Familiar Faces
Photography, Memory and Argentina's Disappeared

Familiar Faces is an interdisciplinary collection of cutting-edge research by leading Argentine scholars and practitioners working on the complex relationship between photography, memory and the legacy of Argentina’s most recent dictatorship (1976-1983), which disappeared and/or killed 30,000 people.

 

At the heart of Familiar Faces is an exploration of the tensions that surround photographs – family snaps and I.D. mugshots of the disappeared, but also other images that emerge alongside them, including those produced by the dictatorial state itself. The tension between history and memory; between the private and the public, between the real and the imagined; between the personal and the political; between index and icon; between document and artefact; between record and affect.

 

With contributions from leading Argentina-based anthropologists, curators, art scholars and photographers, Familiar Faces moves beyond traditional considerations of representation focusing instead on photography’s unique ability to be continuously re-imagined as a tool of memory, mourning and political and justice activism. 

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Familiar Faces will be published by Goldsmiths Press in 2024 and can be purchased here.