Última Huella
CERTIFICATE OF PRESENCE
Photography has become an active tool of representation and denunciation of the dictatorship’s violence, not only because between 1973 and 1990 it built a powerful visual discourse of opposition to the regime, but also because it has remained an essential resource for acts of memory over the years, giving visibility to the impacts of State violence. In that sense, the portraits of the victims of enforced disappearance, which have been search tools for their families and loved ones since September 1973, are also symbols today of their absence, of their snatched life and the incessant question about what happened. Seeing their portraits enables the transition from them being a statistic to recognizing their humanity.
However, as an instrument for memory, photography has its limits, obscurities and deceptions. For example, not all victims of Enforced Disappearance recognized by the Rettig Report and Valech Commission have an image or portrait. In a country with such unequal conditions, photographic and visual records show and focus on cities and professional and cultural sectors. When we place so much emphasis for verification on photographs, we lose the perspective of what happened in a large part of the country.
From the beginning, we asked ourselves: “Can we remember who we haven’t seen?” and, through different means, we sought to reconstruct the image of Disappeared Detainees who did not have a portrait. Using the existing archives and official figures of the time (1999), we traced the images of 1,197 disappeared prisoners. To date, we have found a total of 1,056 photographs. When we realized the archives’ limits, we went to the places where dozens of photographs were missing. In some homes portraits appeared, in others we conducted interviews and portraits of their immediate family members: daughters, sons, grandchildren. We didn’t have a direct image of the victim but there were similar memories and features. We asked them to reconstruct their faces, describe them and create a “Spoken Portrait.” The testimonies and stories that accompanied the descriptions contributed immensely to our work, but memory is fragile and, in many cases, there was a lack of family members who could not give us their testimony.
The pain of the loss has not been treated and remains in the victims’ families and the territory. But people are forgetting, they are dying. And we, without knowing it, are surrounded by contempt for life, we walk on bones. “Every photograph is a certificate of presence” says Roland Barthes, and it is from this foundational phrase that we build our search. We took the photographic lens to the last witness of the missing person’s footprints, the last whereabouts, the last thing their eyes saw. By capturing the landscape, we long to make it appear, to feel the loss and release the pain.
Our country sustains the vestiges of violence carried out for seventeen years. Among them, places that were occupied as clandestine centers of torture and disappearance, bridges from which they were thrown, and desert wastelands that have been maintained with the same stones and footprints. It is surprising and moving to see these spaces merging into the landscape, disappearing and remaining at the same time. It is incorporated into the extension of the time of mourning, that infinite projection of suffering.
In September 2023, fifty years passed since the dictatorship’s first Disappeared Detainee. The length of time stirs our emotions and hopes. It is discouraging because we have seen the effects of the historical permanence of State violence and and how misery crystallizes over the years. But we also know that humanity cannot overcome a pain so great that it has been denied, and relegated to oblivion and death. The pain does not die, even when there is forgetfulness.
The photographs of victims of enforced disappearance are our most valuable and most fragile certificate of presence. They exist for us, in the future, not only because the lens captured the moment but also because of the possibility of preserving the images. We thank the family and friends who have made public the image of their loved one and the archives and institutions that have made its preservation possible. Rescuing and safeguarding photographs is an act of resistance against oblivion, something that, fifty years after the 1973 coup d’état, we cannot allow.
Catalina Jeanneret