Abstract

SELIGMANN-SILVA, Márcio. Photography as the art of trauma and image-action: light game in the photographs of missing people in Latin America dictatorships. Temas psicol. [online]. 2009, vol.17, n.2, pp.311-328. ISSN 1413-389X.

Ernst Simmel, author of Kriegneurosen und psychisches Trauma (1918), described the trauma of war with a formula that clarifies the relationship among technique, trauma, violence and the recording of images. "The flash light of terror prints a photographically exact impression". This article tries to analyse the relation between photography and trauma in the context of the Latin American dictatorships in the years 1960-1980. It's departing point is a reflexion about the images in its relation to violence as well as about our new digital age that favor a culture of amnesia. This culture, paradoxically, is characterized by the almost pathological necessity to register everything in images. In Latin America we live the impasse of living at the same time the analogical technical modernity, with its memory wish, and the electronic images age, with its post history wish.

Keywords : Photography and trauma; Images of violence; Images of missing people.

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