Picturing an Antarctic country. Robert Gerstmann, photography and the chilean antarctic landscapes. 1932-1959

This paper analyzes the photographs of southern Chile that Robert Gerstmann took and disseminated between the publication of his book Chile: 280 grabados en Cobre (1932) and Chile en 235 cuadros (1959) to delve into the way in which the inclusion of his first images of the Chilean Antarctic in the second was linked to the definition of an imaginary of an “expanded” south to be valued for its supposed natural virginity. In this process, the most recent book joined a set of previous publications focused on reaffirming the Chilean legal position, describing the claimed territory and disseminating its history in order to foster a national Antarctic awareness. However, it stood out among them for integrating his landscapes into a more general imaginary of the entire country and, along with this, redefining the entire southern territory as a completely different region compared to the one he himself had observed and disseminated before. Comparing these books with each other and with other photos by the same author, verifying what is included and what is excluded from the final narrative, allows us to consider the work by Gerstmann as a representative of the official discourse, and understand the ideological and cultural biases that led to the aforementioned resignification for the initial construction of an image of Chile as an Antarctic country.