Whis essay examines photomontage practices in rural contexts of Michoacán, Mexico, in order to ask how social uses of photography are intimately linked to collective subjectivities and affects of loss, between histories of migration and recurrent cycles of violence. These visual practices cannot be understood without paying attention to intrinsic aspects of photographic technology-such as its indexical character, its materiality, its artificiality, and its temporal anchoring. Here a careful reading of the concept of "the obtuse" proposed by Roland Barthes reveals how photomontage techniques, in the hands of local photographers, generate visual effects and dislocations through the manipulation of subtle details that contribute to recreate, but also to subvert, the "ways of looking" among the inhabitants of the region.

The war on crime has brought, for the past 13 years, a spiral of violence that has left deep scars on Mexican society. Every day, mass media records the expressions of the failed security strategy, although they do it mostly to beautify and spectacularize it. In the middle of the coverage by the major news outlets, war victims have opted for other practices, particularly the families of the disappeared, who use the materiality of images to create search files that help others visualize the absence of their loved ones.

[drocpap]T[/dropcap]his article presents an overview of the use of photography as a methodological resource in the scientific work of Mexican anthropology. The account goes from 1840 to date, emphasizing three periods. The first one shows how the first traveling photographers who arrived in the country established the relationship with anthropology. In the second, three projects that led to the first ethnographic maps of the indigenous population in Mexico are reviewed. On the third, we mention some researches of the 21st century that review and criticize the multiple nuances and forms that this relationship has adopted.