Surveys and romance: Methodist missionaries´ photographs of the South American “field” in the early 20th century

Beginning probably in the early 1920´s, the various Boards of Missions of the American Methodist Episcopal Church put together more than 250 photo albums. Today, these volumes constitute an invaluable visual record which documents the life of missionaries in the various ¨fields¨ where they were working, and hoping to spread not only their own brand of Protestantism, but also what many of them understood to be the most advanced form of modern civilization. This paper looks at a small sample of these images, taken from the first pages of the ¨South American¨ albums, which cover missionary activities from Northern Brazil to Southern Chile. After a brief reminder of the close links between the missionary enterprise and the creation of an informal empire by the US in South America at the turn of the 20th century, the analysis of the opening two pages of the first South American volume suggests that the photographs collected by missionaries and re-arranged by their New York hierarchy served at least two contradictory purposes at the same time: contributing to the social and “scientific” turn taken by mainstream missionary movements at the time, while simultaneously preserving the heritage of what could be called the romance of mission