Photography and Its Publics by Melissa Miles;Edward Welch;

Author:Melissa Miles;Edward Welch;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

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A Little History of Photographic Displacements: From Chile from Within (1990) to Chile desde adentro (2015)

Ángeles Donoso Macaya

In 1988, Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas travelled to Santiago, Chile, to document the referendum that eventually put an end to Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1990). While in Santiago, she met a group of photographers who had been documenting life under the dictatorship for over a decade. Meiselas started to work with them on a book of photographs, Chile from Within.1 In September 1989, almost a year before the book was released in New York City, a photographic exhibition of the same title began touring the United States.2 Meiselas’s role as a facilitator was key for the book’s publication and for the realization of the itinerant exhibition. Some of the photographers involved in the project in Chile also travelled to the United States to participate in these events.

Of all the documentary projects with which Meiselas has been involved, Chile from Within is the only one that has yet to receive in-depth critical attention.3 This critical neglect may be due to the fact that Meiselas is not the author of these photographs.4 Chile from Within has strong political, ethical and aesthetic resonances with Meiselas’s own photographic work, but these correspondences are not what is at stake here. Rather, I am interested in the geopolitical and temporal displacements of the images that comprise the book, as well as the collaborative work that made possible and fostered these photographic displacements. As I will argue, Chile from Within helps to elucidate questions related to the displacement, dissemination and contextualization of images in different geo-socio-political and historical contexts. The displacements and translations fostered by the project illuminate the varied publics that photography addresses in its movements across national contexts, and shed light on the temporal and historical dimensions of photography’s publics. Chile from Within has had different lives since it was conceived in the late eighties. In each of its manifestations, the project engaged diverse audiences and contributed to the formation of different publics. In the 1990s, the book and its accompanying exhibition introduced audiences abroad (mainly in the United States) to the period of the Chilean military dictatorship. Meanwhile, the Spanish edition of Chile from Within, published in Chile in 2015, reactivated debates about pending political reparations and about the historical memory of the dictatorship period in the present. I argue in this chapter that the debates instigated by the Spanish translation of the book highlight the key role photography played and plays still within these processes.

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