Travel Albums

This gallery is composed of two volumes in which Soledad Acosta employs the same techniques of cutting and assembly as in the previous albums. Here, however, her fundamental subject is travel. Travel writing was a popular genre among educated women and men in the nineteenth century. Through this versatile format, they could express their appreciation of other societies and cultures and put the private world of their writing and experiences into contact with the public sphere of travel, views, and social encounters, among others. For Latin Americans, trips to Europe (such as those included here) also represent a route of fundamental intellectual education and training. The proliferation of trips to the Old Continent in the second half of the nineteenth century resulted in the simultaneous development of a tourist industry and photography as a consumable object of this same industry of travel. Postcards, business cards, and even albums that were sold with pre-printed images of visited places (see Mills in bibliography), began to coexist with typical travel narration and functioned as souvenirs (memories) of lived experience. Particularly in Peregrinaciones en Francia (Peregrinations in France), one can see that Soledad Acosta was aware of these modern practices both in travel and in writing and utilizes a series of postcards possibly acquired on the narrated trips. The engravings and photographs of the postcards and cut-outs are organized in agreement with the route of the trip through exhibitions, galleries, or points of interest that she visited. The visual density of the book offers readers a “palpable sense” of the physical space (or of their American idealizations) of Europe. Thus, these albums permit us to travel through visuality and through the visual experience of the observer. Soledad Acosta reveals to us that travel writing is not an exclusively literary expression. It is the product of moments of consumption, transit, and movement of the writer, but also of the content of the book. It is moreover another result of her “writing with scissors–” to adapt the expression of Ellen Gruber Garvey (2013)– that is located in an intermediate space between the authorship of the text itself and the reading/manipulation of materials (graphic and literary) for its elaboration.