CLAUDIO  PEREZ

It was his political militancy. The camera captured and reflected the harshest events of the Chilean dictatorship.  It is in this period where his interest and concern to address issues related to human rights begins, as a central axis that will accompany him in all his later work.

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During this time, he mainly portrayed the conflicts of the first national marches and protests against the military regime. It is here that we are faced with “everyday” moments - irony of the period, impossible to think - of what happened in the demonstrations, encounters with supporters of the dictatorship and the conflicts. It will be the black and white images that reveal the necessary security and protection of the photographers (they themselves developed the photographic development), and in another sense, it is the color that symbolizes the political memory of the recent past in Chilean history.

  

The author accentuates a look during this period: mass portraits. Managing to generate an ironic tension of the day-to-day events in the streets of the great capital. The portrayed subject is transformed from a particular identity to a collective one, just at the moment of being captured by the author. 

The portrayed represent the silent, the silenced and peripheral, which we see facing the adversary. Thanks to this coverage, and that of other photographers of the period, we have been able to reconstruct the political history and memory of the country.

 

Monserrat Rojas Corradi

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