Images and Archives of State Violence in Argentina in the 2nd Half of the 20th Century

Abstract

Photography has been incorporated in recent years into historiographical research, as it represents a crucial visual source in order to address certain issues. In Argentina, it has constituted an important channel for public, and later judicial, denunciation of the repressive processes that spanned from the "Argentine Revolution" military dictatorship (1966-1973) and the democratic government (1973-1976) until the crimes committed by the last military dictatorship (1976-1983). The lack of photographs of political repression from the second half of the twentieth century remains, however, a commonplace in studies on the image, memory and recent history of Argentina. Yet, there are images of state violence from the late 1960s recorded mostly by photojournalists which have become both journalistic icons and symbols of struggle, judicial evidences and, in recent times, art historical documents. In the last few years, photojournalists have even become themselves objects of study. But there are also other images, produced and collected by state intelligence services and the military, police and prison bureaucracy through what, despite the illegal nature of many of their actions, might be defined as state identification practices. This article is primarily focused on these images, which have recently been incorporated as historical documents into academic research.

Unlike archetypal wartime images, these photographs depict political persecution and frequently clandestine arrests. Through a dizzying journey through the emergence of some of the so-called "archives of repression" and their handing over to researchers, the existence of a series of documentary collections containing a vast array of photographs of state violence, some of them still rarely studied, poorly-accessible or inaccessible to historians, will be explored.