these essays by critics, theorists and artists explore the allusive nexus of the dark in contemporary mexican literature and visual culture. they chart the poetics of 'negrura-oscuridad' in creative media during decades of deepening crisis marked by the high-profile staging of atrocities, the re-emergence of an ironic noir aesthetic and the consolidation of forensically inspired art-making.

in the wake of walter benjamin's 'unfinished' thinking structures, this volume operates through contiguous directions, transitions and regressions, incorporating images as part of the discussion of a ruinous visuality. its polycentric mesh covers a wide range of art, writing, photography and film: from ritual uses of the 'darksome' and its legacies in pre-hispanic cultures to colonial religious iconography of penitential blindness; from narco-noir in the novels of roberto bola o and yuri herrera to techno-noir in dystopian border films; from the quotidian taxonomy of horror expurgated in art practice to the haunted 'other darkness' of the photographic blink. it also explores how we can contest the threat of dark ecology and 'horrorism' through sense expansion within new media and by positing fruitful blind spots in text and art.

the miracle of analogy is the first of a two-volume reconceptualization of photography. it argues that photography originates in what is seen, rather than in the human eye or the camera lens, and that it is the world's primary way of revealing itself to us. neither an index, representation, nor copy, as conventional studies would have it, the photographic image is an analogy. this principle obtains at every level of its being: a photograph analogizes its referent, the negative from which it is generated, every other print that is struck from that negative, and all of its digital "offspring."

photography is also unstoppably developmental, both at the level of the individual image and of medium. the photograph moves through time, in search of other "kin," some of which may be visual, but others of which may be literary, architectural, philosophical, or literary. finally, photography develops with us, and in response to us. it assumes historically legible forms, but when we divest them of their saving power, as we always seem to do, it goes elsewhere.

the present volume focuses on the nineteenth century and some of its contemporary progeny. it begins with the camera obscura, which morphed into chemical photography and lives on in digital form, and ends with walter benjamin. key figures discussed along the way include nic phore ni pce, louis daguerre, william fox-talbot, jeff wall, and joan fontcuberta.