By Ruben Chabab
The scene is of extreme happiness. The mother is standing there, looked at the child. One arm of the child is leaning on the table, the other, hidden, seems to stretch forward to reach the knob of a radio. The look of the child could say that is oriented towards the dial and that his hand is, at the time the camera shutter was fired, looking for your favorite station.
The mother is there, beside him, watching his son, just looking at him with a smile. Behind a curtain there floreadas, una puerta que seguramente dará a un patio y nada más.
La escena es también de una extrema intimidad. Todo está concentrado en ese espacio hogareño que podemos deducir es la sala o el típico comedor diario de una casa de clase media obrera argentina de los años setenta.
Quien sacó la fotografía no logró establecer los balances de luces y de oscuridad necesarios, porque hay zonas de la escena que aparecen como saturadas. La mesa por ejemplo. La madre tiene apoyadas sus manos sobre el borde de la mesa, pero no vemos sus manos, y esa misma saturación lumínica erased to confuse the elements in addition to radio on the table.
The scene is of extreme happiness, not because there is something special happening, an event that causes the joy of the two portraits but because the atmosphere returns, who look at this picture, the idea more acute or more extreme that feeling that overwhelms us, when in the midst of everyday life, we are surprised to feel that we are feeling happy.
know who took this picture because at the bottom of it says "Father Ephraim, amateur photographer, took it and found this instant. " The explanation is not standing idle. The amateur nature photographer explains rudimentary photographic process. But more, this complete data somehow familiar and intimate sense of this scene.
The father is not present but his body is he who holds for posterity the strength of that scene. The father would be, in that distant day or evening of 1974 when the photo was taken on the same side in which we are now looking at the picture, located in the extreme angle of an equilateral triangle whose base would consist of the line from mother to child. The father looks at both mother and child to child puts his eyes out of that glance.
is impossible to know exactly the time the photograph was taken, but everything indicates, by force oblique light projected from the outside, its intensity falling on one side of the body of the child and part of the table, which is noon or early afternoon. One could imagine that was obtained on a Saturday or Sunday, after lunch. That the table has already been collected, that the mother has already dressed to go out and in the meantime the son wanted to listen to the radio and then the parent has called his wife to portray that moment that it forms a trinity of love.
father wanted, rehearsing with his camera to portray that moment of bliss home: the table clean, uncluttered, quiet gestures, the disposal of bodies, show or speak of this quiet parentheses that family is living at that time.
both smile, but in the face of the mother is where the smile is more evident because of the son, the light, giving the side, blurs the gesture, especially the lips are trapped in the white light projected from an unseen window.
Nothing makes disturbance at the scene. The amateur photographer has managed to capture not only the simplicity of the home but peace of mind that inhabits it. It is as if he wanted to tell us (or tell yourself to reveal the picture) that is familiar territory peaceful balance. The look of the mother is confirmed: see smiling child with a touch of naivete and trust. Some of pride (for the estate) there appears to be envisaged, as if he were looking at him saying (or saying to herself): This is the son I have, the fruit of my life.
Remove this photograph seems to have meaning for either photographed or the photographer who won a ceremony or an act previously tested. There is a hint of spontaneity in the absence of pose, the fact of not looking at the camera. The photographer appears notifying them that the photograph would be taken but for sure you press the shutter preferred at the moment most natural , negating any claim of solemnity at the scene.
is as if the amateur photographer had said I catch with my camera this naturally takes place inside my house walls. Lingerie holding the least tied in the affection of the mother to the child but also the father to both. Absent from the photograph, the father testified that the harmony of family relationship.
There is something in this picture that makes painting: the blurring of the boundaries. The effect of sunlight away at this photo of these portraits in the portrait that seeks to detect the accuracy and uniqueness of the faces and the places photographed. Is that an amateur photographer, but the presence of these two bodies around the table, has been of interest to convey the atmosphere affective, harmonica, in which these bodies are installed, some of what Charles Baudelaire unsuccessfully sought from the Paris of the late nineteenth century and left as testimony in a letter to his mother. It tells you you've been looking for someone to portray together, but so far has failed in the attempt, "the majority of photographers have ridiculous obsessions: they consider a good photograph, one in which all the warts, all wrinkles, all the defects, and all the trivialities of the face are visible: the harder the image, they are happier " , Baudelaire writes [1] . Let's say the author of The flowers of evil looking what did the amateur photographer in this picture: no reliable representation of the faces and forms, but the atmosphere around them, the narrative of the scene closed testimony on the real that is offered to the eyes.
There are few objects so strongly melancholic as photographs. Perhaps because they figure exaggerated and impossible desire that humans have of trying to catch what we know will inevitably sneak of our lives. Despite being a purely mechanical and despite that we are not aware of this effect we are creating when removing , the emerging germ of melancholy born at the instant immediately after revealing photos, and will be increasingly over time: the farther away we are from that landscape, the youth of those faces, the intensity of those eyes, the innocence of that scene will become the most powerful and most ruthless power melancholy feeling is that with our soul.
is impossible for the amateur photographer who got this picture in an evening or afternoon of 1974 did not have known or intuited this. All the strength of their commitment is set to retain for tomorrow intimate and friendly atmosphere that he knows that in a few years will evaporate: the mother grow old and leave the child home. At least that dictate the laws of nature and cultural rights in the family that has formed and is incorporated. The amateur photographer who captured this picture knew, at the right time to get it, that was generating an effective area for future melancholy that of his family.
