Image: Museum of the Americas, Madrid
Eduardo Longoni will give the conference ‘Fotografiar para dejar testimonio’ at the Museo de América’s Sala de la Reina on Thursday 29 October at 17:00. The talk will address his experience as a photojournalist during Argentina’s dictatorship, the persecution suffered by photographers and the role of his images in constructing memory.
The event is connected to the exhibition ‘Imagen y memoria. Argentina 1976-2003’. The exhibition’s photographs lead through Argentina’s dictatorship, the subsequent restoration of democracy and the different forms of conflict that have affected Argentine society and continue to affect it. The museum describes the exhibition as the beginning of a new line of institutional study and reflection focused on the experiences, conflicts and memories that have shaped the present and remain part of it.
Longoni began his professional activity as a photographer in 1979, during the military dictatorship, at the Noticias Argentinas agency. The museum’s account describes conditions in which photographers had to learn to move quickly, remain briefly at each location and be accurate when taking each photograph, while they were targets for the security forces.
Photographing the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo could mean pursuit and intimidation for photographers; they had to be present to leave testimony and then depart quickly so that each photograph could become memory over time.
Longoni will guide a tour through the exhibition covering the atmosphere in the streets during the military dictatorship, the economic crisis, hunger and everyday violence, the emergence of human-rights movements and the white headscarves of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.
