Two
photographic interpretations of the bombing of the AMIA
Arizona State University
There are two irrefutable facts
regarding the recent social history of Argentine Jews: 1) the devastating
bombing of the AMIA on July 18, 1994, which left 85 dead and 300 wounded; and
2) the fact that no one has ever been brought to justice for this massacre and
that, indeed, basic facts discovered by Argentine and Israeli investigators
have never been revealed to the public or the families of the victims, despite
the many leaks of information and common beliefs about those responsible. The
AMIA disaster remains very much of an unhealed wound in the collective memory
of Buenos Aires. While one could say that it is just one more unresolved crime
of significant sociohistoric dimensions that Argentines have had to cope with,
one more appendix to the frightful cycle of tyranny throughout national history,
the bombing of the AMIA has had particular resonance for the Jewish community.
And taking place as it did in the heart of the Once neighborhood, the legendary
center of the community, brought with it a paradigm shift: in one sense the
Once has never been the same since, and in another sense Argentine Jews have
experienced a much altered relationship to their society.
There is now a significant
bibliography of cultural production relating to the AMIA bombing, and it stands
alongside important projects such as the Daniel Burman et al. series of ten ten-minute docudrama shorts, 18-J
(2004) on the impact of the bombing on the daily lives of those who live and
work in the Once. I would like here, however, to discuss two important
photographic projects focusing on the AMIA bombing. One project involves
conventional photography, the other a return to the legendary popular genre of
the fotonovela. One is an exercise in
memory construction, the other a metacommentary on the limits of photography as
cultural production.
Santiago Porter's collection of
photographs of personal belongings of the victims of the bombing, La ausencia (2007) details the impact of
a major event on the lives of ordinary people through the construction of a
dossier grounded in eloquent pathos. (1) Synecdoche (the signification by the
part for the whole) and metonymy (the important associative or collateral
detail that summarizes an entity) are two of the most powerful rhetorical
strategies to be used in the representational codes of language. While
customarily identified with verbal language, synecdoche and metonymy are
unquestionably at work in other cultural languages: in the case of Porter’s
book, photography.
The Argentine
novelist Marcelo Birmajer speaks, in his introduction to the twenty images by
Porter, of how the bombing of the AMIA, which effected the total destruction of
the five-story building, produced the disorder of dismembered bodies, burnt and
water-damaged books, and the rubble of the destruction of the building, cars,
and surrounding buildings. In his view, Porter's photographs restore an order
to life against the chaos produced by the terrorists-assassins. And, one might
add, the fact that not one single person has been brought to justice for this
atrocious act of anti-Semitism in the Latin American country with the largest
Jewish population, remains as an aching need for such restoration of order (see
AMIA: la verdad imposible).
Porter's are
reproduced as high quality 24x20 cm. stark white panels, with the actual image
composed of two juxtaposed photographs, each against a champagne-colored
background. There is a clear unifying structural principle. Of the two
juxtaposed photographs, the one on the left is of a relative of one of the 85
victims (in five cases, more than one person is involved); the one on the right
is some personal effect of the victim that the relative retains as a vivid
memory of the lost loved one. All manner of relationships are represented:
parents who have lost a son or daughter; sons and daughters who have lost a
parent; widows and widowers; brothers and sisters; even, in one case, an
in-law. Surely, if one remembers that Jewish society is a communal culture—“life
is with people,” as the saying goes—one in which individuals identify
themselves in relationship to the community bound by laws, customs, and
traditions, Porter's array of individuals linked to victims by principles of
social connection provides one important level of the restoration of order.
To be sure,
one can argue that there are many Argentine Jews who have only a tangential and
tenuous link to traditional Jewish life, but it is safe to assume that the
employees of the AMIA—the bulk of the victims—were among those who continued to
have an investment in traditional Jewish values. In this sense, each of the
victims and each of the survivors are synecdoches of Jewish life in Buenos
Aires: actors in a social drama whose cohesiveness was challenged by the 1994
bombing. The extensive cultural production relating to the 1994 bombing, of
which Porter's dossier is one more eloquent entry, is alternatively an
ideologically grounded response to the challenge and, at its best, an
analytically driven one.
The juxtaposed
images of the effects of the victims are, in the main, mundane ones, whether
they are items that the victims had in their possession at the time of their
death and that were recovered from their bodies, or whether they are items that
they left behind on the day they went to work or to conduct personal business
at the AMIA (some were killed by the car bomb because they happened to be in
the vicinity of the AMIA rather than in it). These items, then, become
metonymies of their person, and, characteristically, they are principally
everyday items, such as a kippah, a teacup, a doll, a leather jacket, a school
uniform, work utensils, a wrist watch, a set of keys. Some of the items are
mundane; some of them are important effects, such as the kippah or work utensils.
