Buena Memoria is a photographic essay by the Argentinian photographer Marcelo Brodsky. It has developed over the years with the aim of helping the reconstruction of individual, social and historical memory in a country haunted by 30,000 unresolved deaths.

At the core of this project, like the first piece laid in a puzzle, is the annotated photograph entitled 1st year, 6th Division, 1967 (1996).¹ This piece was exhibited for the first time in Marcelo Brodsky’s high school, the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires (CNBA) in October 1996 during the ceremony Memory Bridge, organized by the Argentine Historical and Social Memory Foundation and Madres de Plaza de Mayo in memory of the school’s desaparecidos.² This ceremony included Marcelo Brodsky’s photograph, taken in the same school thirty years earlier. The names of the ninety-eight ex-students murdered by the military Junta³ were read aloud in a symbolic roll call. Naming the ninety-eight dead students and announcing them as present challenged the act of erasure that had condemned them to oblivion for over twenty years.⁴

Brodsky found the portrait of the class of 1967 on his return to Argentina after a forced exile for several years in Spain. He decided to find out what had happened to his classmates from the CNBA. Three of them had been kidnapped and incarcerated by the military regime; Marcelo’s best friend Martin was never to be seen again and Marcelo’s brother Fernando was kidnapped in 1979, became a victim of state terrorism and has been missing ever since.

As Brodsky made contact with his classmates, he defaced an enlarged copy of the original black and white portrait with text summarizing their lives during the thirty years that had passed. But these additional pencil marks inevitably defined more than individual fate, for they document the fatal socio-political events that transformed the lives of an entire generation of Argentines. The group photograph became a portion of history, the picture of an entire nation.

By the mid 1990s, Argentina began to confront her past and work towards the clarification of unresolved disappearances with the aid of grass-root human rights organizations. The making of the work and its exhibition coincided with the public demonstrations that commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the coup d’état.

In post-dictatorship Argentina, photography became a vehicle for memory in moments of confusion and functioned as a constant reminder of that which was initially destined to extermination. Photographs became banners for those demanding justice and, at the same time, unavoidable evidence of absence, a memento. If Western faith’s engagement with the image determines an association of the sign with the real, the public exhibition of images of the disappeared evokes the fetishism of the lost object in a quasi-religious way.⁵

Since the end of dictatorship, the Madres y Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo had used the portraits of the absent ones to evoke and sustain a sense of struggle. For all Argentines, those images become the trademark of resistance and even transcend the country’s borders. Black and white, sometimes blurred, the portraits of the lost youth brought back the real faces of those whose lives had been interrupted while most of the population was living in ignorance. But it is not only political repression that acts as an eraser of memory: the passing of time also vandalizes that which needs to remain in our consciousness. In this sense, it was the aim of Brodsky’s project to endow the photographic image with the function of reminding us of historical facts that need to be acknowledged in order to be avoided in the future.

However, Brodsky’s photographs are not constructions. The images are rescued from real situations, almost like chance encounters waiting to happen. We see fragments of words written on signposts, the view in the car’s rear mirror, a partly effaced graffiti: the product of a biased glance at reality that reveals a new order. He favours the conceptual treatment of the photograph, capturing images that border on abstraction, such as the images of the River Plate’s brown waters. At times, his images explore what he calls the evanescence of symbols.

Another idea that permeates Marcelo Brodsky’s work is that of premonition. Three adolescent friends appear blindfolded against a wall as if waiting to be shot. The photograph was taken in 1974, two years before the military coup. The photograph, Fernando in our Room (1968), appears blurred, Fernando’s face erased by the shifting of the hand in the moment of shooting the photograph. A premonition of the evanescence of the self?

In this way, tragedy is not depicted with formal means of representation but reconstructed symbolically and in a way which verges on the allegorical, as in the work of other contemporary photographers. An example of this is the way in which Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar dealt with the genocide in Rwanda.

The idea of erasure is present in the images of the River Plate, as it’s this river that gives a name to the inhabitants of Buenos Aires, becoming in the years of the Dirty War an anonymous tomb for those who were imprisoned and tortured by the army. The river also appears in the photograph, The Three of Us in a Boat (1966), as a backdrop of childhood games, a magic place of discovery.

After a series of confessions from repentant members of the army in 1995, Argentina came to terms with a revelation: the bodies of some of the disappeared would not be recovered because they had been thrown, still alive, into the River Plate during the so-called flights of death. The magic river had turned into a mysterious entity that signified the impossibility of burial. Under its dark brown surface, the horror of violence had erased all identities.

The vandalism of time may succeed in defacing the very personal features of what memory strives to preserve, but a vanishing face or a familiar smell will keep trying to come to the surface.

¹ One copy of this work donated by the artist to UECLAA (University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art) was lent for this exhibition
² The term desaparecidos refers generically to the 30,000 missing people who were kidnapped and murdered by state terrorism from 1973 to 1979. The Madres y Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo are the mothers and grandmothers who challenge the authorities to disclose information about their missing children
³ ‘Junta’ is the name of the Military group that, following a coup in March 1976, usurped power in Argentina until 1983. The period is also known as la dictadura (the years of dictatorship)
⁴ During the course of the ceremony, names kept being added to the compiled list to total one hundred and five at the end of the event
⁵ Jean Baudrillard, ‘Symbolic Exchange and Death’, Paris, 1976