Unearthing the Past in a City Focused on the “Now”

Last night I went to see Sebastián Moreno’s fascinating 2006 documentary La ciudad de los fotógrafos, and I just wanted to jot down a few thoughts about it. The film revolves around a series of interviews with men and women whose cameras documented the state repression that marked Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile, which lasted from 1973 until 1989.

Moreno begins and ends on a personal note, because his own father is one of these photographers, and Moreno—like most of the viewers of his documentary—first became aware of the violence that was going on in his country through the photos taken by his father and his colleagues. Moreno’s experience of the photos is the first of many ways in which the photos—static, occasionally grainy, black and white, remote—come alive before our eyes. One of them, when he first sees it as a young boy, appears to be of a group of people standing around a castle; he later finds out that the stone structure is the entrance to a mine, in which a group of laborers, seen as threatening to the regime, were “disappeared,” buried alive within.

The most interesting aspect of La ciudad de los fotógrafos is the way it stimulates the photos taken so long ago into new significations, new angles, causing them to take on the dynamism sufficient to bring the past they depict into the present. From the mine, located on the outskirts of Santiago, Moreno moves closer and closer into the very center of the Chilean capital. More photographers lend their voices and their photos—works of art in themselves, starkly beautiful in their unblinking, up-close depictions of the horrors of the dictatorship—allowing a broader, more three-dimensional depiction of the past to emerge.

But Moreno supplements the photos themselves, along with the testimonies of those who took them, with video footage of the events photographed and, occasionally, testimonies of those who are photographed. We are also able to see the context of the photos—what happened before and after they were taken, who else was nearby, what else happened outside their frames. Violent protests on the streets of Santiago take on new gravity when we see how the water cannon—known in Chilean slang as the guanaco, a llama-like creature with a propensity to spit—mows down not just the man throwing rocks at the police in one photo taken, but also many others standing beside him. We can also better appreciate the bravery of the photographers, since we see what they had to go through to take their shots.

They also go to the very places where they took their photos; the documentary shows the mine on the outskirts of Santiago, with the photographer who took the photos of the bodies there, and of the protest against their murder. From there we move to a photo of a funeral procession and protest, following the regime’s murder of the teacher José Manuel Parada just a few years before the return of democracy. Not only does the photographer who took the picture of the procession return to the intersection in downtown Santiago where the procession passed, but we also turn to video of the procession as it approached the cemetery. There, the police try to block its entrance into the grounds of the cemetery with water cannons, and we see the shouts of Chile’s future president Ricardo Lagos denouncing the dictatorship’s tactics. And this signification, this stimulation of meaning, is infinite, as Susan Sontag shows in an analysis of Tyler Hicks’ photos in the New York Times in 2001: “the pity and disgust that pictures like Hicks’ inspire should not distract you from asking what pictures, whose cruelties, whose deaths are not being shown” (Regarding the Pain of Others, 13-14). What wasn't photographed? What can we never see?

Many of these photographers are activists, in addition to being artists; one of them acknowledges that their guild, the AFI, or the Asociación de Fotógrafos Independientes, was popularly known as the Asociación de Fotógrafos de Izquierda—the Association of Independent Photographers was called the Association of Leftist Photographers. In addition to simply documenting the horror, they consider it their mission to publicize, and to remember, what they saw; to bear witness, in the spirit of protest. Several of them note that their cameras were as powerful as any weapon, and they wield them with purpose. Moreno shows how they use their photographs as tools of memory: photographing the mothers whose children have disappeared, they themselves, in turn, wearing the photos of their children on their lapels; documenting and archiving the photos of those who were disappeared, and photographing their loved ones holding those photos; and wearing their own photos, blown up, in a procession through the Paseo Ahumada, Santiago’s busy pedestrian thoroughfare, in the final scenes: a procession of memory.

As Giorgio Agamben points out, any witness of horror is inevitably complicit in that horror. Writing about those who gave testimonies of what happened to them in Auschwitz, he states that the witness’s duty is to demystify the horror of what happened, “even at the risk of discovering that what evil knows of itself, we can also easily find in ourselves” (Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 33). The photographers discover the same phenomenon: they find themselves craving violence, since this was what was necessary for them to obtain “good” photos, photos able to offer the coup de grace of evidence that could denounce the Pinochet regime once and for all. Many of them describe how this caused them great guilt; one states that she quit taking these photos as soon as she realized this. But this leads to the central problem that Agamben and others have described when writing about testimony: who will take the photos, then? Taking the photos implies complicity in violence, but not taking them means that no evidence can be registered. It’s a classic Catch-22.

The city of Santiago is as prominent a character in the documentary as the photographers are. By returning to the places where the photos and videos were taken, which are familiar to all Chileans and anyone else who has ever visited Santiago—the Paseo Ahumada, the General Cemetery, the intersection of Bandera and Moneda Streets, La Moneda Palace, the Alameda, Lonquén—we are forced to remember the city’s painful past. This is not always a pleasant exercise, since it reveals that Chile’s image as a stable, consensus-based country to be somewhat tenuous and perhaps even fleeting, given the recent protests that have cropped up there—particularly in Santiago—and the police repression with which they have been met. We are forced to realize that in this city, despite the flashy signage of neoliberal capitalism that lines places like the Paseo Ahumada, which privileges the latest fashions, the newest purchases, and in which goods from the past run the risk of being considered “out-of-style,” the past persists. La ciudad de los fotógrafos shows how this past is embedded in the very urban landscape that attempts to paper over it with signs that advertise the latest sale. No amount of neoliberalism can cause it to completely go away, however much it obscures and devalues the past. This is particularly clear when we are faced with the hard evidence that so many photographers risked their lives to obtain, and which Moreno works diligently to restore.

[Sorry to go all grad school on you, but, there were things that needed to be said.]