The English word "effects" captures very well the sense of integral
relationship of these items, which, if only seen in isolation, would be
inanimate artifacts. But as significant extensions of the everyday, material
life of those who possessed them, these effects are the detail that remits the
viewer to the wholeness of their humanity, which has been shattered by the
circumstances of their death.
Porter's
photographs contain an element of pathos, because the viewer understands the
unresolved emotions, the melancholia, that the survivors must experience
vis-à-vis these inert items. One could examine only the images on the left of
each layout as a gallery of Jewish subjects in Buenos Aires. Likewise, one
could examine only the objects on the right as an inventory of a segment of
Argentine material reality in 1994. But viewed together, the effect is that of
a Jewish society that can forget neither the event nor its victims: the absence
(which, of course, in the first instance refers to the absent victims) of the
title is, in fact a permanent presence.
Stavans's and Brodsky's project,
Once@9:53, takes a different tack,
reviving the venerable genre of the fotonovela. While the graphic novel has
been prospering in Buenos Aires, the fotonovela is now very much of a forgotten
format, its reality effect presumably more efficiently achieved via television,
the internet, and cellphone imaging. Since one of the principal points to be
made by Once@9:53 (the title, of course, references the exact time of
the bomb blast) is the profound effect of the AMIA bombing on life in the Once,
the decision to construct a text based on an iteration of images of the
neighborhood through the rapid accumulation of images that sophisticated
photography enables provides a revalidation of the rhetorical possibilities of
the fotonovela. Ilan Stavans, a Mexican scholar and writer based in the United
States, brings to the project as author of the text his enormous familiarity
with the genre in Mexico, where it is still a viable product. Marcelo Brodsky,
as one of Argentina's most innovative photographers, with a distinguished
record of work on human rights issues and neofascist tyranny, provides the
photography for Once@9:53.
The text is organized around a
fundamental metaphotographic conceit: a photographer who is engaged in taking
images in the Once on the morning of July 18, 1994, captures with his camera a
young woman who first draws his attention because she is so attractive and then
because she is acting rather strangely. At the same time, he also captures a
suspicious-looking group of individuals with whom the young woman seems to have
some relationship. The photographer sees both the men and the woman hurriedly
getting into a waiting van. It is this van, laden with bombs, that will
ultimately crash into the AMIA and produce the lethal explosion that reduces
the imposing building to rubble. Although the photographer has captured the
suspects on film with his camera, one of them knocks him out. Just as he
recovers a few moments later and rises to his feet, dangling his camera from
its strap, another man rushes by him, grabs the camera, and tosses it in a
garbage truck just as the latter proceeds to compact its load. Presumably, the
camera is crushed to bits and its images forever destroyed. Although a few
moments later the explosion takes place, no visual record remains of those
responsible for it.
Once@9:53 is heavily ironic, since the
reader knows, in ways in which the photographer cannot, the inevitability of
the narrative arc that is relentlessly measured throughout the text by a series
of time markers and by a repeated negatively exposed map of the Once. These
elements remind the reader of the spatial scope of massacre that cannot be
prevented because, tragically, there is no way for anyone to read the signs
which are there materially (i.e., they are being captured by the photographer),
but which no one has at the time the key to interpret. There is a certain
dimension of apocalyptic teleology in this narrative, not just because the
dénouement of the story is foretold by the reader's familiarity with a historic
event (and, indeed, Stavans and Brodsky would have a text of no
sociohistorical significance if the reader did not already know that event
had—will have, by the time the reading of it is completed—already taken place),
but because it is foretold by signs in the text that only make sense with the
dénouement: a man walking by reading the Koran, a rather maniacal rabbi
predicting the end of time, a swastika suddenly spotted in a store window in
the heart of the Jewish quarter, a canary that falls dying from the sky. These
are all portents the photographer records but cannot interpret, even though the
reader knows ironically that they are there as part of an inevitable historical
climax that has already taken place.
Another metaphotographic
dimension of Once@9:53 is the
photographer's boast that a photographer sees what others cannot see. There is
certainly an intertextual reference here to Julio Cortazar's short story, “Las
babas del diablo” (from the 1959 collection Las armas secretas), where a
photographer has captured what others were unable to see, but who, seeing what
he has seen subsequent to its taking place, is powerless to intervene in the
act of violence his camera foretells: like Stavans's and Brodsky's
photographer, art is futile in the face of what will, inevitably, take place. There can only be the
melancholic abyss of individual impotence in contemplating that history: “Antes
y después de esa mañana cualquiera en que se escarbaron nuestras raíces y se
las expuso al sol, el Once ya no es el mismo, y yo tampoco.”
