Manuel Ramos and the Virgen de Guadalupe

This article explores the relationship between the destruction and production of religious images in postrevolutionary Mexico by analyzing photographs produced by Manuel Ramos (1874–1945) between 1921 and 1931. A pioneering photojournalist of the Porfirian and revolutionary eras, Ramos was also a militant Catholic who chronicled the Cristero conflict and harnessed photography as a tool of Catholic visual activism. Taking up this lesser-studied angle, the article argues that Ramos’s imagery responds directly and indirectly to iconoclastic violence against Mexico’s preeminent religious icon, the Virgen de Guadalupe, by exploiting the medium as a means of documentation, reproduction, and artistic experimentation.