Susan Meiselas: Reframing History
[Santiago, 1989: Photographers Helen Hughes, Susan Meiselas, Álvaro Hoppe, Paz Errázuriz et Marcelo Montecino (seated on the right) working together on the layout for Chile from Within © Alejandro Hoppe]
Chile from Within, published in New York in 1990, is not just an album of 75 pictures by 16 Chilean photographers, but rather, a dense visual record of 15 years of dictatorship, from the military coup of 11 September 1973 to the referendum in October 1988 which voted Augusto Pinochet out of office and initiated the democratic transition process.
This collective account by a group of men and women who had lived on a day-to-day basis what they were recording and denouncing with their cameras was put together in collaboration with Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas.
To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the coup d’Etat, she has now worked with two of the photographers from the original group, Helen Hughes and Luis Weinstein, as well as the researcher Lee E. Douglas, to produce the ebook Chile from Within/Chile desde Adentro which was announced in the first part of this series.
To borrow the title of the multimedia project Meiselas carried out in Nicaragua in 2004, 25 years after her coverage of the popular uprising against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, this new, enlarged edition of Chile from Within/Chile desde Adentro offers us the timely possibility of ‘Reframing History’. In Chile and elsewhere.
This interview is the result of conversations that began at the Rencontres d’Arles in France last July and continued over the past few months by Skype and email.
MR: You’ve just brought out an expanded digital version of Chile from Within, which was published in New York in 1990 and has since become a reference for successive generations of Chileans.
How did the original project get started?
SM: In a sense, it grew out of our encounters on the streets. I was photographing in Chile several weeks before the referendum in October 1988. I thus began meeting Chilean photographers as we all raced from water cannons or discretely assembled on corners around spontaneous demonstrations.
Several of them had seen my 1981 book on Nicaragua and the collective project on El Salvador from 1983 that included the work of thirty international photographers. I was naturally interested in what they had been documenting all those years under Pinochet. So that was where the conversation began. It then evolved into a series of get-togethers, and eventually into looking more closely at their work and talking about doing a project to bring it together.
MR: What was the time frame? Did you come back to Chile after the referendum?
SM: There were several trips after the referendum. I don’t actually remember how long I stayed the first time, or how many times I returned, but there were a number of months between each visit. During those gaps, the photographers would print up their work and we then looked through those piles of photographs when I returned.
There was a core group of eight who got involved in the collaborative process of looking together at what they had produced over the fifteen years since the Coup d’Etat. Many of them had never printed their negatives – because of the potential danger and/or the expense –, so there weren’t even contact sheets to share. My memory was that the photographers had not shared their work in this way before – showing it, comparing it, eventually choosing and sequencing it as a collective act.
[Carmen Gloria Quintana with the Sebastian Acevedo Anti-Torture Movement, 1988 © Álvaro Hoppe / Demonstration in Front of the National Library, 1988 © Alejandro Hoppe - Chile from Within, 1990, p. 34-35 - courtesy Susan Meiselas]
In addition, there was some anxiety over the fact that we had a lot of important images gathered together and did not want to be too public about the project initially. I even remember closing the curtains of Helen Hughes’s home, for fear that when we worked late at night, neighbours might wonder what was going on inside.
I also have a wonderful memory about being with Claudio Pérez when we finished the first maquette. We were sitting in a small café, turning the pages slowly, and the waiters started to gather around us. At first we were cautious, and a little secretive, but then showed them the book and saw that they were clearly fascinated.
[La Victoria, 1985 © Alejandro Hoppe/La Victoria, 1986 © Héctor López - Chile from Within, 1990, p. 47-48 - courtesy Susan Meiselas]
MR: What was the reaction to the book in the United States when it came out?
SM: The book was received well. And we printed a travelling show of 75 photographs which first went to Fotofest in Houston and then to public libraries and small college galleries for nearly two years (partially through the support of the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY) and later internationally to France and Spain.
