Hold That Pose: Visual Culture in the Late Nineteenth-Century Spanish Periodical

Hold That Pose explores the role of visual images in Spain’s transition to a fully modern illustrated press by the first decade of the twentieth century. It examines both the ideological impact and the technological transformation of image production in Spanish magazines during the Restoration. In the brief period of forty years, 1870 to 1910, technological and manufacturing advances revolutionized Spain’s illustrated press and consequently Europeanized the tastes and the expectations of its elite urban readership. By 1900, once subscription prices fell and magazines began to apply modern photojournalistic techniques, the middle classes became inured to illustrated magazines. Advancements in photomechanical reproduction allowed periodicals to focus more extensively on the vicissitudes and pleasures of everyday life in urban Spain along with world events in increasingly remote locales. Hold That Pose explores this period of transition through an analysis of the images that spoke for and to the burgeoning numbers of subscribers who purchased the most popular weeklies of the period.