Mnemonic hauntings: photography as art of the missing.

• Date: 22 June 2006
• Author: Tandeciarz, Silvia R.
• Published date: 22 June 2006
• Author: Tandeciarz, Silvia R.

Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.--Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

The value, I think, of maintaining a distinction between narrative memory and traumatic memory is that it allows us to conceive of a realm of imagery that maps onto the latter. Rather than reducing itself to a form of representation, such imagery serves to register subjective processes that exceed our capacity to "represent" them. A substantive category of memory, but also of image-making, is instituted by this process--a category in which affective experience is not simply referenced, but activated or staged in some sense. Theories of expression are inadequate to the task of understanding this mode of image production insofar as they regard the artwork as the transcription or deposit of a prior mental state. The imagery of traumatic memory deals not simply with a past event, or with the objects of memory, but with the present experience of memory. It therefore calls for a theorization of the dynamic in which the work is both produced and received--a theory, in other words, of affect.--Jill Bennett, "The Aesthetics of Sense-Memory" (2003)

WHAT IS IT ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY THAT HELPS US TO FIX THE PAST? FIX IT, THAT is, potentially in every sense: to freeze it, as in a fixed image, rendering it still; to put it back together, mend what has been broken; to con us, as in mislead, take advantage of, profit from those willing to believe in what has been captured within the frame. By exploring some of the uses of photography in post-dictatorship Argentina. I hope to shed some light on this question, taking as my point of departure Jill Bennett's observations that the process of making and consuming images serves not only to reference affective experience, but also to activate or stage it. In attempting to theorize the links between trauma and the visual arts, Bennett calls for a theory of affect. Bennett (2003: 29) argues:

As the source of a poetics or an art, then, sense memory operates through the body to produce a kind of "seeing truth" rather than "thinking truth," registering the pain of memory as it is directly experienced, and communicating a level of bodily affect.... It aims to constitute a language of subjective process (specifically of affective and emotional process) to complement history and to work in a dialectical relationship with common memory. In what follows, I explore the difference between "seeing" and "thinking truth," posited by Bennett through a close examination of Marcelo Brodsky's work and its efforts to complement contemporaneous memory narratives in Argentina. If "common memory" in Argentina recognizes the brutality of dictatorship as part of its recent history, official rhetoric also has attempted to close that period by suggesting its containment within the past, as something that is finished and should be forgotten for the sake of stability and future prospects. (1) In this study, I wish to suggest that photography, in a variety of formats, has proved to be extraordinarily effective in resisting this discourse and in forcing an always present negotiation--both affective and aesthetic--of this past and its legacy in contemporary Argentina.

Before pursuing Brodsky's work, however, it may be useful to take a brief detour to consider some of the ways in which photography in Argentina has represented the trauma of dictatorship since its inception in 1976. (2) As is widely known, the military regime that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983 committed countless human rights abuses in the name of national security. Human rights organizations estimate the total number of victims at 30,000; though many remain unaccounted for today, approximately 9,000 cases of illegal kidnapping, torture, and death were documented in Nunca Mas: Informe de la Comision Sobre la Desaparicion de Personas (1984). The military junta's policy of abducting citizens and making them disappear led in 1977 to the earliest and most widely recognizable use of photography to resist repression--that enacted by the Mothers of the Disappeared in their weekly marches circling Buenos Aires' symbolically central Plaza de Mayo on Thursday afternoons. As Jean Franco (1992:115) notes in her now classic study of gender and resistance, "the mothers turned the intimidating function of the city under the police state into an alternative public sphere, transforming the Plaza de Mayo into a theater in which the entire population, whether actually present or not, became an audience and a witness to loss." In Franco's reading, this spectacle of mourning represents a first instance in which a strategy of resistance--the public demonstration of solidarity and search for information--interrupts the civilizing order of the city to generate awareness and acknowledgment of the Mothers' plight from even the most casual passers--by. More significantly, perhaps, the photographs the Mothers carry, in addition to their signature white scarves, render their situation intelligible:

The photographs carried by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo became proof of existence. Often taken on family outings, sometimes blurred and badly focused, they silently emphasized the fact that these people were not monsters but young men and women whose absence had to be accounted for. The military had tried to eliminate them from memory, but their images were turned into a commemoration; the public display was an eloquent reminder of an ethics based on collective memory and continuity (Franco, 1992:115). Coverage of their movement most often has stressed their refusal to remain indoors and privately mourn their loss under a state of siege, but I am equally struck by the surprising consistency with which the use of photos, coupled with their silent form of resistance, has been replicated across the globe. Well documented and analyzed by journalists, scholars, and human rights activists, the "model of trauma-driven performance protest" (Taylor, 2003: 170) initiated by the Madres has proved to be extremely exportable. Indeed, as Ariel Dorfman (2003: B7, emphasis added) notes,

We have grown strangely used to them over the last 25 years, those women with a small photo pinned to their dark dresses, the extended tribe of those whose loved ones, from Chile to Kurdistan, from Argentina to Ethiopia, from Guatemala to Guinea, have been abducted in the night and never heard of again.... They have become a habitual presence, these faraway women on the television screen asking at least for a body to bury, asking that they be allowed to start mourning their dead. What is it about the irruption of women in the public sphere and, specifically, their use of photography to turn "their bodies into billboards ... land] conduits of memory" (Taylor, 2003: 170) that makes this method of resistance so poignant, so meaningful, and so transnational, capturing the imaginations of so many?

Ludmila da Silva Catela's (2001) study of mourning rituals engaged in by relatives of the disappeared in Argentina suggests that photographs play a key role in helping mourners to grieve. She argues that because, by definition, the repressive act of disappearance leaves no body to bury, no definite moment of death, and no tomb, mourners have had to open new spaces and rituals to confront their loss:

The use of photographs to remember an absence re-creates, symbolizes, recuperates a presence that establishes links between life and death, the explicable and inexplicable. Photographs "vivify." Like a metonymy, they contain part of the referent to totalize a system of meanings. In cemeteries the photo indicates to whom the gravestone corresponds, and iconographically locates the separation between the living and the dead.... These cultural attitudes before death and its images are like those re-created in relation to the missing. The photos of the missing constitute one of the most frequently used forms to remember them. They oppose and complement the category of disappeared in the sense that they return a notion of personhood, that which in our societies condenses the most essential features: a name and a face (2001: 129). (3) By attaching a face and a name to the disappeared, these photos imbue them with a corporeality they have been denied; opposing their categorical erasure by the authorities, they reinsert the missing in the spaces from which they have been torn, serving as placeholders until their hoped-for return, or alternatively, as concrete sites where loved ones focus their grief. Da Silva Catela (2001: 131) goes on to describe three sites in which photographs become a principal medium of mourning-the home, the plaza, and the Madres' bodies--arguing that in these cases, the photograph of the missing person "re-creates a bond broken by disappearance." As such, on a very personal level, the photos function both metonymically and literally as tombs, recalling the observation that "ever since cameras were invented in 1839, photography has kept company with death" (Sontag, 2003: 24). By situating the dead and creating a material residue that links them to the living, photography becomes an especially potent representational medium for processing grief.

Roland Barthes' (1981 : 76-77) exploration of the particularity of photography as a representational medium further helps to explain the political efficacy of these images and at least one of the reasons that this form of expression has remained so evocative through the years:

Photography's referent is not the same as the referent of other systems of representation. I call "photographic referent" not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often...