This investigation centers on the crossroads between three research lines. The first is a historical question about the metabolization of European Modernism in Mexico and the United States during the early 20th century. The second is a theoretical argument exploring the relationship between political autonomy and aesthetic autonomy. Subordinated to the other two, the third highlights the importance of Photography in the intellectual discourse of both countries at this time. I focus on how photography and photographers, due to the liminal status of the medium between craft and fine art, provide a thread that sheds new light on the struggles of artists in the Americas for autonomy, first from Eurocentric paradigms and later from constrictive nationalist models of identity partly configured by modernist/primitivist aesthetics. I analyze these tensions through three case studies. First, I examine the New York Photo Secession’s shift from pictorialism to straight photography, focusing on Mexican caricature artist Marius de Zayas’s argument that straight photography could capture an “American reality” beyond Eurocentric aesthetics. Second, I explore Paul Strand’s 1933 report on Michoacán’s arts and crafts, which critiques both foreign and domestic coloniality’s impact on folk art and exposes nationalism’s oppressive potential for marginalized communities. Third, I investigate Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s textual and photographic attempts to depict Nonoalco-Tlatelolco in the 1950s, a district shaped by rural migration to Mexico City. Rulfo’s work highlights the challenge of representing marginalized subjects at a time when early modernist aesthetics had become rigid and fetishizing. By tracing these examples, this study reveals how modernist aesthetics navigated shifting dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, celebration and exploitation. The analysis reveals that while modernist aesthetics promised artistic liberation, they often reinforced new forms of exclusion and commodification. Photography emerges as a key medium in these debates, providing insight into the broader struggles of artists in Mexico and the United States as they negotiated autonomy within national and international artistic and political landscapes.