Clément Chéroux, one of the leading voices in the history of photography, has spent his career shaping how we see and think about the medium. After serving as Chief Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and later at MoMA in New York, he now directs the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris. Beyond his institutional and curatorial roles, Chéroux has personal relationship with photography through his photobook library: rather than treating books as collectibles, he regards them as working tools that directly fuel his writing and research. Organised according to the themes of his texts, rather than canonical categories, his library filled with books reveal not a collector’s logic but the trace of intellectual obsessions that guide his thinking.

In 2022, he named Mänk’áčen among his favorite photobooks of the year, a work by the Chilean artist and researcher Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo, who holds a PhD from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, and develops projects at the crossroads of research, curating, and pedagogy. In the following conversation, Valenzuela-Escobedo reflects on what drew him to Mänk’áčen, its visual strategies, conceptual rigor, and expansion of artistic research practice, while also examining the broader ways in which such practices continue to shape his work and thought.

Clément Chéroux (CC) — Your book is called Mänk’áčen. I’m not sure if I am pronouncing it correctly, but as I understand, it means “the shadow hunter”. Who is this shadow hunter?

Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo (SVE) — The term Mänk’áčen is indeed bound to the figure of the photographer. It comes from my research on the Yaghan people and Martin Gusinde, a German missionary who lived among Indigenous communities in southern Chile between 1918 and 1924. He was the only anthropologist to carry out an in-depth study of the Selk’nam, Yámana, and Kawésqar peoples, already in steep decline at the time. Over those years, Gusinde produced an extraordinary archive of some 1,200 plates—an irreplaceable record of those cultures. The Yaghan gave him the name Mänk’áčen: Män means images, figures, or shadows; k’áčen means to grasp or take. Together they form “shadow catcher” or “image hunter”—a poetic description of the photographer. You may recall Gusinde’s work from the Rencontres d’Arles exhibition in 2015.

There is a fascinating parallel in the United States with Edward S. Curtis, who spent three decades photographing Indigenous peoples of North America. Between 1907 and 1930, he published his monumental twenty-volume encyclopedia of what he perceived as a vanishing world. Around 1900, several tribes referred to him as the “Shadow Catcher.” Despite the distance in time and geography, both expressions carry the same symbolism: photography as the act of capturing a shadow.

And so, when I chose Mänk’áčen as a title, it was not only to evoke this history but also to question what it means to be a photographer—or perhaps even more broadly, to ask what photography itself really is.

CC — And in your choice of that word as a title, is it about photographers in general, or more about yourself?

SVE — I’d say it speaks to photographers in general—or, as they once called themselves, operators. The term ‘photographer’ wasn’t yet in common use. What interested me were those first encounters: the moment when Indigenous communities came face to face with these mysterious mechanical devices, these “black boxes” capable of recording time and space.

So for me, Mänk’áčen is less about the individual photographer and more about the relationships forged in those encounters—operators arriving with a device that could literally seize shadows. My research began in southern Chile around 1840 and extended to the Amazon around 1976, tracing photographic collections brought back to Europe by priests, astronomers, early explorers, and artists with optical equipment.

Surprisingly, there is very little written on the act of photographing itself, compared to the vast number of images preserved in European and North American archives. Often, the traces I found were no more than a sentence in a scientific report or a fragment in an autobiography. These fragments, however, reveal how the colonial gaze took shape: the moment when notions like the sauvage were invented and codified. From the first explorers in the 16th century to the expansionist missions of the 19th century, the body of the Other both fascinated and unsettled Europeans—and the camera became one of the primary tools through which this image was constructed.

It is worth remembering that the camera and the train are contemporaries. If the train was designed to conquer territory, the camera, in a sense, was devised to conquer the soul. This idea sits at the heart of my doctoral thesis—MÄNK’ÁČEN: Photographic Mechanics, Mysticism, and Superstition among the Indigenous Peoples of South America—which ultimately provided the material for the book.

CC — Could you tell me a little bit about the difference between the book and the doctoral thesis you defended at the École Nationale supérieure de la Photographie (ENSP) in Arles?

