Luisa Fernanda Arrieta Fernandez

This project examines how Afro-Colombians used portrait photography between 1880 and 1930 to negotiate the visual terms of citizenship and national belonging in the aftermath of slavery. Focusing on the main urban centers at the time, some selected in part for their significant Afro-Colombian populations—Cartagena, Bogotá, Cali, Medellín and Quibdó—it explores how Black Colombians paid for, posed in, and preserved studio portraits that challenged the liberal state’s racialized visual narratives. Drawing from Latin American and African Diaspora History and informed by Visual Culture Studies, the research argues that photography functioned both as a tool of governance and a site of contestation, enabling Afrodiasporic subjects to assert self-representation and reshape the visual boundaries of post-emancipation citizenship.