Caribbean Pearl: Alfredo Boulton’s Photographs of Margarita Island
Alfredo Boulton’s photographs of Margarita conjure a pastoral vision of communal life on the largest island off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast. The works included in this exhibition feature landscape panoramas, archeological ruins and artifacts, colonial-period garrisons and churches, portraits of islanders, and sequences depicting traditional subsistence practices. Taken in the 1940s, these photographs demonstrate a mastery of composition, lighting, and visual rhetoric that have earned the Venezuelan photographer, intellectual, and arts promoter broad recognition as a pioneer of modernist photography in his country.
Born in 1908 to a patrician family in Caracas, Boulton received most of his education in Europe, where he became familiar with the vibrant art scene in Paris in the 1920s. Returning to Venezuela in 1928, he advocated for regenerating the country’s stagnant cultural panorama. At a momentous period in the country’s history, Boulton’s privileged social position allowed him to play an important role in his generation’s reimagining of Venezuelan cultural identity. As the discovery of abundant oil reserves in Lake Maracaibo presaged an era of frantic modernization, Boulton and other intellectuals grappled with the challenge of reconciling Venezuela’s modernizing promise and deeply rooted rural traditions. Within this context, critics have noted that Boulton was the first photographer to engage the medium aesthetically to express a notion of Venezuelan identity in visual terms.[1]
With his portraits of margariteños – women, children, and men carrying on with ancestral ways of life – Boulton uses photography to express his understanding of racial synthesis in Venezuela. As Ariel Jimenez explains, Boulton proposed a specific type – a dark-skinned person of mixed race – as the embodiment of what he termed belleza criolla (creole beauty) and raised it to the status of a national prototype.[2] In this sense, he merits comparison with Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Martín Chambi, pioneers of modernist photography in Mexico and Peru.[3] But unlike Álvarez Bravo and Chambi, whose work was in dialogue with writings on race by intellectuals such as José Vasconcelos and José Carlos Mariátegui, Boulton gave photographic expression to his own theories about Venezuela’s racial and cultural identity.
Careful observation of Boulton’s portraits suggests bonds of familiarity and trust between the photographer and his sitters. Several of them depict women, children, or men engaging the photographer’s gaze with visible confidence. Furthermore, his pictures of islanders at work – fishermen, pearl divers, pottery makers, and so on – reflect a depth of knowledge about local traditions. But in Boulton’s hands, the camera transcends the boundaries of the merely documentary. Often, a modernist sensibility prompts him to focus on specific motifs –a fisherman’s hands and feet entangled with a fishing net, for example – and represent them as abstracted shapes and patterns illuminated by incandescent tropical light.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Boulton’s photographic engagement with Margarita was his skillful employment of the book format to promote his vision of the island as the foundational locus of Venezuelan history and cultural identity. In 1952, he published La Margarita, an exquisite photobook that experts consider the first authorial photographic publication in the country.[4] Carefully designed and printed in photogravure, La Margarita appeared in a small edition of one thousand numbered exemplars. Throughout the book’s pages, Boulton’s photographs are sequenced in correspondence with an extended essay that recounts the history of Margarita, from indigenous antiquity to the present. Early in Boulton’s narrative is the tragic story of Cubagua, a small barren island neighboring Margarita, where Spaniards established Nueva Cádiz, the earliest colonial settlement in present-day Venezuela.
In his book, Boulton describes Nueva Cádiz as a city doomed by colonial greed and violence. In the early 1500s, the discovery of prodigious pearl oyster beds around Cubagua prompted Spaniards to settle on an island lacking fresh water and other resources for human habitation. Within a few years, they were profiting from a brutal system of pearl extraction based on the forced labor of indigenous peoples. After decimating indigenous communities, Spaniards began importing enslaved peoples from Africa to work as pearl divers. Fabulous riches from the pearl trade financed the spectacular growth of Nueva Cádiz. However, the colonists’ rapacity undermined their pearl enterprise. Within a generation, oyster beds around Cubagua had been exhausted. By the early 1540s, colonists had relocated to nearby Margarita. Nueva Cádiz lay abandoned and in ruins, never to be inhabited again.
Some of Boulton’s photographs of Cubagua appear in La Margarita. As narrated through an elegant dialectic between images and text, Cubagua’s downfall foreshadowed Margarita Island’s subsequent role as the cradle of a distinct cultural identity. As decisive factors in its gradual configuration, Boulton underscores racial miscegenation throughout the colonial period, battle heroism during the wars of independence, and a prolonged period of economic stagnation in their aftermath. The final and longest chapter in the book describes the islanders’ continued reliance on the sea for their livelihood. Along this chapter, two extended photographic sequences depict processes of artisanal fishing and pearl extraction. Boulton’s camera follows islander men closely as they harvest the sea’s riches and bring them ashore to support their communities.
In contrast to the rapacious colonial enterprise in Cubagua – the opening act of Venezuela’s history – Boulton’s photobook presents fishing and pearl extraction by Margarita islanders as sustainable practices that foster a sense of community. As he explains, “Above any other industry, the island will continue to live from what has always been closest to its heart. It lives from the sea, from fishing and pearls.”[5] As Venezuela – suddenly awash in oil money – rushed toward an urban vision of modernity, La Margarita offered a cautionary tale about greed and the unsustainable extraction of natural resources.[6]
In 1981, Boulton published a redesigned second edition of his photobook. But by then, Venezuela’s oil riches had changed Margarita Island almost beyond recognition. The so-called “Perla del Caribe” (Caribbean Pearl) had become a vacation and tax-free shopping destination for the middle classes. In the preamble to the revised edition of his photobook, Boulton lamented the island’s transformation into a consumerist mecca: “We have refused to learn how everything can change; how the beauty of a place is destroyed when profit is placed above the innate harmony of a people.”[7]Around that time, he also organized a touring show of his Margarita photographs, displayed on custom-designed aluminum boards. These prints are now on view in this exhibition, shown on their original display devices.
Michel Otayek
[1] Luis Perez Oramas, “El ojo de Boulton,” in Boulton moderno 1928/1944, ed. Juan Manuel Bonet, Luis Pérez Oramas, and Sofia Vollmer de Maduro (Barcelona: RM, 2015), 8.
[2] Ariel Jiménez, “Alfredo Boulton III / Una belleza criolla,” Prodavinci, June 21, 2020, https://prodavinci.com/alfredo-boulton-iii-una-belleza-criolla.
[3] Juan Manuel Bonet, “Alfredo Boulton moderno y venezolano,” in Bonet et al., Boulton moderno 1928/1944, 18–34.
[4] Sagrario Berti, Fotografía impresa en Venezuela (Caracas: Casa editorial La Cueva, 2018), 213 (insert r.10).
[5] Alfredo Boulton, La Margarita (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1952), 209. My translation.
[6] For more about Boulton’s 1952 photobook, see Michel Otayek, “Greed, Violence, and Desire: Alfredo Boulton's Portrait of a Venezuelan Fisherman,” in Dialogues: Modernist Bodies, eds. Michelle Greet and Lynda Klich, special issue of Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2024) 6(1), 111-115.
[7] Alfredo Boulton, La Margarita (Caracas: Macanao Ediciones, 1981), 11. My translation.