• 1 Elisa Pastoriza and Juan Carlos Torre, Mar del Plata. Un sueño de los argentinos, Buenos Aires, Edh (...)
• 2 Juan Carlos Torre and Elisa Pastoriza, ‘La democratización del bienestar’, in Juan Carlos Torre (ed (...)

2The group in the photo might belong to any of the thousands of families that descended on Mar del Plata every summer. In the late nineteenth century, this city 250 miles south of Buenos Aires became a popular beach resort. With each passing year, it welcomed growing numbers of holidaymakers from increasingly diverse social backgrounds. Although in its early days, Mar del Plata was favoured by the elite, over the twentieth century, as part of the democratisation of welfare in Argentina, it became the most popular holiday destination in the country, one that all Argentinians aspired to visit at some point in their lives.1 As the city’s popularity grew, dining options increased and diversified to meet the demands and tastes of both holidaymakers and residents.2

• 3 Alan Warde and Lydia Martens, Eating Out. Social differentiation, consumption and pleasure, Cambrid (...)

4Mar del Plata’s restaurants played a fundamental role in the city’s social life. Food and drink were an excuse for people to get together. However, the ways that different social groups visited these places and consumed the products and services they offered varied at different times: gender, class and age divisions were central to defining who was entitled to patronise given establishments and consume certain products there.3 As a consequence, not only did food itself become an expression of people’s identities, but the space in which it was consumed did, too.

• 4 See, among others: Aníbal B. Arcondo, Historia de la alimentación en Argentina: desde los orígenes (...)
• 5 Fernando Remedi, ‘Modernidad alimentaria y afrancesamiento. Ciudad de Córdoba (Argentina) en el trá (...)
• 6 John Burnett, England eats out: a social history of eating out in England from 1830 to the present, (...)
• 7 Victoria Aupart Ortega, ‘Nuevos espacios de sociabilidad en las ciudades: las casas de café en Lond (...)
• 8 Enrica Asquer, ‘Domesticity and beyond: Gender, family, and consumption in modern Europe’, in Frank (...)

5Although food has occupied a prominent place in Argentinian historiography on consumption,4 relatively less attention has been paid to dining establishments (restaurants, cafés, tearooms, etc.), although there have been some important exceptions.5 This lack of research stands in contrast with the prominent place that the habit of dining out had throughout the twentieth century in Argentina, particularly in specific cities such as Mar del Plata. It also contrasts with the broad attention paid to this topic in Europe, the United States6 and other Latin American countries.7 This article thus intends to contribute to the field of studies that explore the ‘public face’ of consumption8 by showing how the democratisation of welfare in Argentina led to forms of eating out that were potentially more inclusive in terms of gender, class and age.

• 9 Nora Rabotnikof, ‘Lo público-lo privado’, Debate Feminista, 9:18, 1998, 1–13; Brian Cowan, “Public (...)

6Since the start of the modern era, men and women have been associated with different spheres: men with public spaces, women with domestic ones. However, this is not to say that women have not participated in the public sphere—instead, at different points in time, they have done so in specific ways through specific activities. Although the notion of public space has been defined in a variety of ways, in this paper I use the term to refer to physical spaces for socialising and consumption in which people can see and be seen by others. Restaurants form part of urban public space: in them, people interact and socialise, public behaviour is configured, social ties are forged and social distance is established, all of which contribute to upholding personal and collective identities.9

• 10 Susana Delgado, ‘Deshilvanando imaginarios a través de fotografías de mujeres en Mar del Plata. La (...)
• 11 Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: the uses of images as historical evidence, Ithaca, Cornell University P (...)
• 12 Andrea Torricella, ‘Género, prácticas de re-presentación familiares/personales y fotografías. Usos (...)
• 13 Boris Kossoy, Fotografía e Historia, Buenos Aires, La Marca, 2001; John Mraz, ‘Ver fotografías hist (...)
• 14 Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: a middle-brow art, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1990 [Un art (...)

