El Álbum del Santa Lucía as a visual narrative artifact. Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna and the photographic registers

Abstract

Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna's Album de Santa Lucía (1874) is studied here as a cultural artifact whose visual narrative construction reveals modern ways to understand the relationship between photography and writing. Beyond the notion of the album as a testimony of the urban transformations undertaken by the Intendent of Santiago, this article delves into the complexity of a piece gifted with a not sufficiently studied conceptual richness. Vicuña Mackenna elaborates a single narration by means of a noteworthy combination of written and photographic fragments, thus revealing novel ways to articulate senses. Moreover, Vicuña Mackenna’s reflections on photographic, visual, and optical devices show how these registers were intermingled in the Chilean fin de siècle culture, as well as the way this author was acquainted with the global debates that were then taking place on these matters.