Ángeles Donoso Macaya. The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices under Chile's Dictatorship. Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America Series. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2020. Illustrations. 268 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-68340-111-7.
Reviewed by Denisa Jashari (University of North Carolina Greensboro)
Published on H-LatAm (June, 2021)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
In her book, The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices under Chile’s Dictatorship, Ángeles Donoso Macaya, like other visual studies scholars, questions the indexical nature of photographs and examines instead what the photograph attempts to capture, how it is represented, and what it can potentially achieve. Donoso Macaya uses the metaphor “depth of field” as a conceptual framework for the book to reveal the variety of “documentary practice[s]” that countered the Augusto Pinochet regime’s control of visuality (pp. 4, 5). She painstakingly traces how photographs were displaced, photocopied, transformed, edited, and disseminated in the streets, in protest signs, on the cover of magazines, in documentary films, as forensic documents, and more. In all four chapters, Donoso Macaya argues for the performativity of photographs, their ability to be transformed and acquire new meanings, and, in so doing, expand the documentary field.
In chapter 1, “Persistence of the Portrait,” Donoso Macaya examines the production of the Vicariate of Solidarity’s archive of ID photos of the detained-disappeared. She investigates the processes through which the portraits of the disappeared gained iconicity. In one instance, she shows how the vicariate’s photographer, Luis Navarro, improved the quality of the original photo, “printed it on matte paper and retouched it with a graphite pencil (as he saw fit). He then proceeded to rephotograph the improved portrait” (p. 51). This process, she argues, led to a uniform corpus of portraits of the disappeared and a “photo-copy rationale” (p. 57). The most fascinating segment in this chapter is Donoso Macaya’s analysis of Hernán Parada’s “Obrabierta A,” a performative project commemorating the disappearance of his brother. Parada appeared in various public spaces throughout Santiago wearing a mask, which he made by photocopying his brother’s portrait. The photos of Parada’s project, “in their crossing of alterity and the auratic, in their effacing of the photographic trace, in their subtle rendering of the ineffability of loss and of becoming other, avow that even when the photocopy of a portrait does not carry with it the trace of the subject, it still can acquire life by, paradoxically, becoming an iconic mask” (p. 73).
Donoso Macaya expands on the themes of photographic performativity and displacement in chapter 2, “Forensic Matter.” Here, she makes use of the Lonquén legal case file, which was made publicly available in 2018; media accounts; interviews; and photographs. This impressive array of sources allows her to shed new light on a paradigmatic case that provided evidence, for the first time, of the existence of the disappeared during Pinochet’s dictatorship. Donoso Macaya argues that the importance of photographs of human remains found at the base of an abandoned mine’s chimney have been previously overlooked. Photographs taken of the mine and its ovens by Helen Hughes and photographs taken by Navarro during the excavation process became “supplementary forensic evidence” in the Supreme Court proceedings and became publicly available for discussion via different mediums (p. 86). Fear of regime cover-up meant that the photographs would provide evidence of a state-sanctioned crime in case material evidence was destroyed. Although the military regime acquitted those accused of the Lonquén disappearances and later razed the mine to the ground, the photographs of Lonquén persist. Donoso Macaya argues for their use beyond mere illustration (as historians have often done) and suggests, against historian Steve J. Stern, that “if we listen to and follow these documentary echoes, the visual and sonorous traces of Lonquén, we realize that the Lonquén memory box has never been closed, that, on the contrary, it keeps expanding and resonating” (p. 117). The author is not suggesting here that photographs, as forensic evidence, provide unmediated access to what they attempt to portray. But she takes photographs seriously as complex visual signs whose multiple uses, including in a judicial case, cannot be overlooked.
In chapter 3, “Emergence of a Field,” Donoso Macaya contextualizes the “discursive emergence of the field of photography” during the socioeconomic precariousness triggered by the 1982 economic crisis in Chile, the new constitution that went into effect in 1981, and the creation of the Independent Photographers Association (AFI) that same year (p. 123). In spite of censorship and lack of financial resources, photographers in Chile found creative ways to print photo books and photographic essays and engage in written reflections on photography as a field. Photocopies, though lacking in print quality, “encouraged photographers to propose diverse and new forms of composition by integrating different materials (photographs, handwritten and typed texts, corrector fluid or pencil stains, various types of paper, etc.) and writers to rehearse different forms of critical approaches” (p. 146). The economic policies of the dictatorship, she shows, made cameras more affordable for a sector of the population, yet they also sunk the country into a crisis that primarily affected the working class and working poor. The photographic field during this period reflected this context of precariousness, belied regime claims of a Chilean miracle, and expanded the field of photography nonetheless. Although the author mentions that the 1980s photographic venture sprung from the documentary tradition of the fifties, sixties, and early seventies, one is left wondering about this longer history of photography in Chile.
In response to a wave of anti-regime protests that rocked Chile beginning in May 1983, the Pinochet regime announced Edict Number 19 in September 1984, prohibiting independent media from printing images altogether. These censored photographs, and the reactions they triggered, are the subject of chapter 4, “Photography Off Limits.” Such magazines as Análisis, Cauce, and Apsi and the Fortín Mapocho newspaper found creative ways to transgress—and protest—censorship. These independent publications still left empty spaces on their pages to show that a photograph would normally appear there. By juxtaposing empty frames with captions and other cues, Donoso Macaya argues that the “word ‘photograph’ began to describe forms or elements that were not, strictly speaking, photos: empty surfaces, sometimes framed in the form of pictures, sometimes intervened with doodles, letters, or signs” (p. 188). The ban had unintended consequences; it made photography central to debates about censorship and freedom. Since photographs themselves did not appear in these publications, but references to them continued as if they had, the author points here to the limits of photography. She is not naïve about the different uses of and interests that press photography can serve (the state, market, opposition, etc.), but the author does point to the potential of photography, its diverse users, and the civil imagination they require.[1] However, I was left wondering to what extent the 1980s methods of protesting media censorship drew from similar practices employed in the past, and is the context of authoritarianism more conducive to photo altering or does the medium of photography simply lend itself more easily to transformations of these kind?
The Insubordination of Photography is a necessary, timely, and original book. I do not know of any other monograph that analyzes the complex and multidimensional uses of documentary photographic practices during Chile’s dictatorship. From altered ID photos of the disappeared, to forensic photographs, photocopied photos and photobooks, and censored press photography, Donoso Macaya skillfully and carefully has traced the ways photographs travel, incite public discussion, move from one setting to another, and transform. She sees her work as a participant in the event of photography, a form of participation that expands photographic practices, and she invites readers to do the same.
Note
[1]. Donoso Macaya draws on Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2014). Azoulay here argues that the invention of photography created the possibility for a triangular encounter between photographer, the photographed, and the spectator. Each photograph, then, has the potential of a re-reading by a spectator, who, by becoming part of the citizenry, assumes responsibility of an “ethical” response.
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Citation:
Denisa Jashari. Review of Donoso Macaya, Ángeles, The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices under Chile's Dictatorship.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56393
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