SVE — The book is, in many ways, an extension of the thesis,[1] but reimagined as an artist’s book. The dissertation itself is a much larger, heavily illustrated volume of over 460 pages. By contrast, the artist’s book is more visual, distilled, and poetic. As part of the research-creation PhD, the defense consisted of both an exhibition and a dissertation. In October 2021, I presented twenty tables arranged like stations, each evoking a stop along a journey. These stations drew on diverse histories of photography and exploration—for instance, the Oriental-Hydrographe,[2] the vessel that first carried a camera to South America and Australia; the rediscovery of Hercules Florence in Brazil; or the Mission Scientifique du Cap Horn (1882–1883), to name just a few. These boat trips, both literal and symbolic, framed the project as a voyage through histories of exploration and colonial encounter, Indigenous perspectives, and the circulation of images. The stations brought into relation archival fragments, artistic interventions, and theoretical reflections, tracing the layered meanings of Toumayacha Alakana.[3] This expression lies at the origin of my research. It means “to look with a veiled head”. This is how the Europeans noted that Fuegians described the act of photographing in the 19th century, when they first encountered cameras as operators arrived in the Americas around 1840. In this way, the exhibition blurred the boundaries between archive and artwork, theory and practice, while staging a “mystical mechanic” at the core of my project. In that framework, Yann Linsart, the designer, who saw the show suggested that the material could be transformed into a book. The result is not merely an exhibition catalogue, but rather an artistic translation of a thesis defense. For this reason, I invited the art critic Justo Pastor Mellado, a member of the jury, to contribute a text adapted from his report. At the time, we were constantly reminded that “nobody reads dissertations.” True, I don’t disagree, but the exhibitions and the book proved that artistic research could reach a far wider audience than expected.

CC — Do you intend to publish the thesis itself one day?

SVE — Yes, that is the plan. Looking back, I think the thesis would need to be condensed to around a hundred solid pages, since not everything is equally relevant. What time has given me is the clarity to understand how—and for whom—it should be published, something I could not see while writing.

During the process, I discovered I wanted to study not only the camera as a device but also the darkness inside the box. This shift began when Jan Dibbets introduced me, through the exhibition Pandora’s Box, to the work of Vilém Flusser and his Towards a Philosophy of Photography.[4] That book became an entry point into what I call “theorists of the South.” I asked myself: Is it possible to write a dissertation on photography without citing Walter Benjamin or Rosalind Krauss? I deeply admire both, but their voices did not resonate with me in the same way as Vilém Flusser, Ronald Kay, Nelly Richard, Ticio Escobar, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, or Eugenio Dittborn—thinkers who engage directly with the photographic apparatus from a South American context.

Of course, “publishing” is a complicated word in the academic field, with its hierarchies of indexation and citation. In artistic research, we still have much to discuss about what counts as publication and evaluation. What is the value of an exhibition, for example? Personally, I see my PhD as a toolbox: each module is a starting point for an exhibition or another form of public engagement. For instance, I recently developed a show called Lightseekers,[5] which emerged directly from my doctoral research. While reflecting on the consequences of the black box, I realised I also wanted to study light itself—both as revelation, capable of unveiling hidden visions, and as mystical, tied to spiritual and political insights. The exhibition, presented at the Porto Biennial 2025, explored the dry light of deserts and the humid light of forests, through five contemporary artists from West Asia to the Amazon, tracing the dualities and cosmopolitics that connect these regions.

So for now, the thesis becomes exhibitions, each one a stage of maceration, infusion, or slow decoction. But eventually, all of this will crystallise into a formal book.

CC — You are a Chilean photographer and researcher. Do you analyse the way Europeans looked at the peoples of South America through a colonial gaze?

SVE — I don’t really see myself as a photographer. I consider myself an artist who plays with the camera. In fact, I rarely use it. Instead, I look at it—treating it as a Western artifact imbued with mystical mechanics. In my research, the camera often appears less as a neutral instrument than as an object believed capable of copying dreams, stealing shadows, awakening the dead, cutting time, even causing illness or interrupting a trance.

