The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices under Chile's Dictatorship by Ángeles Donoso Macaya (review)

Donoso Macaya presents illuminating new archival materials and considers the social, political, and historical construction of photographs and photography as a field during the Chilean dictatorship. Her analysis centers on the performative dimension of photography and its social and political construction rather than on a strict visual analysis of the images. She is also interested in how the specific historical context of the Chilean dictatorship laid a foundation for protest photography at this formative time for photography as a field (1970s and 1980s). The chapters work independently from one another as essays, although they are united by a shared concern for the social and political contexts of the material.

The first images the book takes up are the most iconic of this time period: portraits of the disappeared. Although the use of these photographs is incredibly well-traversed territory, Donoso Macaya's concentration on the particularities of their emergence sheds some new light on the topic. It is surprising, for example, to what extent activists and organizations had to alter images to construct the neutral headshots that became so ubiquitous. Far from being simply the images available, they were the result of careful aesthetic and political choices.

The book then turns to the photographs of Lonquén, a site at which the bodies of 15 disappeared men were discovered in the ovens of an abandoned mine in 1978. Because the bodies were discovered during the dictatorship, the excavation of the remains and the photographs of the bodies and the site were contested by the dictatorship and became an interesting case in the construction of photographs as public and legal evidence. Donoso Macaya considers the performance of these images as forensic documents and the contexts of their production and circulation.

The author then takes up the discourses of photography as an emerging professional and artistic field in Chile through the examination of dictatorship-era publications and organizations. She emphasizes the contrast between the remarkable number of significant publications that emerged at this time (many of them photocopied improvisations) and the discourses of precarity that they professed.

The last set of material the book takes interest in is the alternative publications put out during a three-month period in 1984 when the dictatorship banned them from publishing any images at all. Many of these publications went forward with planned content, simply substituting images with blank spaces (complete with captions describing photographs that were not reproduced) or with simple non-representative graphics. The case allows the author to explore how much the construction of the meanings of these protest photographs were independent of their visual content, as well as showcase how innovative these producers were in using images (or the idea of images) as a form of protest.

The book makes effective use of key visual analysis terms such as symbol, index, icon, or trace that would be useful for classroom use alongside supplementary materials introducing the terms. The same is true for introducing the Chilean dictatorship and the protests surrounding the disappeared. The book assumes a great deal of previous knowledge, but it is accessible for an undergraduate reader. Unfortunately, the book does not reproduce the images it discusses (many of them archival materials that cannot be found elsewhere) at a very high quality. The book would also be stronger if it pushed its theoretical contributions further, especially the central organizing principle of "depth of field" as a metaphor to bring into focus objects in the field of photography that were not previously visible. Even so, the book is a valuable addition to the literature examining the social construction and performativity of images as well as the use of photography as a civil practice, areas that are essential to understanding the political uses and consequences of protest photography.