Fachbereich Gestaltung

This paper discusses photography in Chile in relation to its use as prime medium of documenting the state of the nation, especially in an environment of frequently changing economic and political conditions. Photography, I argue, was used to make governmental decisions visible as well as to evaluate and actively promote them. Given the greatly diverging political positions and their coming to power alternately during the 50s and 60s, and eventually to an extreme extent in the early 70s, photographic documents were the basis for comparing the results of these administrations. Its status as a document, moreover, was not exclusively based on truthfulness and objectivity, but was coined by political partisanship and artistic expression. Photographers and public institutions often collaborated in order to visualise their respective utopias. Regarding the growing corpus of images available, the use of the archive became an effective practice of artists and state propaganda from the early 70s on.
First, I introduce the socio-political situation, followed by a presentation of the photographers Antonio Quintana, Luis Ladrón de Guevara and Sergio Larraín and their respective notions of the documentary. Taking some of their projects as a point of departure, I elaborate on the practice of re-visualising key themes of Chilean society. Recognising the importance of the archives they and their colleagues built up, I set out to implement this source into the history of Chilean photography.

The Museum of Modern Art recently inscribed into the history of photography what is being abundantly discussed in new media departments and post-internet art communities. The exhibition’s title “Ocean of Images” is declared a cultural condition, the iconic turn is in full swing, and academics and cultural critics hasten to update their methodologies.
In this environment, digital photographs are described as ephemeral, as spectres of possibilities and subject to continuous transformation. Their ontology of code exposes them to easy manipulation, quick deterioration, immediate obsolescence, and the constant necessity of a projecting medium. But what does ephemerality mean in these terms? Do the images lack constancy and consistency? Or do the same properties that evoke ephemerality also produce stasis within the digital? What do we learn from the theory of photography that we can apply to digital image politics?
This presentation is divided into three parts that assess the ephemerality of digital photographs. These are their ontology and phenomenology, repetition and redundancy, and photographic representation. Alongside these theoretical investigations, I will present artists that explore the ephemeral in the image. In particular,  Alfredo Jaar’s investigation of absent pictures, Penelope Umbrico’s found and sorted images of sunsets, and Thomas Ruff’s pixelated photographs that question the content of, and communication with the image. The goal is to discuss ephemerality as volatile in degree and ambiguous in nature, by way of its visual manifestations.

Review of "La Extensión Fotográfica. Ensayo Sobre el Triunfo de lo Fotográfico." Rodrigo Zúñiga. Ediciones Metales Pesados, Santiago, 2013. 114 pages with four black and white illustrations. Softcover chil$ 8.000, ISBN 978­956­8415­56­3.

First published in Spanish as Ronald Kay, “La Reproducción del Nuevo Mundo,” en Del espacio de acá: señales para una mirada americana (Santiago de Chile: Editores Asociados, 1980), 26–9. Reprinted as Ronald Kay, “La Reproducción del Nuevo Mundo,” Del espacio de acá: señales para una mirada americana (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Metales Pesados, 2005), 26–9.