My work interrogates how Europeans historically looked at the peoples of South America through this colonial gaze. For five years, I combed archives in search of the earliest photographs, alongside the notes and transcriptions left by Westerns operators such as Jean-Louis Doze, Anne Chapman, Guido Boggiani, Martin Gusinde, Mario Baldi, Juan Downey, José Medeiros, and Leonore Mau, among others. Yet in the process, a more complex question emerged: I had to confront my own position within this narrative. Coming from Chile to study in France, it would be too easy to assume a guiltless perspective, although France is not responsible for the colonisation of the Americas. Instead, I had to reckon with my own privilege—as a Chilean researcher moving through European institutions while studying how Europeans looked at Indigenous South American communities. That act of displacement became the foundation of my artistic investigation: how should I define my posture as a researcher?

At first, I thought I was investigating a Native American gaze, perhaps even one I could embody. That was the initial title of my thesis draft. But I soon realised this was a methodological mistake. What Indigenous peoples thought when first encountering the camera will always remain a mystery. What can be studied are the fragments of language that survive in European writings—expressions that offer glimpses of how the photographic act was perceived. Two examples stayed with me: the Selk’nam phrase Toumayacha Alakana,[6] “to look with a veiled head,” and the Yanomami expression Noreshi Toway,[7] “to take a person’s double.” Both epitomise the atavistic fear that photography could capture and dispossess something essential, especially the images of the dead, which threatened to interrupt the work of mourning.

From this realisation, my methodological approach took shape as a triangle. I placed the camera itself at the center—not the operator, not the Indigenous subject. Both the researcher and the Native American looked toward the camera, which became the true subject of study. In this sense, my work is not about reconstructing an “Native American gaze”—an impossible illusion—but about tracing the genesis of the camera as a technical and cultural object in South America.

CC — How, in your view, can we decolonise these images?

SVE — Images are another history altogether. I understood this thanks to an encounter with a Machi, a Mapuche shaman, during the Mapuche exhibition I was curating at the Musée de l’Homme in 2017. She had just arrived in Paris; I was in the second year of my thesis and hoped we might speak about photography. Instead, she immediately unsettled my assumptions. At the Trocadéro square, she asked me to take her picture with her iPhone in front of the Eiffel Tower. That simple gesture dismantled my preconceptions: it was no longer a question of speaking about a camera that could steal souls but rather of analysing the European gaze directed at them. The idea that native people do not want to be photographed, especially because it would be “stealing their souls”, is a colonial myth. This western belief gave value to the images brought back by explorers. The reasons behind refusing the camera are much more complex and diverse: they can be about the camera angle, the circulation of the image of the self, the one-sided nature of the transaction, the lack of understanding of the device, or political and spiritual considerations.

Later, as we visited the Musée du Quai Branly, she described the objects on display as “very sick.” That phrase struck me deeply and pushed me to reflect on the role of the curator in a museum—not only as caretaker of works, but also, in some sense, as one who tends to work with the wounds of history. Here, I found an echo in the work of Kader Attia, who speaks of scars as reminders of a past that must not be concealed. Decolonisation, in this sense, cannot be separated from the notion of repair. But what does it mean to repair, to heal? Can history itself be healed?

From our western gaze, the very way these populations were represented already marked them as destined to disappear. Their suffering was inscribed not on their own terms but within the archives of museums. But as Paul Chaat Smith, a comanche artist, referring to the work of Edward Curtis, once wrote: “If one machine nearly annihilated us, another has granted us immortality”[8]—a stark comparison between guns and cameras. Certainly, from the first days of photography, the anthropologist and the artist perceived this notion of immortality that Chaat Smith points out in relation to the photographic trace which bears witness to facts. Today, the greater visibility of indigenous struggles across the planet is accompanied by an increased presence of indigenous artists in the art world. A debate remains open: is it in the art world that politics finds its greatest effect? But that is not the essential question of this interview.