7The democratisation of access to such services expanded in parallel with the spread of photography as a way of recording events as cameras became more accessible.10 This is why many dining establishments and the experiences that took place there were recorded through photos. As Peter Burke has pointed out, for a long time, historians have used visual sources to illustrate arguments rather than to construct them.11 In this article, to investigate certain aspects of consumption practices, class imaginaries, stereotypes and representations of gender and age in Mar del Plata in the mid-twentieth century, I analyse a set of photographs, most of which are family shots from private archives. My intention is not to embark on a history of these photos and their uses12 but rather to create a history with or through photographs,13 as I understand them to be a particularly valuable testimony to the material culture of the past and the social relations captured in them.14

• 15 María Antonia Antoranz Onrubia, ‘La pintura gótica aragonesa, fuente de documentación para la época (...)
• 16 Jesús García Olivares, ‘La pintura y otras fuentes de documentales para la construcción de un relat (...)

8Throughout history, various iconographic records have focused on food and the ceremonial aspects of it.15 Paintings, for example, are an excellent source for researchers considering these issues in different historical periods.16 In the twentieth century, photography was one of the media that came to prominence for recording both everyday practices and more atypical ones. Certain scenes involving food in both private and public spaces became increasingly frequent. This article attempts to historicise the widespread practice of taking photos at restaurants and other eateries. Its starting points are the following questions: Why did people take pictures there? Who wanted to ‘capture these moments forever’ and why? Who appeared in them? In what ways? Where did these images circulate? What do we know about those who received or viewed them? What does this practice tell us about the meanings they assigned to the experience of visiting these places and eating there? How was a practice like eating—traditionally associated with the realm of the domestic and the private—transformed and re-signified when it took place in the public sphere?

• 17 Bourdieu, Photography: a middle-brow art.
• 18 It is my understanding that these meanings may also depend on the expected circulation of these pho (...)

9My hypothesis in this paper is that eating (by which I mean visiting dining establishments and consuming food there) and taking photos at such places were part of a process of constructing status and individual and collective class and gender identities. As Pierre Bourdieu argued, to pose is to present oneself in a posture that is presumed not to be ‘natural’ and, in response to a gaze that fixes and immobilises, to adopt certain postures to reduce the risk of ridicule and present someone else with a ‘prepared’, pre-defined image of oneself that is worthy of respect.17 Consequently, photographs are more than just material evidence that people had visited these places: they also produce specific meanings.18 As I will show, identities were constructed not only by frequenting certain locations but also by being able to create a specific record of having done so.

• 19 David Le Breton, La sociología del cuerpo, Madrid, Siruela, 2018 [1992].
• 20 María Isabel Baldasarre, Bien vestidos. Una historia visual de la moda en Buenos Aires, 1870–1914, (...)
• 21 Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A useful category of historical analysis’, in idem, Gender and the politics (...)
• 22 The intersectional perspective generally also takes racial inequalities into consideration, but in (...)

10This corpus of photos is an excellent source on two levels. First, they allow me to question the ways in which these identities were embodied through gestures, rules of etiquette and the expression of feelings. They also allow me to examine how certain social and cultural expectations were transmitted through the body.19 Second, from an intersectional perspective, they allow me to reflect on the role that photographic images played in the construction of class and gender identities in the mid-twentieth century.20 As Joan Scott has shown, the richness and usefulness of the concept of gender lie in how it can be used to describe the relational aspects of femininity and masculinity and the relationships of power that run through these at any given historical moment.21 The intersectional perspective builds on this by shedding light on the ways in which gender inequality and hierarchies interact and are interwoven with subordination based on different factors—in the photos analysed here, age and social class are the factors at stake.22

• 23 Elisa Pastoriza, ‘Estado, gremios y hoteles. Mar del Plata y el peronismo’, Estudios Sociales, 34:1 (...)

11I have focused on analysing photographs from the 1930s to the 1970s for two reasons. First, the number of images available during this period allows me to compare them and identify the aspects that changed and those that stayed the same. Second, in the 1940s, as tourism in the city grew at an unprecedented rate, the number of establishments that prepared, sold and served food began to multiply and the clientele began to diversify. Growth in tourism in Mar del Plata peaked in the 1970s, as did its impact on the economic sectors associated with it.23 Dining out was of course common practice before the period analysed and has continued to be so since. However, my decision to limit the study to the 1930s–1970s is justified by the quantitative and qualitative changes that took place during these years, which profoundly transformed both the supply of such services and how they were consumed.

• 24 Jack Goody, Cooking, cuisine, and class: a study in comparative sociology, Cambridge University Pre (...)

