From their inception at the dawn of the twentieth century, the sprawling US banana companies that dominated the economic and political life of Central America have inspired a vast literature. The earliest accounts were self-serving histories upholding the United Fruit Company (UFCO, now known as Chiquita) as a bulwark of American ingenuity and benevolent Manifest Destiny in the tropics. Numerous authors have since challenged these congratulatory readings of the American presence, focusing on the myriad ways in which United Fruit carved out monopolies in production and transportation from the farm to the consumer. Known throughout Central America as el pulpo (the octopus) for its tenacious grasp over all aspects of national societies, UFCO brazenly engaged in predatory pricing, bribery, labour repression and even mass murder, an incident García Marquez adapted to the fictional Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Newer scholarship has revealed the complex ways in which workers, independent growers and occasionally state actors resisted the demands of banana companies. Loosely centring on the 69-day strike of Honduran banana workers in 1954, historian Kevin Coleman's A Camera in the Garden of Eden joins this more nuanced literature on the fruit company in Central America.

What makes this contribution distinctive is that it draws on an extensive visual record of one of UFCO's operation centres, the Honduran town of El Progreso. Events leading up to the strike are revealed in several photographic archives, foremost of which was a private collection of prints and negatives that Coleman encountered (serendipitously) in the course of his research. Rafael Platero Paz, the Salvadoran/Palestinian immigrant whose photos are featured in this book, devoted a half-century to documenting the prosaic and occasionally remarkable aspects of life in El Progreso. The images reproduced here range from the photographer's carefully-composed self-portraits, to the stock photos from which he earned a living, to events both newsworthy and transformative. Platero Paz was on hand to record masses of striking workers commandeering a UFCO freight train, forming orderly queues for rations, and attending an outdoor Mass celebrated by a supportive priest. The photographer died in 1984, leaving behind relatively little information about his images, or himself, for that matter. Coleman learned of his work through a surviving daughter, but the images and text render the photographer a knowable and sympathetic collaborator in this account of life in the banana enclave.

If Platero Paz's photographs suggest how Progreseños viewed themselves and the cause they joined in 1954, others reveal company and governmental views of the strike. Some of the most telling recent historiography on United Fruit has been offered by scholars mining the massive body of memoranda and cables between United Fruit's farm managers and corporate headquarters in the United States. Coleman reports that UFCO's publicly-available visual record of working conditions is sparse in comparison. In keeping with the company's sanitised narratives of its role in Central America, the images selected for its photo archive at Harvard University emphasise the company's economic, infrastructural and health contributions. Hence, there is a series of photos relating to company research on poisonous snakes and the extraction of snake venom, but nothing pertaining to UFCO's well-known photographic surveillance of labour organisers. And just two company photos relate to the 1954 strike that convulsed Honduras and garnered the anxious Cold War attentions of the United States. Coleman suggests that this ‘official’ interpretation of events is better indicated through news sources, such as Life magazine, whose photo content and placement toe the US line that the strike was communist-inspired. Life's images are contrasted with those of the Cuban magazine Bohemia, which emphasised the desperate social conditions that fuelled the stoppage.

The strengths of Coleman's volume rest on its heretofore never seen visual record of a banana enclave. Gazing directly at Platero Paz's camera, the subjects of these photographs speak to us in arresting ways. Many of the photos cry out for interpretation, as in the studio portrait of a bandaged and bruised Asian man, apparently the victim of violence, who poses in a way that displays his injuries to the camera. From the print itself Platero Paz tells us nothing, but Coleman ventures interpretations of this and other photos in the collection. These may or may not prove convincing to the reader, and in one instance his text is contradicted by the photo it references. An image identified as a record of events in 1927 (p. 33), for example, displays a 1960s pick-up truck in the foreground. Too often, the book's overwrought narrative distracts from the accompanying photos. An extended treatment of UFCO's snake research farm (identified with Foucauldian flair as a ‘panopticon’) asserts that ‘As the knower and the known were inextricably bound up in the photographic event at the serpentarium, the observer – the subduer of serpents, the manipulator of nature – was coded as superior to the observed’ (p. 77). Such heavy-going writing is prevalent throughout the book.

Perhaps the most startling photo, the inspiration for the book's title, is also the most troubling for interpretive purposes. Among the negatives in Platero Paz's collection was an image of the photographer in a side-by-side embrace with a white North American man, most likely a fruit company foreman. Both are naked in this full-frontal shot, although their genitalia are concealed by artfully placed vegetation. This ‘gay Garden of Eden photo’, Coleman tells us, ‘perfectly allegorizes an unexpected past, alluding to a prefallen paradise when nature herself was divinity and humans were demiurgic artists’ (p. 237). Prior to its publication here, he surmises that no one else had seen the image contained on the negative. Elsewhere we are presented with Platero Paz's much more conventional self-portraits, Coleman observing the great pains that he took in representing himself to friends, family and posterity. Aside from its fanciful interpretation, what are we to make of a long-hidden image so at variance with the photographer's carefully crafted representations of self? As with most photos throughout the book, Platero Paz is mute in this instance, but the image begs the question: can the subject of a photograph decline to be seen, even when he can no longer speak for himself?