Yet material restitution alone—whether of photographs or artifact—cannot repair the psychic wound. What matters is the cultivation of meaningful relations, beginning with a process of self-repair rather than waiting endlessly for recognition by the other. This is where the role of the curador in museums comes in. In Spanish, Curador shares its root with Curare, to heal. To be a curator is, in this sense, to care for objects, but also—if only metaphorically—to heal. Of course, what happened during colonisation is beyond healing. But the gesture of care remains crucial in my opinion.

In practice, this led me to work with images differently. Instead of requesting formal authorisation from institutions or museum collections, I used what was available online, assuming a certain risk in doing so. This strategy allowed me to enter the archive from another angle, but it also forced moments of profound self-questioning. Meeting the Machi Rosa Barbosa was, in this sense, a revelation—one that continues to shape my approach.

CC — In your book, there are both photographs from scientific colonial missions and documents related to astronomy, such as the transit of Venus. What, for you, is the connection between these two registers of images?

SVE — For me, the link lies in the emblematic power of the sky. It has always absorbed the dreams of every era. Looking up is universal, but the way we fix those visions is not. While all societies have sought to name and understand the stars, not all sought to inscribe them permanently. In Europe, the attempt to fix the heavens on chemically prepared surfaces marked the beginning of a mythology of progress: the transition from animistic cosmologies to a world governed by rational logos, mathematics, and mechanical images. As science advanced, nature—once sacred—was desacralised, treated for the first time as inert matter, a perspective still resisted by Native American cosmologies.

The French Mission Scientifique du Cap Horn (1882–1883) illustrates this perfectly. Officially, the expedition was organized to observe the transit of Venus and to measure the Earth’s radius. Yet, almost by chance, it produced the largest wet-collodion photographic archive of the Yaghan people. Alongside their astronomical programme—tracking magnetism, auroras, storms, and celestial phenomena—the mission also recorded landscapes, natural events, and, unexpectedly, human subjects. This accidental convergence of astronomy and ethnography has been a constant source of fascination for me.

One striking plate number 2878[9] depicts a young Yaghan woman, Pachaoeli Kipa, standing with one hand covering her sex, the other resting on a tree. The pose unmistakably echoes the classical Venus or Aphrodite. Her clothes are visible on the ground, suggesting she was compelled to adopt this posture under the photographer’s direction. Such images expose how the body of the Other was staged as an object of study, conforming to Western disciplinary conventions. At the same time, Payen’s photograph of Kipa departs from strict scientific protocol, producing instead a violent mise-en-scène—a fiction of the “primitive” that resonates with the Western history of Venus’s representation. This analogy continues at the Paris Observatory. A ceiling painted in 1886 by Edmond Louis Dupain depicts a celestial Venus, nude with a star above her head, lifted by two white birds and accompanied by Cupid. Jean Counil photographed the scene, showing Venus presiding over the Council Room where François Arago—who in 1843 officially announced the invention of photography to the world—once sat. It is tempting to imagine that Venus gazes silently upon him as he wrote.

On 19 April 1883, Venus did in fact cross the Sun in the southern sky, captured in photographic form. In that moment, astronomers and Native South Americans observed one another through the same apparatus, yet from radically opposed cosmologies.

These correspondences—between Botticelli’s Venus, Kipa’s posture, Dupain’s painted ceiling, Arago’s historical role, and the planetary transit—may seem overly conspicuous. Yet together, these constituent anecdotes form an assemblage, one that is inseparable from any attempt to rethink the History of South American photography.

CC — No connection with the important discussions in France in recent years around what has been called the “Hottentot Venus”?

SVE — No, no direct connection. The only link, perhaps, is that when I first became interested in photography and the “black box,” speaking often about its mystical mechanisms, people would tell me: “You must go to Africa; there you’ll find countless stories and anecdotes.” I was, and still am, intrigued by that suggestion. But within the framework of a doctoral project, if I wanted to actually complete it, I had to focus. Since my research was rooted in South America, I chose to remain there. That said, I do see the possibility of extending this line of inquiry in the future—tracing the genealogy of the camera across continents. I have already begun to look toward Norway, Japan, and India, and Africa could well be another important chapter.