12The sections focus on visual records of dining out in Mar del Plata. The first looks at the period when Mar del Plata was an elite seaside resort, while the second addresses the transformations that occurred with the democratisation of tourism in the city. In both sections, I show that dining establishments were not merely the backdrop for certain gatherings, nor were the photographs taken there simply records of these events. Instead, both venues and photographs contributed to defining and expressing specific forms of socialising in the city and announcing and shaping identities and hierarchies of class, gender and age at particular historical moments.24

• 25  URL: http://www.lacapitalmdp.com/contenidos/fotosfamilia/; https://www.facebook.com/groups/1579775 (...)
• 26 I have also published a methodological reflection on the uses of information from social media plat (...)
• 27 British Library, Endangered Archives Programme, URL: https://eap.bl.uk, accessed Dec. 4, 2024.

13The corpus analysed is made up of a varied, fragmented set of photographs. Many of them are from private archives that I was able to access through collaborative online sites where people of different ages and backgrounds share recollections of Mar del Plata and in which photographs take centre stage. The photos in the corpus were compiled from sites such as Fotos de familia. El gran álbum de Mar del Plata, Diario La Capital de Mar del Plata and two Facebook groups that focus on the history of the city of Mar del Plata: Mar del Plata Retro Oficial and Historia de Mardel.25 These sites give the general public access to photos from private archives that would otherwise not be available to them. Those sharing or commenting on these photos also tend to provide valuable information about them.26 I also looked at the collections of online postcard sellers (Delcampe.net) and the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, which has over 400 photographs of Mar del Plata from the 1940s to the 1960s.27 I used these images to create a database that so far contains more than 450 very diverse images with one feature in common: they all capture scenes at dining establishments in Mar del Plata. Using clues in the photos and information provided by those who shared them online or else drawn from other historical sources and/or bibliographies on the city, I have dated them approximately and put them in chronological order.

• 28 Ana María Mauad, ‘Fotografía e Historia, Interfaces’, in Fernando Aguayo and Lourdes Roca (coords.) (...)

14I selected the photos for the corpus based on thematic criteria and included sufficient images to be able to observe similarities and differences between them. I worked from the understanding posited by Ana María Mauad that the process of assigning meaning to photographs involves examining them in terms of both content and expression.28 Content refers to the relationship between the things portrayed in the photograph and the context in which they are shown, while expression relates to technical and aesthetic considerations, which are situated and determined historically. Based on these premises, I created an interpretative grid to classify the photos by date and location, the people in the foreground and background, the objects they contained, the attributes of the people and their surroundings and factors relating to composition, such as framing, planes and sharpness. After carefully examining the entire corpus, I selected images that reflected trends I had observed throughout to analyse them in more detail, in order to draw attention to some of the factors that underlie my arguments.

• 29 Cora Gamarnik, ‘La fotografía en la revista Caras y Caretas en Argentina (1898-1939): innovaciones (...)

15I have also drawn on other sources, such as a hotel regulations list, advertisements, menus and magazine and newspaper articles, which do not play a central role in my analysis but help construct the universe of meaning in which these photographs are embedded. Specifically, I reviewed and analysed articles published about Mar del Plata in Caras y Caretas magazine between 1930 and 1939. This was the first publication in Argentina to systematically include photographs as part of its reporting on social, cultural and political events in the country in the first few decades of the 20th century.29 I also drew on social and political articles and advertisements that featured between 1930 and 1970 in La Capital, the local newspaper with the largest circulation and in La Opinión, a national daily published in the 1970s. Another source I examined was the dining room regulations from the Hotel Royal, a luxury hotel that operated in the first half of the twentieth century. I used these sources to provide context for the photographs I analysed and to reconstruct the “backdrops” against which they were taken to understand them in social terms, rather than individual ones.

• 30 Nicola Charles and Marion Kerr, ‘Es así porque es así: diferencias de género y edad en el consumo f (...)

16As I noted above, restaurants and other eateries played a major role in the social life of Mar del Plata since its early days as a seaside resort. Cameras bore witness to many of the experiences and relationships that took place in these establishments. The photographs I analyse show that consumption practices in restaurants and other eateries constructed differences in status that were anchored to inequalities relating to social class, gender and age. These were transformed and redefined throughout the twentieth century.30

• 31 Torricella, ‘Género, prácticas de re-presentación familiares/personales y fotografías’.

