Folkwang Photo Talk with Juanita Solano Roa

5.11.2026

We are very much looking forward to welcoming professor Juanita Solano Roa for this winter term’s first Folkwang Photo Talk:

Into the Darien. Timothy O’Sullivan and John Moran on the US Darien Expeditions, 1870–1874

The talk will take place online on November 5, 2026 at 6 pm CET or 12 PM (noon) in Bogotá or New York. Everybody inside and outside Folkwang University of the Arts is welcome to join us!

Ever since Vasco Núñez de Balboa first saw the »South Sea« from a summit in the Darién in 1513, the idea of cutting through the narrow strip of land between the Atlantic and the Pacific has drawn explorers, engineers, and governments. The canal would only open in 1914, under US control and a decade after Washington backed Panama’s separation from Colombia. But the United States had been looking for a route long before that.Between 1870 and 1874 the Navy sent Commander Thomas O. Selfridge three times to survey the Isthmus of Darien, then Colombian territory, and two photographers went with him. Timothy O’Sullivan, just back from Clarence King’s Fortieth Parallel Survey, worked on the first season in 1870. John Moran, a Philadelphia photographer and brother of the painters Thomas and Edward Moran, took his place in 1871.

O’Sullivan’s western views are among the most studied images in nineteenth-century American photography, yet his months in the Darien rarely make it into that story. Moran has fared even worse. Many of his prints have circulated under O’Sullivan’s name, and his remarkable portfolio from the expedition, together with hundreds of stereographs, is still largely unknown. Beyond rivers, bays, and jungle, these cameras also recorded the people who lived along the proposed route, including Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in villages such as Pinogana and Chipigana.They also documented the expedition’s stops in Cartagena, now a tourist city, and in the port of Turbo, in the Urabá region of Colombia. This talk brings these photographs back into view. It treats the Darien as a hinge in O’Sullivan’s career between the King and Wheeler surveys, asks what Moran’s images tell us when we finally look at them as his own, and considers how both photographers pictured the inhabitants of this region and a territory that the United States imagined mainly as a passage.

Juanita Solano Roa is an art historian and Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She holds a master’s degree and a PhD in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Her research focuses on the history of photography in Latin America, the intersections of photography, race, and identity, and modern and contemporary Latin American art. Her publications include »Negative Originals: Race and Early Photography in Colombia« (Duke University Press, 2025), which examines how photographic practices in late nineteenth-century Colombia shaped racial ideologies and constructions of whiteness. She is also co-editor of »Lámparas de mil bujías: Fotografía y arte en América Latina desde 1839« and co-creator of »Banana Craze,« a digital humanities project exploring the cultural and political significance of bananas in Latin American and Caribbean art.