Annemarie Heinrich and Modern Women: Photography, Glamour, and Women's Visibility in Modern Buenos Aires

GLUZMAN, GEORGINA

Washington DC

Conferencia; Sixth Feminist Art History Conference; 2018

American University

The work of German-born Argentine photographer Annemarie Heinrich (1912?2005) has only recently begun to attract interest from art historians. Some of these readings have offered a rather simplistic portrait of the artist and her context: she is often presented as a lonely female hero in a hostile environment. The myth of the so-called Great Female Artist surfaces over and over, following an established tradition in Argentine art historiography. This paper focuses on Annemarie Heinrich?s photographs of women from the 1930s. Even though these images were intended for many different uses and functions, from mass media to commissioned portraits, they show a stable set of visual traits. I argue that these images, whose subject matter ranges from anonymous women to movie stars and female sculptors, are visual comments on the deeply desired modernization of women´s roles in Argentina and Latin America. They construct in visual terms a so-called modern femininity, which is characterized by beauty and glamour. To better understand Annemarie Heinrich´s representations of modern women, I ask and answer these questions: how was the modern woman constructed in visual terms?, how did these images circulate?, and finally, what is the connection between them and other contemporary visual representations, like the ones that could be found in popular illustrated magazines or in the work of contemporary artists also interested in women?s roles?