Postcards from Chile and Images from an Archive: Lighting the Nitrate of the 1973 Coup

Louise Purbrick

doi:10.3390/h7040115

Abstract

This article examines a mass produced postcard image as a picture of conflict. It considers the postcard as a Benjaminian ‘prismatic fringe’ through which an archive can be viewed, wherein documents of the British trade in Chilean nitrate are juxtaposed with those of General Pinochet’s 1973 military coup. The archive itself is explored as a site of loss and its postcard, an unvarying idealisation, as a particularly problematic but powerful image that renders conflict out of sight.

Highlights

Not all pictures of conflict carry the visual shock of photojournalism in either its past or present forms, not all have the sombre grey tones of newspaper photographic reproductions that depict the awful wreckage of exploded bombs, and not all consist of the bright pixels sent across internet sites that clinically translate the horror of bodies ripped apart
My attempt to interpret this postcard as a picture of conflict is written as a series of encounters with the archive in which it is held, with the writings of historian Harold Blakemore, who sent it, and with the history of the nineteenth century British trade in Chilean nitrate about which he wrote
He wrote of the intricacies of financial and personal relationships within the nitrate trade that he discovered in the lines upon lines of letters sent between Chile and Britain, between partners and managers of nitrate companies, which lie stacked in boxes in his University of Bradford archive

Summary

Introduction

Not all pictures of conflict carry the visual shock of photojournalism in either its past or present forms, not all have the sombre grey tones of newspaper photographic reproductions that depict the awful wreckage of exploded bombs, and not all consist of the bright pixels sent across internet sites that clinically translate the horror of bodies ripped apart. Light with a View of the Andes Mountains), The Harold Blakemore Latin American Archive, Special This picture postcard conflict faces the problemofofmany manyrecords recordsofofthe theeveryday, everyday,one onethat thatisisnot. My attempt to interpret this postcard as a picture of conflict is written as a series of encounters with the archive in which it is held, with the writings of historian Harold Blakemore, who sent it, and with the history of the nineteenth century British trade in Chilean nitrate about which he wrote. Nor have I sought to remove it from its present location in an archive, where the postcard is part of a longer past It is a circuitous way of making an argument about the historical materiality of images of war: traces of past exploitation are present in contemporary conflicts and can be found in the most everyday artefacts of exchange