CC — So, in the book, there is a diagram that presents the project’s system of thought, and actually, when I saw this diagram, it reminded me a lot of the one Alfred Barr—MoMA’s first director—created to describe modern art, which he famously reproduced on the cover of Cubism and Abstract Art. In it, you see all the avant-garde movements intersecting, influencing, and colliding. Since diagrammatic thinking has been heavily criticised by post-structuralism and postmodernism, how do you respond to such critiques? What is your position?

SVE — For me, the diagram is not a universal concept but a tool whose meaning depends on context. Each author defines it according to their own framework and interest. In my case, the diagram is best understood as an essay in graphic imagination, entirely independent of Barr. It opens a field of thought and then, at another moment, allows for new formulations in visual form. In the book there are two versions of the same diagram, and in the exhibition a third—each iteration provisional, each one subject to revision.

My diagrams function as heuristic tools: they illustrate thought processes rather than fixing them. This is inseparable from my approach to artistic research. When I began the PhD, I had very few reference points and faced skepticism: the doctoralisation of art schools was still viewed with suspicion by some, especially by professors without doctorates themselves. It was important to define what it meant to undertake a thesis as an artist. In this context, I came to think of the “diagram as exhibition.” No single artwork was privileged; rather, the diagram itself, through its network of relations and spatial mapping, became both the central outcome and the method of thinking through the artistic research. A practice-based PhD, in my view, does not produce artworks in the traditional sense. It generates results—connections, constellations—and the diagram became my way of organising and presenting them.

This act of bringing elements into relation is already a creative gesture, close to the curatorial. In fact, the diagram also served as the exhibition’s floor plan, mediating between archives, research findings, and visualisations. It is relational and geographic, resembling a map. In this way, it does not contradict post-structuralist concerns but embodies them: it acknowledges complexity, uncertainty, and the relational nature of knowledge, rather than imposing a totalising perspective.

CC — The corpus of the book is mostly composed of documents and archives. Yet you also include photographs that bear your name. What role do they play?

SVE — I don’t really consider them “my” photographs. They serve more as a bridge between research and creation. Some come from photographer friends, while others derive from advertising material. As I told you, from the beginning, I had deliberately stepped back from using the camera myself: I did not want to reproduce the folklorisation of Native South American communities, so the act of photographing was not part of my research programme. Gradually, my position shifted toward that of a curator—one concerned less with producing images than with creating relationships among existing ones.

The images you are talking about are those in the Advertising series. These began as camera advertisements that I reworked by erasing the slogans. Originally, the slogans dictated how the image should be read; once removed, the images opened onto a new discourse about the photographic apparatus itself. This gesture reflects the broader aim of my PhD: to bring another voice, another history, into the history of photography.

In the Advertising series, the removal of text dissolves the single, promotional message and allows the expressive—and even magical—power of photography to reemerge in its polysemy. Suddenly, one can see a device pierced by a fine ray of light, another bound like a wounded body, or one shaped into an infinity symbol or a pyramid. At times, the gaze even seems to reverse, with the device looking back at the viewer. My intention was for these altered advertisements to circulate again in the same channels from which they came. One was published in Inframince, no. 12, in 2018. From there, my attention to the imagery of devices expanded into a broader collection of visual materials—manuals, encyclopedias, amateur photography books—that continues to inform both my artistic and scholarly practice.

CC — These images reminded me of the aesthetics of the 1960s–1980s and, indirectly, of Christopher Williams’ critical work. Was he a reference?

SVE — Yes, absolutely. Christopher Williams was a key reference—particularly for his use of images produced by others, his attention to the photographic apparatus, and his notion of the camera as a “box.” In a lecture during his exhibition For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons sur la Société Industrielle (Révision 10) at Bergen Kunsthall in 2010, he put it simply: “I am interested in boxes. What is a camera? A camera is basically a box with numerals and letters inscribed on it. It’s a little box-like machine; someone with the knowledge to read those numbers and letters will produce the correct kind of image”.[10]

Williams’ influence was decisive for me, both through his retrospective The Production Line of Happiness (2014) and through his books—artist books as well as catalogues—such as Printed in Germany. What drew me most was his way of interrogating the conventions of photojournalism, archival methods, and commercial imagery, always attentive to their socio-political contexts as well as to the historical and anecdotal details that shape them. His method revolves around examining the theoretical and political history of photography within the broader field of image production.

