The Art of Illuminating What Is No Longer There

Pozo de Quilmes, 18 May 1984. A man — Alfredo Maly — returns to the cell where he had been held. There is no light; there never was, in those places. So he strikes a lighter and brings the flame close to the wall. There, scratched by his own hand when he was a prisoner, is the inscription he left like a message in a bottle: Dios mío, ayúdame. God, help me. Shore presses the shutter in the exact instant the man and his own mark meet again.

Consider what that image is. A survivor carries a small flame into the dark to illuminate the words he wrote hoping to be remembered; and a photographer is there so that the flame will never go out. The light does two things at once. It lights a wall, yes. But above all it lights the past. That is precisely the documentarian's task: to bring light to what the darkness had kept.

In 1984, Enrique became photographer of the CONADEP — Argentina's National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons. Called to accompany the Commission with his camera, he walked through the clandestine detention centers, entered the cells, stood in the torture chambers, and heard, firsthand, the accounts of the survivors. The photographs he made were not only testimony; they were judicial evidence, part of what brought the military juntas to trial. "We were dead with fear," he once recalled — some of those places were still occupied by the armed forces. Of that work he later said something worth keeping: in the Nunca Más report only a few were published, but there were hundreds in the files that went to the trials. He had, in his words, the honor and the responsibility of being called for it.

There is another of his photographs I cannot shake. A man seated in what had been a detention center, looking out a window. An immense solitude. And looking at it, you understand that the solitude is also the place the one who documents occupies. The camera stands where the absent are. The people you want to portray, the experiences you want to record, are no longer there: they are ghost images. The documentarian works alone with that absence. The man at the window is, without knowing it, a portrait of the one photographing him.

All of Shore's work from those years is dedicated to Franca Jarach. Franca was Enrique's girlfriend. She was kidnappend on 25 June 1976, and remains missing or disappeared for lack of a better term. Her portrait — an adolescent with a clean smile, hair in the wind, a brown river behind her — is the first image in Evidencias, the exhibition with which AMIA, and later the Buenos Aires legislature, marked the fortieth anniversary of the Nunca Más. At sixty-seven, his eyes still fill when he says her name. Perhaps all the light he brought to those walls began in the darkness of that loss.

And there is an ending no screenwriter would have dared to write.

Today, from Connecticut, Enrique photographs birds. Birds in flight. It is work of enormous technical difficulty — to freeze in the air a body that will not hold still — and it is in no way without meaning. If the CONADEP photographs sought to capture the ghosts of the past, the birds seek to capture and freeze the present. Both are equally audacious artistic operations: to arrest what escapes. The man who spent his youth lighting cells now chases wings against the open sky. From the darkness of Quilmes to the full light of flight.

It is the same camera, the same hand. Only now the flame is not needed: the whole day is the light.