This book examines the archival aesthetic of mourning and memory developed by Latin American artists and photographers between 1997-2016. Particular attention is paid to how photographs of the assassinated or disappeared political dissident of the 1970s and 1980s, as found in family albums and in official archives, were not only re-imagined as conduits for private mourning, but also became allegories of social trauma and the struggle against socio-political amnesia. Memorials, art installations, photo-essays, street projections, and documentary films are all considered as media for the reframing of these archival images from the era of the Cold War dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, and Uruguay. While the turn of the millennium was supposedly marked by “the end of history” and, with the advent of digital technologies, by “the end of photography,” these works served to interrupt and hence, belie the dominant narrative on both counts. Indeed, the book's overarching contention is that the viewer’s affective identification with distant suffering when engaging these artworks is equally interrupted: instead, the viewer is invited to apprehend memorial images as emblems of national and international histories of ideological struggle.
Author(s): David Rojinsky
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 304
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
Abbreviations
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Visual Interruptions
Visual Politics and Photographic Memory Art
The Index and the Beholder
Visual Interruptions in Memory Art
Identification and Disidentification Photographs
Positioning the Viewer
Between Affect and Critical Inquiry
Taking Position on a Global Historical Memory
References
Chapter 2: Vernacular Presence
Early Human Rights Archives
Oppositional Photography in the 1980s
A Post-Dictatorship Photographic Aesthetic
Family Photography and the Family Trope
Marking Irreparable Family Loss
Vernacular Photographies in Love against Oblivion
Your Photographs
Beyond Identification: Empathic Vision
Techniques of Interrupted Viewing
Visual Politics, Memory, and Gallery Installations
References
Chapter 3: Imagined Genealogies
The National Photo-Album
The Argentine Family as Contested Trope
From Victimhood to Photographic Memory Art, 1997–2016
Lucila Quieto’s Filiación (2013–2016)
Obama-Macri and the Fortieth Anniversary
The End of Photography and the Trace of History
Reviewing Arqueología de la ausencia (Archaeology of Absence)
Sitios de Memoria (2008–2012) (Memory Sites)42
Family Frames and Geopolitical Histories
References
Chapter 4: Memory Walls
Photographic Counter-Monuments
Urban Interventions in Chile under Military Rule
The Continued Relevance of Luz Donoso’s Interventions
Formulación 335 (Formulation 335)
Interventions in the Street and the Endless Banner
The Rise and Fall of the Memory Wall
Other Walls of Faces
The Afterlife of the Memory Wall: Nécrosis (2015)
Aesthetic Reframing and the Critical Gaze
Imprints of Historical Decay
References
Chapter 5: Absent Gazes
Turning the Page in Post-Dictatorship Uruguay
Visual Politics and the Photography of Protest
Reframing the Archive in Uruguayan Art Photography
Absent Gazes
From Exile to Memory
Absent Gazes in the Street (2008–2009)
Faces of the Other
Hauntology and Justice
Rejecting the Face
A National Work of Mourning
Nomadic Images, Memorials and Shopping Centres
References
Chapter 6: Never Again!
Guatemala. Never Again: Texts and Images
Visual Clarification
The Invisibility of Guatemala’s Past
On the Global Stage
An Angelic Intervention
Of Documents and Monuments
Projected Faces in Guatemala City
An International Aesthetic of Urban Intervention
The Global Angel and Holocaust Discourse
From Universal Victimhood to the Angel of the Present
References
Chapter 7: Disappeared (Epilogue)
Photojournalism, Revolution and Celebrity
The Ideological End(S) of Photojournalism
Global Disappearance
Interrupting Affect. Interrupting Time?
References
Index
