Always on sunday: The clandestine photographs of Jorge Tiscornia in the “penal de Libertad”

Abstract

A click of the camera is the moment where a lifetime fits. But if that creative act of taking photographs is challenged by the urgency of letting know an extraordinary experience, as  lived inside the "Penal de Libertad" during the Uruguayan dictatorship (1973-1985), so the way we perceive the image will change. It will not contain just a memory but an event that seeks to be narrated. We take the photographic visual material that Jorge Tiscornia photographed inside the Prison and we will see that when looking at the images with a space-time distance, recognition (individual and collective) is reactivated, which adds the susceptibility to interpretation of the images in our present. We opened around the reference to the four photographs of Auschwitz narrated by Didi-Huberman in connection with the images of the prison, which we could relate the images in prison in this process of memory. Susan Sontag allowed us to access the images from a different perspective by taking them out of the static and subjective plane and giving them movement. Finally Didi-Huberman led us to touch the real when the unimaginable can be imagined through the memory fragments that combine the recognition of the extraordinary experience. We turn a static photograph into a piece of mobile frames that allows us to look at the experiences of political prisoners objectively as testimonial evidence of what happened inside the prison and was intended to be denied.

Dictatorship

Uruguay

Political prisoners

Libertad prison

Photograph