Ethnography of an absence. The meanings of family photography in the transmission of traumatic memory
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/dra.2021.023Keywords:
Photography, Anthropoology of Violence and Social Suffering, Visual Anthropology, Mourning, Disappearances, Spanish Civil WarAbstract
How do family photographs move in the domestic space? What happens when those images belong to victims of Franco’s regime? This article examines the intergenerational uses and displacements of these images, enabling us to analyze both the transmission and silencing of familiar memories within a traumatic context. This article picks the paradigmatic case of Emilio Silva, founder of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. The analysis focuses on two moments: the disappearance of Emilio’s grandfather in 1936 and the encounter of the grandson with his remains in the grave, decades later. We shall see these two moments linked to different photographic manipulations, marking the temporal space where the various relationships of the family with the photographs take place. Indeed, a family photograph hidden in the wall of the house will impel Emilio Silva to reconstruct his grandfather’s history, fortuitously triggering the beginning of the memorialist movement in Spain.
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