El Duelo Revelado: La Vida Social de las Fotografías Familiares de las Víctimas del Franquismo Jorge Moreno‐Andrés (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2018)
Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: Two old photographs sit in a shoebox outside a recently demolished house.The first, sepia-toned, is no wider than your palm.It portrays a man wearing a uniform for his job.The larger photo is a black-and-white portrait of the same man in an elegant dark suit, a suit that oddly seems painted and looks bigger than the actual body.The surface of the first photograph is scratched and wrinkled, a missing corner and side, frayed edges.There are some words written on the back, barely legible.Beyond their aesthetic value, there is no obvious meaning.The photos are now a pair of orphan stills that have succumbed to sheer oblivion.However, a trained eye-like that of a social anthropologist-looks beyond the images to reveal an experience of enduring mourning, which becomes a living testimony against brutality.Photographer and filmmaker, Jorge Moreno-Andrés, demonstrates the value of this sharp gaze in his latest book, El Duelo Revelado: La Vida Social de las Fotografías Familiares de las Víctimas del Franquismo (a title that plays on the double meaning of revelar, to reveal: The Exposed/Developed Mourning: The Social Life of Family Photographs of the Victims of Francoism).Over eight years in the field, Moreno-Andrés has compiled over 2,000 photographs of political victims of the Spanish dictatorship , particularly those resulting from the military suppression of dissent during the postwar period (1939)(1940)(1941)(1942)(1943)(1944)(1945).This book records a search for family snapshots which gather dense narratives and unsettled biographies.The quest for photographs took place mainly in Moreno-Andrés' home area, Ciudad Real (Spain), a region that remained loyal to the Republican Government and consequently faced the merciless retaliation of Franco between 1939 and 1942.Nevertheless, his ethnographic search for photographs also took him further afield to other Spanish cities (Barcelona,
DOI: 10.1111/plar.12336
Author: Ignacio Iturralde
Institution: Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Language: Spanish
Topic: Spanish Culture and Identity
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W3016008520