In Archive Matter, Liliana Gómez examines the visual economies and discursive regimes of modernity through the photographic archives of the United Fruit Company (UFC) and related institutions. The book offers a theoretically ambitious reading of photographic practices and visual discourses as central to the shaping of modern infrastructures in the Caribbean and Central America. Taking the "laboratory of the modern" as both metaphor and analytical framework, Gómez explores how photography participated in establishing racial hierarchies, economic extraction and scientific regimes, arguing that the archive becomes a site of epistemic production tied to colonial and capitalist systems. The study bridges media theory, visual studies and historical analysis, contributing to debates on photographic evidence, colonial visuality and the archive's testimonial potential.

The book comprises an introduction, four chapters and an epilogue, each organized around a central theoretical concept. Jens Andermann's preface is rich in vivid pictorial references that, even in the absence of actual images, evoke compelling visual impressions, while the theory-based introduction outlines the conceptual framework. Chapter 1 traces photography's role in legitimizing the UFC's modernization efforts. The camera is positioned as an instrument of capitalist ordering, echoing media-theoretical accounts of spatial control and visual appropriation. Chapter 2 explores photography within "discourse networks," linking it to infrastructures such as railroads and telegraphs, and arguing that it stabilized racialized labor hierarchies within the plantation economy. Chapter 3, drawing on concepts of cultural techniques, examines drafting, grafting and collecting within botany, highlighting the entanglement of scientific visualization and agricultural exploitation. Chapter 4 turns to archaeological imagery, tracing how photographic representations of pre-Columbian objects and excavation sites contributed to global flows of identity-making and heritage politics. The epilogue, one of the book's strongest sections, revisits the archives through photographic testimony and human rights discourse, linking images taken around the 1928 Banana Massacre to Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and contemporary debates about Chiquita, the UFC's successor.

Archive Matter is structured conceptually rather than chronologically, with individual chapters anchored in a distinct theoretical paradigm rather than a visual motif or photographic corpus. This allows Gómez to traverse a wide range of topics, including botany, medicine, archaeology and infrastructure - but can be disorienting: Sparse subheadings, dense paragraphs and long quotes occasionally obscure the author's voice. While this reflects Gómez's commitment to theoretical depth, it sometimes narrows the empirical focus. A clearer roadmap of the archive under investigation - its scope, provenance, visual typologies and previous treatment in literature - would have enhanced accessibility and analytical clarity.

Given its title and visual focus, one might expect Archive Matter to engage deeply with photographic theory and image analysis. However, photography more often illustrates than anchors the book's theoretical claims. While the images - mostly album pages - are printed full-page, fitting into the book's layout, their small scale and the reproduction of entire collaged pages often render individual photographs and captions hard to discern. The text rarely refers explicitly to specific visual elements and descriptive or formal analysis is limited. For instance, Gómez asserts that "hierarchy is embodied in the photographic archive's order, in the way the pictures are arranged to imagine technological process" (190), without going into the structure or arrangement of the archive or the albums. The material and visual features of the photographs and albums - captioning, framing, sequencing - are rarely analyzed. This invites reflection on whether photography plays a central role in Gómez's argument, or whether it serves more as a conceptual anchor for a broader history of modernization.

From the perspective of recent photographic theory, which emphasizes the agency of depicted subjects and the interpretive multiplicity of visual media, the book opens valuable pathways but sometimes engages photography in a too conclusive a manner: The absence of references to scholars such as Tina Campt, whose concept of "listening to images" might have counterbalanced the archive's function as a colonial apparatus, limits the exploration of the archive's affective dimensions. [1] Moments where Gómez states that images "undoubtedly witness" (282) or "unquestionably invisibilize" (317) might benefit from a more open-ended stance attuned to the ambiguity central to current discourse in the history and theory of photography.

Gómez, a distinguished scholar in cultural, literary and media studies, demonstrates impressive interdisciplinary breadth in Archive Matter, engaging deeply with media theory combined with scholarship on the UFC and its impact across the Caribbean and Central America. The book, developed from her revised habilitation thesis (2016), is thoughtfully situated within ongoing conversations about colonial visuality and media infrastructures, drawing primarily on German- and English-language sources. Engagement with Spanish-language scholarship, Caribbean and Central American oral histories and the perspectives of those depicted is nevertheless limited with the exception of the epilogue, where these voices offer valuable postcolonial insights. Some archival references remain vague and visual grounding is sometimes unclear. These gaps may frustrate scholars seeking to trace arguments back to primary sources or use the book as a source for their own archival investigations.

Despite these limitations, there are notable moments when Gómez's argument gains momentum and analytical depth. This is especially evident in the epilogue and in occasional close readings, where theoretical and archival perspectives intersect productively. For instance, the connection between Inca ruins and modern railroad infrastructures offers a powerful full-circle moment, where disparate historical and visual regimes converge (292). Likewise, more detailed visual analyses, as in the discussion of photography's role in representing archaeological sites (291), are compelling. The epilogue stands out for its integration of archival photographs, literary texts and contemporary political discourse.

In sum, Archive Matter effectively maps the interplay between visuality, modernity and infrastructure through a media-theoretical lens. Conceptually ambitious, it contributes valuable perspectives to discussions about the politics of the archive and the visual construction of capitalist modernity. Scholars in cultural theory and media studies will find much to engage with in Gómez's text. Readers from photo history or archival studies may seek more sustained visual methodology and deeper engagement with the photographs as objects. Notwithstanding, Archive Matter opens important avenues for thinking about the visual and global dimensions of capitalist modernity, even if it does not always deliver on its promise to center the UFC's photographic archive as a site of knowledge production.

Note:

[1] Tina Campt: Listening to Images, Durham 2017.

Marie Meyerding