17Almost all the dining-related photographs I found from the beginning of the period of analysis showed venues such as restaurants and tearooms frequented by people belonging to the more affluent sectors of society. This suggests that the practice of photography was still restricted to certain social groups.31 As can be seen in picture 2, many of these establishments were inside the city’s best-known hotels, which provided high-end dining as well as accommodation. This particular photograph was taken during afternoon tea at the Bristol Hotel in 1938 and was published in La Nación newspaper. Given the newspaper’s circulation at the time (150,000 copies daily), the photo would have been seen by a huge number of readers. These largely belonged to the Buenos Aires elite, who followed what was happening in Mar del Plata through different publications. At the end of January 1937, in a report on the summer season at the resort, the magazine Caras y Caretas noted:

• 33 Débora Garazi, ‘Maîtres, mozos, comises y sommeliers: el trabajo en el salón comedor de hoteles de (...)

19As can be seen, the photo is a wide shot that provides a panoramic view of the hotel dining room while also allowing us to identify some of the people in it. The diners are the main focus: many are posing and looking contentedly at the camera as they smile or gesticulate in some way. The opulence of the room—with its paintings, table linen, flower arrangements and furnishings—and the male waiting staff all point to the exclusive nature of the establishment and the services it provided, thus also revealing the kind of people that might dine there.33 An article published in 1946 in La Capital, a local newspaper, described the day that a new tearoom opened:

• 35 Bourdieu, Photography: a middle-brow art.
• 36 Royal Hotel Regulations, undated.

20Both men and women took afternoon tea, carefully dressed for the occasion, as the ladies’ hats show. Establishments of this sort were exclusively for adults.35 The absence of children from the photos is noteworthy—they would have their meals elsewhere, often with the families’ domestic staff. As the regulations of a well-known hotel in the city reveal, mealtimes for ladies and gentlemen were 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. for lunch and 7:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. for dinner, while for children and servants, lunch ran from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. and dinner from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., both served in a separate dining room.36

• 37 The association between pastries and femininity does not imply that men did not consume these produ (...)
• 38 Advertisement for Chateau des Anges, La Capital, 7 January 1961, 8.

21Between the 1930s and 1950s, tearooms were the only establishments where photographs show all-female tables, suggesting that among the higher social classes, practices of consumption and socialising were organised around gender differences. This gave rise to restaurants that catered to specific sectors of the public and that contributed to the segregation of public space by gender and age. Tearooms seem to be associated with femininity, as do the food and drinks consumed there, which centred on pastries, cakes and other sweet confections. These were associated with feminine traits or stereotypes: the sweetness and delicacy of women were expressed in their taste for food that shared these characteristics.37 The fact that tearooms were largely the preserve of women was also reflected in advertisements of the time. In the early 1960s, the Chateau des Anges [Castle of Angels], renowned for its exclusive tearoom and Viennese confectionery, informed its customers that it had a nursery service ‘staffed by young society ladies’.38

• 39 Both photos were taken by professional photographers. In the first half of the twentieth century, i (...)
• 40 Advertisement for the Confitería París [París Tearoom], La Capital, 23 December 1939, 5.

23Pictures 3 and 4 are from the same period and were both taken at the Confitería París [París Tearoom].39 By the end of the 1930s, the company had two branches that only opened during the summer season, one on the seafront at Playa Grande—another of the most exclusive parts of Mar del Plata at the time—and the other on the Rambla Bristol [Bristol Promenade]. Both were open daily for ‘dejeuner [lunch], tea and an aperitif dansant [tea dance]’, at which well-known orchestras played.40 Picture 3 shows five young women having tea at the establishment. Unlike picture 2, it is a close-up of a single group and does not reveal the surrounding tables. Picture 4, in contrast, is of two young women who appear to be leaving the establishment. The photographer seems to have deliberately included the sign spelling out the famed tearoom’s name in capital letters, which may have been golden. Although the sign is in the background of the image, it is clearly visible. In both photos, the physical contact between the women, their relaxed attitudes and their smiles suggest closeness and intimacy.

• 41 Baldasarre, Bien vestidos.
• 42 Griselda Pollock, ‘Missing women: Rethinking early thoughts on images of Women’, in Carol Squiers ( (...)

