Familiar Faces: Photography, Memory, and Argentina’s Disappeared

An exploration of the rich and varied relationship between photography and the most recent Argentine dictatorship.

Familiar Faces offers a diverse, theoretically rich, and empirically informed exploration of photography in Argentina’s memorial, political, and artistic landscape.

During the country’s most recent civic-military dictatorship (1976-1983), 30,000 people were disappeared or killed by the state. Over the decades, vernacular and professional photographs have been central to the Argentine struggle for justice. They were used not only to protest the disappearances under the dictatorship and to denounce the authorities, but also as tools of political and social activism, and for remembering the disappeared.

With contributions from leading Argentina-based anthropologists, ethnographers, curators, art scholars, media researchers, and photographers, Familiar Faces moves beyond the traditional considerations of representation, focusing instead on the ways in which photography is continuously reimagined as a tool of memory, mourning, and political and judicial activism. In so doing, it considers the diverse uses of press photography; artistic practice; photographs of the disappeared in domestic rituals; photographs of the inmates of torture centers; the reclamation of images taken by the dictatorial state for memorial and activist purposes.

Written and published at a crucial moment in Argentine memory politics, Familiar Faces offers a geographically and formally diverse selection of case studies, with international as well as regional resonance. While firmly rooted in this national context, the book contributes to wider, global debates about the increasingly pervasive role of the photographic image in relation to state-sponsored, large-scale violence.

Piotr Cieplak is a filmmaker, writer, and academic. Prior to joining the University of Sussex as Senior Lecturer in Filmmaking, he held positions at SOAS, Africa Research Institute, and Brunel University London. Piotr’s films have won awards and screened widely at international film festivals, conferences, and on television. His work combines academic research and creative practice and is concerned with the interaction between memory and the still and moving image, especially in the context of the depiction of genocide, political violence, mourning, and individual and collective trauma in film and professional and domestic photography.