Image of the Disappeared Face: Historical Density of a Global Visual Artifact

Abstract

In the imaginary of the crimes of South America dictatorships, the image is, in the first place, that of the disappeared. From this repressive experience of the seventies and eighties, this image has circulated, becoming a global icon for the political representation of state crimes. Taking the Chilean case, and drawing on elements of the medial approach, the studies of visuality and the theory and history of art, this article addresses the specific condition of this photograph as a link in the history of the representation of the human face and as an image whose rhetorical efficacy also rests on processes of editorialization, circulation, selection and framing that have remained disattended in the literature on memory. This paper suggests that this “invisible” content is updated when the image becomes a transnational icon of human rights violations.