24In establishments of this sort, consuming food and beverages was about more than just dining: it was an excuse to socialise and rub shoulders with people from similar economic and social circles. They were spaces in which to see other people and be seen: the performances that unfolded there were intended for oneself and others, including peers and those deemed to rank higher and lower on the social scale.41 These spaces therefore played an important role in the construction of subjectivities. The disciplining of the body as revealed through gestures, postures, clothing (such as coats and furs, dresses or suits, hats and shoes), women’s hairstyles or makeup and men’s moustaches: all these aspects were part of the process of constructing upper-class femininity and masculinity that acquired meaning in these specific contexts. Likewise, visual representations were also part of this historically situated process of constructing the gender identity of upper-class women and men.42

• 43 Elisa Pastoriza and Graciela Zuppa, ‘La conquista de las riberas. Política, cultura, turismo y demo (...)
• 44 Pastoriza and Torre, Mar del Plata. Un sueño de los argentinos.

26Despite the changes that swept Mar del Plata over the period covered by this article, the seaside promenade was the heart of the resort for decades.43 Opened in 1941, the Rambla Casino [Casino Promenade] was designed by architect Alejandro Bustillo, as were other iconic buildings on the seafront, including the casino and the Hotel Provincial. Strolling up and down it was a ritual for holidaymakers, especially at sunset, after a day at the beach. Ranged along it there was a variety of shops (such as jewellery stores or clothing stores) and, more importantly, several tiny cafés (known locally as ‘barcitos’) that became a fixture in the city’s social life.44

• 45 Natalia Milanesio, Cuando los trabajadores salieron de compras, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2014; Torr (...)

27In the first half of the century, the establishments along the promenade were more exclusive and patronised by people from the wealthier classes. However, by the 1950s, during the democratisation of welfare, the upwardly mobile middle classes also began to frequent them.45

• 47 Susana Delgado, ‘Deshilvanando imaginarios a través de fotografías de mujeres en Mar del Plata. La (...)
• 48 Kossoy, Fotografía e Historia; Andrea Torricella, ‘Una democratización diferenciada: Discursos y re (...)
• 49 It belongs to a collection of postcards that are for sale online. Accessed Dec. 4, 2024, URL: https (...)

31As I mentioned in the introduction, the democratisation of eating out developed in tandem with access to cameras as these became cheaper and smaller and as developing photographs became easier.47 For a long time, people would give photos of themselves to family or friends as a way of creating and maintaining kinship or friendship ties.48 When friends and family lived far away and did not visit often, sending photographs allowed people to show the passing of time and chronicle how their children were growing up. This was the case for a woman and a young girl (probably a mother and daughter) who sent a picture of themselves dated October 1964 to their relatives with the following text on the back: ‘To our grandma, auntie, uncles and cousins, with love’.49 Unfortunately, I have not been authorized to reproduce this photograph. The picture had been taken in one of the cafés on the promenade and shows the two women sitting at a small round table. The pile of empty plates and the almost empty soda siphon suggest that they had already finished eating. The shot was taken in October, springtime in Argentina, which may explain the number of empty tables nearby. The trousers, long sleeves and coats they are wearing suggest that the weather was cold, which the women would have felt even more by the sea. There are three glasses on the table, suggesting that the women were with someone else, probably the person who took the photo.

• 50 Erving Goffman, La presentación de la persona en la vida cotidiana, Madrid, Amorrortu, 2006 [The Pr (...)

32Although we do not know who the women were with, the fact that they had their photo taken there and then shared it with their relatives shows this type of café to be an acceptable place for them to be, as middle-class women, at least during daylight hours. The older of the two looks between 40 and 50 and is dressed up for the occasion: her hair is cut in a bob with a blunt, neatly combed fringe and she has on a knee-length dress, pointed shoes with spiky heels, long nails, rings on both hands and a wide metal watch or bracelet on her left wrist. The younger woman is wearing trousers, a pullover, a long chain with a charm dangling from it and a ring, while a small handbag rests on her legs. Their clothing and accessories were part of a communication code that contributed to constructing a sense of gender and social hierarchy that allowed them to set themselves apart from those who were lower down the social scale. The location where the photo was taken also contributed to this: at the time, frequenting such establishments was one of the symbolic rituals of the middle class. Similarly, being photographed in this setting, creating a visual record of having been there and sharing this with their relatives were both individual and collective ways of constructing a certain social distinction and sense of belonging. These were based on the kind of establishment in question and the ability of individuals to acquire and internalise certain bodily gestures and behavioural norms that befitted a particular context.50

