The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices under Chile's Dictatorship by Ángeles Donoso Macaya

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices under Chile's Dictatorship by Ángeles Donoso Macaya Clayton Oppenhuizen The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices under Chile's Dictatorship. By Ángeles Donoso Macaya. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2020, p. 250, $80.00 Ángeles Donoso Macaya's book The Insubordination of Photography examines the importance of photography as a documentary tool to denounce, protest, and defy the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). Macaya challenges the notion that photographs are indexical ephemera by examining their production, representation, and construction in public spheres in Chile. Developing from the concept of "field" in queer theories of Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed, the central concept of the book is "depth of field" which refers to "what is discernible, intelligible, or visible within the expanding field of photography" (4). Through meticulous examination of counter-archives of reproduced (photocopied) photos, amended IDs, forensic photography, precarious photographic publications, and censored media, each chapter provides a glimpse and reframing of the importance of various photography practices to oppositional movements and their media during the dictatorship. The first two chapters, "Persistence of the Portrait" and "Forensic Matter," examine the multifarious ways photographs, as documents, shaped the public sphere. "Persistence of the Portrait" examines the use of amended state IDs in various campaigns – on TV displays, as posters, in print media, and on protesters – during some of the earliest opposition demonstrations and performances that emerged starting in the late 1970s and flourished in the 1980s. Chilean photographers and activists used photographs of the detained and disappeared to draw attention to violations of human rights. These demonstrations also made icons of the photographs. The most emblematic example from the chapter is that of Hernán Parada's "Obrabierta A," a project wherein Parada commemorated his disappeared brother's life by wearing an enlarged portrait of his brother over his face while demonstrating on the streets of Santiago and visiting the veterinary school where his brother studied. The practice of wearing his brother's portrait as a sort of skin in public was, according to the author, a "loving/photographic act" that transformed both subject (Hernán) and beholder (77) by repurposing family portraits and state IDs from documents to signifiers of missing persons and emblematic materials in protests. Historians of media, particularly print media, in Chile will find the third and fourth chapters of most interest. Chapter three, "Emergence of a Field," traces the discursive emergence of a photographic field through the creation of the Asociación de Fotógrafos Independientes (AFI) and the creation of inexpensive books like Presencia del Hombre and Ediciones económicas de fotografia Chilena. Due to the nature of censorship and the overhaul of the Chilean economy, the photographic field as constituted [End Page 579] in the halcyon days of the 1950s and 1960s did not exist. However, the field was created "anew" through the practices of photographers like Paz Errázuriz and Luis Navarro (142) who documented the quotidian lives of average Chileans, depicting life in Chile outside of explicit repression but still within the precarity of the regime. Ediciones económicas also depicted daily lives of Chileans but also transformed the medium but using a Ricoh copying machine – a more affordable and often better version than a Xerox (145-6) – to reproduce images and composed entirely new images from the amalgamation and repeated copying of photos. Chapter four, "Photography Off Limits," charts the efforts of Chilean independent press to chronical the national protests in 1984 despite the censoring of all images within their pages. In response to anti-regime protests in the years before, the military regime announced Edict Number 19 in September 1984, banning independent media from using any images in their publications. This ban on images led independent publications Cauce and Análisis to emphasize reference to the censored images. Two such examples include Cauce claiming that a blank image contained all the rights afforded to Chileans, while Análisis filled their photographic space with a printed question mark made up of the words "cuantos son, quienes son, donde estan". The censorship backfired as activists and journalists used the banned images as a means of debating freedom of press and freedom of...