photography as a one-sided act of observation, this perspective reveals the photograph as a space of negotiation in which curiosity, resistance, indifference and confrontation all become visible,” he notes. “Thinking about the returned gaze encourages me to reconsider colonial photography not only as a technology of representation, but also as an encounter in which both the observer and the observed participate in the production of meaning.”
This article was originally published in the August 2026 issue of ON Stage.
