Documentary Reverberations: “Exploring the Photographic Field in Chile under Dictatorship” a lecture by Ángeles Donoso Macaya
Wed, Apr 6, 2022
6:30 PM–8:00 PM
This event will be in Spanish and both in person and live-streamed. Please register below.
Professor Ángeles Donoso Macaya (Faculty Seminar Leader of Archives in Common project) will give the 2022 Art School Inaugural Lecture at Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile, on April 6th at 6:30 PM (EDT). The lecture “Documentary Reverberations: Exploring the Photographic Field in Chile under Dictatorship”will be in Spanish (w/o translation), and both in person and live-streamed. For more information and to Click here to Register for this event.
This is the first in-person public talk Ángeles will give about her 2020 book, The Insubordination of Photography, which received the Best Book in Latin American Visual Culture Studies Award at LASA 2021 and several reviews—in The Latin Americanist, Journal of Social History, The Americas, Reseñas Iberoamericanas, Revista Iberoamericana, H-Net Latin America, and Bulletin of Spanish Studies.
Here is the publisher’s description of the book:
“After Augusto Pinochet rose to power in Chile in 1973, his government abducted, abused, and executed thousands of his political opponents. The Insubordination of Photography is the first book to analyze how various collectives, organizations, and independent media used photography to expose and protest the crimes of Pinochet’s authoritarian regime.
Ángeles Donoso Macaya discusses the ways human rights groups such as the Vicariate of Solidarity used portraits of missing persons in order to make forced disappearances visible. She also calls attention to forensic photographs that served as incriminating evidence of government killings in the landmark Lonquén case. Donoso Macaya argues that the field of documentary photography in Chile was challenged and shaped by the precariousness of the nation’s politics and economics and shows how photojournalists found creative ways to challenge limitations imposed on the freedom of the press.
In a culture saturated by disinformation and cover-ups and restricted by repression and censorship, photography became an essential tool to bring the truth to light. Featuring never-before-seen photographs and other archival material, this book reflects on the integral role of images in public memory and issues of reparation and justice.”
During the summer of 2020, Angeles revised and translated the book into Spanish and in April, 2021, published it in Chile with Metales Pesados as La insubordinación de la fotografía.
Here is an interview (in Spanish) Angeles gave about this event.
SPEAKER BIO:
Ángeles Donoso Macaya is an immigrant educator, researcher, and organizer from Santiago, Chile, based in New York City. She is Professor of Latin American Literature and Visual Culture at The Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY and at the Ph.D. Program in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Studies (LAILAC) at The Graduate Center, CUNY; 2020-2023 Faculty Lead ofArchives in Common: Migrant Practices / Knowledges / Memory, part of the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research at The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center / CUNY; and a 2021-2022 Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellow. Her research centers on Latin American photography theory and history, counter-archival production, human rights activism, and feminisms. She is the author ofThe Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices under Chile’s Dictatorship (University of Florida Press 2020), awarded Best Book in Latin American Visual Culture Studies, 2021, and published in Chile as La insubordinación de la fotografía (Metales Pesados, 2021). Ángeles is also a member of the activist research collective colectiva somoslacélula.
This event is media co-sponsored by the Archives in Common: Migrant Practices/Knowledges/Memory project as part of the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research from the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY.
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