Mountain Views: Postcards and Visual Consumption of the Amazon in Turn-of-the-Century Peru (1896-1919)

Abstract

During the turn of the century, illustrated postcards became a key medium for disseminating images of the Peruvian Amazon. Through these graphic artifacts, regional and national modernizing elites projected representations that combined the exoticism of the landscape and indigenous populations with their ideals of material progress and prosperity. Initially, the circulation of Amazonian imagery in printed media was limited to a select audience, via illustrated publications and clichés printed on photographic paper. However, the massproduction of postcards facilitated their incorporation into broader consumption circuits, reaching merchants, travelers, military personnel, literate professionals, and collectors. Publishers such as Guillermo Stolte and Eduardo Polack selected views that reflected advancements in infrastructure and the expansion of the internal Amazonian frontier, aligning themselves with the modernization discourses promoted by the political and intellectual elites of the time. In the city of Iquitos —the epicenter of the rubber trade— photographers such as Manuel Rodríguez Lira and the firm Lira & Gil printed postcards depicting urban scenes, infrastructure, and indigenous groups. These images circulated widely within Peru and abroad, reinforcing a narrative of civilizationand progress promoted by Loreto entrepreneurs. In doing so, they contributed to the construction of a national imaginary that framed the Amazon as an integral space within the modernization project of the Oligarchic Republic (1896-1919).