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The first chapter underscores the counter-archival work carried out by the Vicaría de la Solidaridad in the composition of the photographic archive of the detained-disappeared. The chapter also considers the different transformations, displacements, and disseminations endured by the portraits of the detained-disappeared. It considers the critical work of Walter Benjamin, Diana Taylor, and Ann Stoler. The analysis contemplates both the composition of the photographic archive of the portraits and the archive’s dissemination in the public space. I consider the Vicaría’s publications Solidaridad (a biweekly newsletter), Separata Solidaridad (a special issue that focused on particular matters also considered in Solidaridad), and the seven-volume book series ¿Dónde están? (1978–1979). I suggest that the visual representation of the crime of forced disappearances, which took shape with the public display of the portraits, was consolidated in these Vicaría publications, above all in ¿Dónde están? I also study artistic photographic practices devised to display and disseminate these photographic portraits in the public space. The chapter begins and ends with a consideration of Hernán Parada’s action “Obrabierta A” (1974–present), in particular one of its iterations in which the artist uses a photocopied mask of his brother, Alejandro Parada, detained and disappeared since July 1974.

This chapter explores the modus operandi of photographic archives as well as modes of intervention in its operation. Based on the assumption that the event of photography as multiple, as something that may take place even before or without the operation of the camera, and even without photographs to be seen, it proposes and explores different photographic entities: untaken, inaccessible and unshowable photographs. These entities question common descriptions of silences in the archives and ‘missing’ or inexistent photographs, formerly understood as ‘holes’ in or silence of the archive. In the chapter, they are discussed as concrete presences that initiate deliberative processes.

African American photographer and folklorist Carrie Mae Weems examines in image and text the nature of memory and history, insisting on a critique of historical wrongs as part of a process of self-formulation. As a storyteller-artist, she envisions the artist as the “narrator of history.” This chapter explores the development of her photo-autobiographies from photo-text sequences hung on gallery walls to elaborate architectural installation pieces that require viewers to enter and navigate the narrative visual-verbal space with its many surfaces and interfaces. In the process of showing and telling through photographs and texts and reframing photographic archives, she represents the historical legacy of racial violence to provoke readers-viewers to become aware of injustice and the false narratives that enable it.