Introduction: Visualities in Conflict. Andrea Noble, an Appreciation

Abstract

In the opening paragraph of her 2000 study of the work of the Italian-American photographer Tina Modotti, Andrea Noble (1968-2017) described writing about photography as, in the first instance, a metaphorical process of unwrapping. Reflecting on an anecdote published in Vogue magazine about a man who appeared at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the early 1950s bearing a large brown paper parcel with a collection of Modotti prints, Noble poses a number of questions as we imaginatively unwrap the package with her: who was this man, why did he make this donation now, what did the prints represent, what would happen to them once inside the museum? Beyond these circumstantial questions, the image of the parcel “conjures up an image of concealment, containment and mystery” (Noble 2000, x). The next stage, though, is an inverse one: a reading process that Andrea describes as “a form of re-wrapping” that requires her not only to appraise the works via critical methodologies but also to interrogate the terms of the original wrapping itself. This new critical re-wrapping is as multifarious as it is incomplete. Firmly committed as she is to both feminist scholarship (strongly influenced by the feminist art historian Griselda Pollock) and to the analysis of Mexican visual culture, Andrea steadfastly refuses to limit her understanding of Modotti’s work to one or other critical or contextual framework. As she co-wrote with Thy Phu and Erina Duganne in her last book, Cold War Camera – a work that turned out to be tragically posthumous on Andrea’s part – and drawing on Walter Benjamin’s idea of the constellation, “the meaning of a photograph (... ) is never finished but exceeds the moment of its taking” (Phu, Duganne, and Noble 2023, 14). In understanding photography and, elsewhere, cinema as complex cultural practices rather than mere objects or artefacts, Andrea seeks to maintain her objects of study in a state of revelatory suspense, as it were: a position from which they can be understood without being labelled, apprehended without being seized. In her short but brilliant career as a self-described “‘reader’ of visual culture” (2000, xi), Andrea Noble was a pre-eminent scholar of Latin American and, in particular, Mexican photography and film. Deftly interweaving close reading,