And yet, despite the
teleological pessimism that overshadows Once@9:53, the project is not without
its celebratory dimension, especially in the long aside in which the
photographer visits the rotisserie/bakery his own parents once frequented, an
icon of the permanence of Jewish culture in the Once. There is a brief
encounter between the photographer and Brodsky, who informs him he is preparing
a fotonovela. Brodsky's
daughter Valentina plays the role of the strangely nervous young woman, while
Marcelo Birmajer, the best contemporary novelist of the Once, comes to the
photographer's aid when he is knocked out by one of the suspects. Finally,
Stavans himself plays the maniacal rabbi who predicts that something strange is
going on and who, after the blast has taken place, announces that the end of
time has come. These details serve to make Once@9:53 less of the somber
narrative it might have been. Also worthy of note is the fact that although the
actual event took place in the middle of winter, Brodsky’s photographs are more
spring-like in nature. And by connecting the 1994 event with the present through
the use of current biographical markers, the text ends up confirming that, after
all, the Once is in fact an eternal presence in the life of the city.
Photography is a uniquely strong
form of cultural production in Argentina, and important Jewish names have long
been associated with it, both in representing Argentine Jewish society to its
members and in representing that society to the larger national community
thanks to the enormous public response to the power of the photographic image.
Moreover, photography in Argentina has served as a powerful tool in the process
of analysis of contemporary Argentine society, with specific emphasis on social
issues (see Foster, Urban Photography).
Both of these texts produce extremely valuable and highly creative contributions
to the necessarily ongoing conversation regarding July 18, 1994. Porter’s
volume involves a much more conventional utilization of photography, while the
Stavans-Brodsky project is not without its problematical dimensions. Many
readers might consider the fotonovela
lacking in sufficient gravitas for
such a tragic event as the AMIA bombing. As Herner has shown, the fotonovela, especially in the Mexican
tradition from which Stavans comes, is historically associated with barely
literate readers who are accustomed to sensationalist narratives (see also
Foster, “Verdad y ficción”). Indeed, Once@9:53 could be accused of trivializing the AMIA
bombing by utilizing such a low-brow format. However, I would argue that it is
possible to view the practices of the fotonovela
as useful to portray the banality and everyday commonness of life in the Once,
as in any society, on the verge of the bombing. Indeed, the enormous communal
destruction of the bombing is the way in which it disrupts such ordinary daily
life, which is grounded in the profound trust that nothing significant will
happen and that life will continue to progress incalculably one minute at a
time in its absolute ordinariness: at 9:52, life continues exactly as it is
expected to do,(2) and that ordinariness is most effectively captured by
making use of such an ordinary-life format like the fotonovela. Yet, as I have emphasized in my discussion of Once@9:53, the principal importance of
the Stavans-Brodsky project is to engage in a metacommentary as regards the
possibilities of photography in capturing and interpreting the complexities of
sociohistorical experience. In this sense, it is important to consider the
potential effectiveness of the juxtaposition between the sense of impotence of
the photographer in this regard and the momentous occurrence that suddenly jars
the everyday, ordinary life of the Once that he has been able/not been able to
witness and record with his camera.
Notes
(1)
This section on Porter’s
photographs is an
extended version of a review that I published in Chasqui 38.1 (05/2009).
(2) I am grateful to my colleague Kenya Dworkin for this
observation.
Works
Cited
AMIA: la verdad imposible: por qué el
atentado más grande de la historia argentina quedó impune. Ed.
Roberto Caballero. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2005.
18-J. Dir. Daniel
Burman, et al. Buenos Aires, Aleph
Productiones, et al., 2004. Dur.: 100
min.
Foster,
David William. Urban Photography in
Argentina; Nine Artists of the Post-Dictatorship Era. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland
Publishing, 2007.
Foster,
David William. “Verdad y ficción en una fotonovela mexicana: la duplicidad
genera el texto.” Confluencia 2.2
(1986): 50-59.
Herner,
Irene. Mitos y monitos: historietas y
fotonovelas en México. México: Univerisdad Nacional Autónoma de
México/Editorial Nueva Imagen, 1979.
Porter, Santiago. La
ausencia. Buenos: Dilan Editotores, 2007.
Stavans, Ilan, and Marcelo Brodsky. Once@9:53. Buenos Aires: la marca
editorial, 2010.