2.
Thirty-two years later that afternoon or evening of 1974 when the amateur photographer recorded the scene of the mother and her son, Gustavo Germano returns to the same site as part of a project inspired by the idea of \u200b\u200breproducing photographic scenes that demonstrate the impact of enforced disappearance perpetrated between 1976 and 1983 has had on family and affective groups.
Altemar Clara Fink opens the doors of his house to meet Germano another stage of your project and there, in the same room where the mother guarding her gaze having your child in the past, he intends to draw the picture again account of the hiatus caused by the passage of time and the storm unleashed by the winds of history.
The new scene, unlike the primitive, has chromaticism and an amateur photographer is not the art of photography, but an experienced artist who works hard and cares even the smallest details. The proposal does to the players (in this case Clara Altemar) is to reproduce the gesture of the past in the same place where the first picture was taken. Is, we know, the same slogan, for each and every one of the shots that make up the project Absences.
Atelman Clara Fink is not, of course, the young woman who portrayed her husband's innocence in monochrome photography. In 2006 and is an adult who seems to reach almost the eighth decade of his life. The child's place is empty, only see the back of a chair and hand left the mother perched on top.
All edges are crisp, the objects have thick, unlike what happens in the photograph of 1974 in which all the elements composing the scene seemed to be in a evaporation process.
The palms of the hands of Clara Altemar are visible and only now, 32 years later, we noticed that his hands are great, especially the right that is willing on the table, and ahead of his body. We can also differentiate the subject of glass or crystal that is on the table, the same photo that appeared in the old corroded or eaten by the light. It is a centerpiece with undulating shapes, empty.
Unlike the old photograph is difficult to know what time of day Germano got the new picture. There is in it, a predominance of light invade the whole scene that allows objects to acquire a reality of lacking in the old photograph, showing them in their full reality. Nothing seems be nothing to be guessed or imagined. What little there is, is there. Tablecloth, table centerpiece, the objects that adorn the wall. There is no mystery behind or in front of any objects, let alone in the woman's body is located in the center of the scene.
She is standing firm, front of the camera. There is a natural in this picture, the body is stiff like waiting for the moment of clik shutter. The faint smile of the young woman has been deleted.
not on the table where the child is missing, the radio. We can imagine that was scrapped by the passage of time, but next to the body of the missing child is missing the radio the object, the sole purpose of early photography (also watched it) in which the child deposited his eyes.
Germano probably instructed women in the way he wanted to play the scene, however, unlike most other pairs of photos in series Absences , in this, the protagonist seems to have betrayed the desire of the photographer to turn his face toward the camera, unable to mimic the gesture in the old photograph made his eyes look with delicate gesture of his son. [2]
Caught on their side, the dimension of the absence of the child focused on the empty chair, can not be observed, perhaps for fear of collapse would mean for her character play a scene impossible. How to look at what is not there?
Altemar Clara is in the vacuum side, and not look at it, gives to this spatiality, (did she know?) a forcefulness difficult describe if not with this gesture of firmness.
might venture to say that the picture makes its Germano punctum at the center veiled (dead), who is Clara's right eye alternately, an eye undermined by blindness and she does not hide, but on the contrary, it offers to our gaze. No one to see the photographic reconstruction of the scene does not stop with some concern that physiognomic detail a woman carrying or cargo. Hueco through which all images and ideas that awakens the vision of this scene seem to converge, drained it, as if it were a cesspool that has engulfed the visible.
remaining The second element is the other no, not the child, but of the amateur photographer who took the first photo. I was not there, but occupied, we could secure it, the apex of a triangle, a familiar trinity still invisible, held photography from its absence. Now there is no possible exchange of glances. No parent, husband or son. From the innocence of the primal scene has just survived an empty table centerpiece and a blind eye that looks at a camera held by a stranger.
Although all shine in front of our eyes the smoothness that offers photographic paper, what is there, in that scene, is a ruin. And this woman, who stands as a Cyclops at center stage, fixed staring, with his only living eye, the irrefutable evidence of the heinous evil that the dictatorship was discharged, without mercy, on the body and soul thousands of Argentine families.
[1] Baudelaire, Charles. Letters to Mother , Ed Grijalbo-Mondadori, Barcelona, \u200b\u200b1993
[2] After meeting the reading of this photograph, Gustavo Germano, recalling the backstage of this decision, said " in the first pictures I took, she was watching empty place, but something did not close, until I asked to look at me and then it gave me goosebumps. Never forget that moment, his attitude, the belief that Atelman Clara claimed his gaze. " We believe that this remark, far to nullify the first interpretation, it reinforces the feeling presence that void we sense she is feeling at that moment.
[3] John Berger. "Understanding a picture" in On the properties of the photographic portrait. Quoted in the Preface to the exhibition catalog Absences