MR: On the other hand, it seems that the public was fairly limited in Chile when the book was first published. From what I’ve read, only 300 copies were sent down.
There were several initial shipments toChile, and the book was also carried in by hand. But it took nearly ten years for the photographers’ work to be seen as prints on the walls of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) inSantiago. I of course brought down more books with me for that exhibition because it was out of print soon after the travelling show ended.
[Supporters celebrate triumph of the opposition, Santiago, 1988 © Claudio Pérez / NO campaign volunteers in bicycle caravan, 1988 © Álvaro Hoppe - Chile from Within, 1990, p. 66-67 - courtesy Susan Meiselas]
MR: How do you explain this time lag?
SM: It's important to recall that in 1990 when the book came out in the USA,Chile had just voted Pinochet out of power. The following two democratically elected presidents (both of whom were conservatives, Christian Democrats) focused primarily on the transition in order to portray and ensure economic stability, especially for the international investment community. They also focused their attention on the creation of ‘truth-seeking’ missions, the collection of information and possible forms of ‘transitional justice’. When Pinochet was detained in 1998, all the international attention unleashed pressures for Chilean courts to set up trials and go beyond the testimonial data collection. So it’s not really surprising that it took those ten years for the Chilean photographers’ work to be valued publicly and prominently displayed.
Their images captured what many people did not want to remember.
[Senior Citizens Club, San Bernardo, 1988 © Paz Errázuriz / Pirque, Santiago Suburb, 1984 © Luis Weinstein - Chile from Within, 1990, p. 14-15 - courtesy Susan Meiselas]
MR: To come back to the ebook, can you explain which the 'digital translation' (as the publisher, MACK/MAPP calls it) has involved? In terms of the production – which was literally tricontinental, with you and Lee Douglas in New York, Helen Hughes and Luis Weinstein in Santiago and MACK/MAPP London. But also in terms of access to different publics.
SM: What’s most important is that the book is bilingual now, with materials to contextualize the photographs and process of making the work, including the conditions that live outside the frames of the images themselves.
If I think back to the making of the 1990 book,the physical moving of pictures from one pile to another as we edited, or the process of laying out pairs of images for potential page spreads, is quite different than the ebook process. Here, we first talked by Skype about possible juxtapositions with documents or contact sheets of certain images. Some photographers engaged with Luis in Santiago and told him what they remembered from the time they were shooting. Some sent new images to consider including. The difficulty was seeing the layers of additional narratives as we built them. It’s important to note that not everyone had the same kind of internet access to be able to see the ebook as it was evolving. We were working in an imaginary space, not knowing what else we could find, trying to balance density and intensity.
[Chile from Within/Chile desde Adentro, 2013, added videos, contact sheets, photographers' comments - courtesy Susan Meiselas]
One of the real surprises for me was receiving the movie from Alejandro Hoppe with his audio memory of our editing sessions from 1989. He really took the time to reflect, nearly 25 years later, on what that collective process had been like. It was admittedly ambitious on our part to edit the transcriptions of the conversations we recorded during those sessions, so that we could create the ‘Fragments of Conversation’ for the ebook. We wanted to recapture the moments that now seem long past to those of us who participated, while also being transparent about the fact that this is a new creation.
Everything has changed since this work was originally produced, both in the global context and for the Chileans, who are not as isolated as they were during the dictatorship. This work of documenting History still remains important, both for ‘insiders’ and those who look from afar.
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Website of the ‘Chile from Within’ exhibit (Santiago, 2001), with a selection of images by all 16 photographers
http://www.mac.uchile.cl/exposiciones/chilewithin/
Chile from Within/Chile desde Adentro on the Mapp editions website
http://mappeditions.com/publications/chile-from-within
Susan Meiselas’s website:
Next week’s interview:
Paz Errázuriz: Looking at the Other Side of Things
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Miriam Rosen is a journalist and translator living in Paris. She writes about photography, film and the images in between the two. Most recently, she’s been a regular contributor to Le Journal de la Photographie.