“The surviving image”. Documentary photography in contemporary Chilean testimony (Javier Rebolledo and Nancy Guzmán)

Abstract

In this article, a reading will be attempted of some documentary pictures that accompany the testimonies in El despertar de los cuervos. Tejas verdes el origen del exterminio en Chile (2013) by Javier Rebolledo and Ingrid Olderock. La mujer de los perros (2014) by Nancy Guzmán, with the aim of observing how they reinforce the testimonial word and contribute to completing a memory narratology on two places where human rights were systematically violated during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet: Tejas Verdes concentration camp and the house known as ‘Venda Sexy’. Some theoretical texts will be used to support the analysis of the photographic series on the faces of the torturers and the instructors in Tejas Verdes, as well as the four images of the Santiago house, all of them by Claudia Feld, Diamela Eltit, Jaume Peris Blanes, Joan Fontcuberta and Georges Didi-Huberman. This dialogue will allow us to understand how a without artistic intentions photography like documentary photography constitutes a source of informative value and an imprint of constancy of memory to approach a historical moment that could not be closed due to the magnitude of the horror embedded in it.