Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

La Masacre de Trujillo is one of the most rugged and infamous experiences of the Colombian armed conflict and also one of the case studies with begins about how to narrate the violence, alluding to words and images from the point of view of the victims, who find an opportunity in the current peacebuilding process in Colombia, also known as post-conflict or post-agreement. This article analyzes the way in which stories have been consolidated that ponder an approach to "the truth" of what happened, a matter that does not only correspond to an expectation of objectivity, but to an experience of a symbolic order in which communication processes have the ability to provide victims with a place for deliberation from and through photography. For these purposes, a compilation of photographic material has been made through which the underlying tensions between the official history and the memory of those affected are presented.

The goal of this article is to analyse the different meanings of melancholy in photography following Walter Benjamin’s book Kleine Geschichte der Photographie. The main idea that I am going to develop is that, following Benjamin’s text, there are three different ways of understanding melancholy in photography, even if we understand melancholy just as a lost or a missing phenomenon. Firstly, photography is considered by Benjamin as a melancholic phenomenon because it shows a temporal loss: the course of time is unstoppable, even if images try to fasten time. Secondly, Benjamin introduces Barthes later concept of punctum in his book La Chambre Claire: photography would be melancholic because it would be a kind of premonition able to foresee the destiny of its characters. Thirdly, Benjamin shows that not only photography but also the history of photography is melancholic, because its history does not follow the theory of progress but is determined by the loss of aura.

This article is a reflection on the uses of photography represented in the film Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) that revive the past and develop the present of the characters. To do this, we analyze the photographic objects and acts, its temporal dimension and its social uses, its narrative and symbolic function, in the cinematographic discourse. In the film, the testimonial function of photography remains in digital photography, while enabling new practices, by the introduction of cell phone systems and Internet. Photography becomes in instant messages, autobiographical or not, driven by social interaction in the present continuous of virtual social networks. These photographic signs produce connections and tensions between past and present; have a symbolic dimension on the gaze as an object of desire to be snatched away, and on the changes in the production, diffusion and reception of the photographic medium.

This article reviews the development of a visual archive within the scope of a funded project Wisdom Transfer that was realised at the Faculty of Fine Arts (FBAUP), University of Porto, in Portugal from 2018 to 2021. The project’s directional objective was to research on the pedagogic environment at the faculty during key years preceding the Revolution of 25 April 1974, towards recovering and reactivating the connected historical, empirical, and technical heritage – which had had a pivotal influence on the maturation of the faculty’s now distinctive cultural identity. The visual archive was based on photographic and audio-visual materials gathered through a series of interview-based sessions with noted artists who were associated with the faculty during the indicated period as either teachers or students. The photographic materials included both original imageries belonging to the period, and contextual pictures taken during the project period, and became generative resources for both the reconstruction of pedagogic histories, and their reinterpretation in contemporary contexts of creative education. The article, thereby, concatenates the methodological elements that were instrumental in the articulation of the visual archive, alongside a number of key project outputs towards highlighting the efficacy of photographs and photography in conducting social research.

We start from the idea that the photographic image connects objective reality and the subjective world. This idea has been extensively elaborated in the field of the Theories of Photography and Cinematography, such as Siegfried Kracauer, Edgar Morin, Roland Barthes and other authors, as well as in some of the experiences of the film director Agnès Varda. Thus, through the application of various mental and technical devices - smartphone cameras - we proposed and carried out a sequence of practical experiments in relation to the reading, observation and dynamisation of some of the author's photographs. The results yield interesting insights into the emergence of new personal and narrative interpretations, beyond the reality captured objectively and mechanically by the camera. These results take the form of various audiovisual pieces, one of which is included here. The latter constitute in themselves new creations and aesthetic attitudes which, despite being related, are situated on the margins of the original work.