• 51 ‘Alimentar a los turistas es uno de los negocios más opulentos de Mar del Plata’, La Opinión, 21 Ja (...)
• 52 Advertisement for La Bruja del Mar, La Capital, 16 December 1969, 11.
• 53 Isabella Cosse, Karina Felitti and Valeria Manzano (eds.), Los ‘60 de otra manera. Vida cotidiana, (...)

33The growing democratisation of tourism and holidays in the following decades contributed to the expansion of food options for both tourists and locals. As was pointed out in a January 1975 article in national daily La Opinión, ‘One obsession that hounds the tourist as soon as he arrives in Mar del Plata is food: there is good reason why the municipal Supply Department has registered 3,000 establishments selling takeaway food and 2,500 restaurants for the 1974–5 tourist season’.51 At the time, many eateries invited diners to enjoy their lunch and dinner ‘in a family environment’52 and presented themselves as venues for the whole family—including men, women and children—as a result of a broader process of transformations in gender and class relations that had begun decades earlier. The 1950s were marked by a large number of people from the middle and working classes entering the market as consumers, while the changes brought by the 1960s included challenges to the established systems of gender, family and intergenerational relations. These challenges were expressed by marital relations, daily life and customs taking new forms and by questions around the distribution of roles in the family (i.e., the model of the nuclear family in which the wife is the homemaker and the husband the breadwinner).53

• 54 ‘Alimentar a los turistas es uno de los negocios…’.

34Picture 6 shows a long line of people waiting to get into a popular restaurant in Mar del Plata in the early 1970s. Like picture 5, this is a snapshot. Not only are the people in it not posing, they do not even seem to have noticed the camera. As was the case with picture 1, the presence of men and women of different ages shows that there were no gender- or age-related restrictions in place at this restaurant. Their stances are relaxed—or perhaps indicate that they are tired of waiting—and their casual clothes suggest that the establishment was not particularly elegant or refined but was instead relatively simple and accessible to a broader public. As the aforementioned article in La Opinión pointed out, at Montecatini restaurant (and others like it), ‘the most popular dishes are pasta. The Formica counters gleam and a legion of uniformed waitresses stream from the kitchen to the tables carrying plates of gnocchi in tomato sauce or fragrant pesto, or platters of crunchy schnitzel half-hidden under fried eggs’.54 What the photographer was probably trying to record was how popular the restaurant was, as proven by the long queue at the door. Although the image is a static record of a single instant, it is also testimony to how long people were willing to wait for a table at the establishment.

• 55 Diego Armus, ‘Un archivo de las grandes corporaciones tabacaleras internacionales para la historia (...)

35Picture 7 also captures a scene that could only have taken place at a time when public spaces and consumption practices were undergoing a process of democratisation. It shows a middle-class family having a meal in a restaurant, which includes a bottle of wine, soft drinks, and dessert. The father is smoking, a widespread habit in Argentina at the time, one that was culturally accepted, naturalised and celebrated.55 As many of the photographs show, ashtrays were a standard item of tableware, a sign that smoking while drinking or eating was common practice.

• 56 Enrica Asquer, ‘Domesticity and beyond…’.

37In Argentina, few historical studies have analysed the supply and consumption practices in establishments that prepare, sell, and serve food, such as restaurants, cafés, or tearooms, and it is a field in which much remains to be explored. This article sought to contribute to this field by examining the ‘public face’ of consumption and focusing on a sector that has received little attention from local historians.56

• 57 Bourdieu, Photography: a middle-brow art.

39In this article, I have argued that eating (understood in a broad sense that includes both consuming food and socialising around it) and taking photos in such places were part of a process of constructing status and individual and collective class and gender identities. The photos analysed in this text in dialogue with other sources were significant in that they not only captured specific individuals but also portrayed social roles or relationships. Regardless of who was photographed in them, they allow us to analyse broader social experiences that go beyond those they portrayed and to do so from a historical perspective.57