The 11th of September marks the 40th anniversary of the bloody coup d’Etat which overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. But a one-day commemoration can hardly sum up the seventeen years of military dictatorship that followed, with thousands of people assassinated or ‘disappeared’, and hundreds of thousands tortured, persecuted and/or pushed into exile. Nor can it sum up the individual and collective scars which remain – but also the cultures of resistance and renewal which have emerged over the past forty years.
Material from the e-book Chile from Within/Chile desde Adentro (London, 2013), courtesy Susan Meiselas and MAPP / www.mappeditions.com/chile.
Photo : President Salvador Allende and first lady Hortensia Bussi, on the balcony of the presidential palace La Moneda, 1970 © Luis Poirot
This double portrait opens the original edition of Chile from Within, published in New York in 1990. Declassified US National Security documents: 1- Secret message from David A. Phillips, former CIA agent, to Henry Hecksher, CIA station chief in Santiago, 7 October 1970. 2- CIA director Richard Helms’s handwritten notes from the 15 September 1970 meeting between US President Richard Nixon, Attorney General John Mitchell and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. Typed transcription of Helms’s notes
Over the past six weeks, the portfolio of photographs from the 1990 book Chile from Within and Sebastian Moreno’s documentary The City of Photographers (2006) have given Médiapart’s readers a glimpse of the role of Chile’s photographers in the struggle against the dictatorship. Here too, each one of them (or at least those who were not killed or disappeared) has an ongoing story which continues to the present day.
This is why I wanted to interview several Chilean photographers of different ages and approaches, to let them discuss their life experiences, in words and photos.
To pick up where Chile from Within left off in 1990, I decided to speak as well with Susan Meiselas, the Magnum photographer who initiated and edited the original book project and who’s launching – today, 11 September 2013 – the first bilingual version of the Chile from Within/Chile desde Adentro as an ebook.
See you next Wednesday, 18 September 2013, for the first interview.
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I am a journalist and translator living in Paris. I write about photography, film and images in between the two. Most recently, I was been a regular contributor to Le Journal de la Photographie.