Most bibliometric studies use indexed databases, such as Web of Science or Scopus, for their analysis. This text proposes the use of non-indexed texts as a starting point to analyse which are the most relevant works in the field of Film and Photography. Open Syllabus is used to identify the most widely used works in university teaching in these fields, and these are categorised according to whether they are essays, technical manuals, theoretical manuals or films. The identified works are consulted in Web of Science to measure their academic impact through the number of citations. A co-citation analysis is then performed. The results indicate that theoretical and practical manuals have little scientific impact, while essays are cited in scientific publications. A limited corpus of audiovisual works also has an impact, but this is limited to feature films by a small group of classic directors. In terms of subject matter, Film Theory and Photography prevail over other specialities. The co-citation analysis identifies six clusters of related topics. The list of the most cited books and the most prevalent authors in each cluster allows us to draw a map of essential documents for the study of Film and Photography.

This article analyzes several contemporary art practices based on photography that can be interpreted as a metaphorical representation of images of memory and remembrance. We have divided these practices into two fields; firstly we will contextualize them by the analysis of their historical precendents and background; next, we will focus on the case studies of several contemporary artists. Thus, the first field includes artworks based on a continuous and extended record of time captured through photography so that we interpret them as related to a persistent experience of the past, as we  observe in Michael Wesely´s, Hiroshi Sugimoto´s or Jim Campbell´s artwork. The second field encompasses a different photography model based on overlap and average which no longer reproduces an uninterrupted experience but rather a type of generic picture related to an archetypal image of media culture, as the artworks of artists like Corinne Vionnet or Jason Salavon reveal. Therefore, as we will set out, both strategies represent differently the experience of memory as a record of a temporality.

An investigation is presented on the imaginary relations between the inhabitants of the Oriente Antioqueño region, in Colombia, and their favorite objects, broken down into three generations: children, parents and grandparents. It is based on a philosophical, anthropological and semiotic reflection of the objects, where the classical conceptual frameworks in the matter are reviewed and put in dialogue with contemporary works of sociological, communicative and aesthetic nature. A mixed methodology is used: first, from the quantitative analysis variables are defined as generation, environment, time with the object and symbolic system; second, the generations and the environment of origin of objects are correlated with the symbolic systems in which they act. At the end, we reflect on the relevance and topicality of the theoretical traditions of object study to look at the implications of the supposed virtualization/digitization of the world in relation to what the empirical results of the study show.

Explota Explota is the first film by Nacho Álvarez with Ingrid García-Jonsson, Verónica Echegui, Fernando Guallar. It was released in Spain when theaters reopened during the pandemic in the fall of 2020. The film tells the story of Maria (Ingrid Garcia-Jonsson) who leaves her future husband at the altar of a church in Rome to go to Madrid, a kind of initiatory journey in which she befriends Amparo (Veronica Echegui) before falling in love with Pablo (Fernando Guallar), a television employee, but not just any one, as he is the son of the official censor. It is a musical whose soundtrack, composed of songs by Raffaella Carrà, is a tribute to the admired artist of Nacho Álvarez. But make no mistake, the film is not a biography of Raffaella, although there are several allusions to her life, and she even appears in a cameo at the end. Raffaella's songs have shaped the script of the film, as well as the characters that evolve in a scenario at the end of Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975), in 1973, a time when censorship was still in force. In fact, the film deals with complex issues such as censorship, sexism and dance as an art of rebellion.

Photographs (Chus Domínguez, 2014) is a thirty-minute video made up of photographs and discarded sound clips recorded for Territorio Archivo, a project that explored the relationships between the family photo album, memory, and the people of different Castilian villages. This article proposes an analysis focused on three aspects: the documentary value of the images and their potential for memory work, the way in which the text articulates its discursive framework, and the relevance of the essayistic features that define the essence of this work. The combination of testimonies and photographs from different private archives gives birth to a memory that lives in the present and that is individual and collective at the same time; Photographs is based on a complex discourse defined by its capacity for thought, its tendency towards the unsystematic, its subjectivity, its textual self-awareness, and its dialogical character. All these features indicate that in order to explain the discursive essence of Photographs and how it relates to the viewer, it seems more productive to read it not simply as a documentary but rather as an audiovisual essay.