Of the approximately 250,000 negatives that Benjamín de la Calle (1869 – 1934) is estimated to have produced throughout his career, around 5,000 are preserved. Through them, a valuable portrait of Antioqueño society from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reaches us today, among other things due to the democratization of the gaze that De la Calle practiced and that was his hallmark. In 1897 he undertook the creation of his own photographic studio, from which he was able to photograph the inhabitants of Medellín and its surroundings regardless of their financial, social, or occupational status. Thanks to this, in addition to the most prominent families and figures of Antioquia, soldiers, bullfighters, and clergy paraded before his lens; as well as less traditional characters: circus performers, unconventional couples of lovers, both heterosexual and homosexual, “false women” or cross-dressers, nude women, street vendors, prostitutes, thieves, porters, miners, and many other individuals who, due to their social status, had been excluded from the photographic record. This interest in the marginal is related, according to historians and scholars such as Jorge Mario Betancur and Guillermo Correa Montoya, to the fact that Benjamín himself was marginalized due to his homosexuality; however, his gaze upon otherness was not limited to the sexual sphere. His production is extraordinarily rich, encompassing portrait, social, commemorative, religious, judicial, postmortem, and historical photography, which is why, always innovative technically and compositionally, he is a pioneering photographer difficult to categorize.
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