More broadly, Williams’ practice relies on citation and recycling: the manipulation of titles, the poetic crafting of press kits, the reappropriation of exhibition walls. His images are anchored in the histories of the objects he photographs, using anecdote and narrative to reveal how photography constructs systems of value. What fascinates me most is the transcultural dimension of his reflections on the apparatus—how the apparent neutrality of his images avoids imposing a totalising perspective on the camera.

This brings him close, conceptually, to Eugenio Dittborn. Both artists share a concern with citation and “the lesson,” often using collage as a central technique. In his artist book from 1981 Fallo Fotográfico, Dittborn writes: “A photograph is a North American negative and a Japanese camera”.[11] As early as 1981, through self-published works made with photocopies, he interrogated photography’s role in the Chilean art scene. Like Williams, he was attuned to the effects of technological translation and intermediality—how they allow imaginaries from different territories to converge. His poetic text for ArtPress, published in 1982 Paris Biennale edition,[12] is a beautiful example of this reversed translation through citation and hybridisation, a strategy that resonates strongly with Williams’ practice. Allow me a small secret: it was Dittborn who encouraged me to use Mänk’áčen as the title of my thesis. He told me : “It’s perfect, no one will understand anything. It’s mysterious.”

CC — In your opinion, what brings an artist and a researcher together?

SVE — I don’t see a major difference, except that a researcher is expected to reflect more explicitly on their process. But in practice, the two are very close. Think of a painter in his studio: he wakes up each morning and experiments on blank canvases, trying out different approaches. That is not so different from what we do when research itself becomes a form of creation.

In my case, I didn’t begin with theory. I began with images—hundreds of them. My method was to explore through images first, and only later to arrive at texts. One might assume I would have started with Vilém Flusser or Ronald Kay [13] whose writings became especially relevant to my work. But in fact, I only discovered him during my research—even though he had given lectures at ENSP years earlier.[14] What really marked me was the realisation that, as Flusser suggested, “the true artist is the one who looks into the darkness inside the device.” That statement opened up a very particular practice for me. It confirmed that, in many ways, the work of the artist and that of the researcher overlap—especially when the researcher begins with visual material rather than words. Even in my thesis, images thread through the text like a continuous undercurrent. It does not exist as writing alone, but as a constellation of visual and textual elements. For me, that is where the artist and researcher truly meet.

CC — And what differentiates them?

SVE — For me, the difference lies in writing. As an artist, I never imagined I would write; I believed all the answers would emerge directly from practice. Even in the works I was producing, I relied entirely on the act of making. But during the PhD, I underwent a real metamorphosis: I began to write. Having one mentor who could support me theoretically in that writing was part of the discovery.

Of course, I had read books, like anyone else. But what I came to love in research was its very particular way of working with writing. I always think of Hansel and Gretel—the story of leaving breadcrumbs along the path. In research, footnotes are those breadcrumbs. I fell in love with them. They embody the generosity of researchers: the effort to leave traces for those who come after, so that others can follow the path. That meticulous care—the precision of marking page 321 rather than 322 so someone else can actually find the reference—struck me as profoundly beautiful. It is a form of generosity less common among artists—not because artists aren’t generous, but because their approach is different. What I admire in research is precisely this gesture of leaving a trail, a gift for those yet to come.

CC — It feels like a beautiful way to conclude, Thank you for this exchange.

SVE — Thank you, Clément. It was a real pleasure to speak in depth about Mänk’áčen, artistic research practice and books.

 

Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo is an artist and dedicated researcher with a multifaceted career in the fields of curation and editorial work.
Clément Chéroux is a French photography historian and curator, and Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.