Spirits of the 'disappeared' haunt tragic photographs

Recalling the victims of Argentina's bloody past

'May you be alone and accursed, alone and awake among all the dead, and let blood fall upon you like rain, and let a dying river of severed eyes slide and flow over you staring at you endlessly."

That was the wish for Spanish dictator Francisco Franco expressed by Pablo Neruda in his poem General Franco in Hell.

But it is a curse equally applicable to many leaders of murderous regimes, including Jorge Rafael Videla, the military dictator of Argentina from 1976 to 1983 under whose leadership 30000 people were detained, "disappeared" and murdered.

"The disappeared", as they became known, are the focus of a photographic exhibition at Museum Africa in Newtown, Johannesburg, that forms part of the first Argentinian Cultural Week, the first such cultural exchange between South Africa and Argentina. During the dictatorship in Argentina, the regime, as general director of cultural affairs Magdelena Faillace writes, "created a new category of victim: the 'disappeared,' a creature to whom parents, family members or companions were never able to bid farewell with a prayer, or who were never able to lay a flower on their tomb".

One of those victims was Eduardo Raul Germano. He was 18 when he was abducted, tortured and killed by the government in 1976. His brother, Gustavo, a photographer, has taken the experience of losing his sibling and used it to create a body of work. In the words of Argentinian poet Horacio Verbitsky, it reflects the legacy of the country's so-called Dirty War, a period that "successfully transformed an atrocious past into a perpetual, sleepless present" in which thousands of families still wait for information or the return of the remains of their loved ones.

Ausencias (Absences) consists of pairs of photos - one a snapshot showing the disappeared before they were taken and the other that matches the original photo's location, now showing those who are left and the absence of those who were murdered. This simple idea provides a remarkably effective visual means of bringing home the brutal realities of the past and the long shadows it casts in the present.

Two bathers snapped in black and white on the banks of the River Uruguay are not there in the colour photo of the same place taken in 2006. A brother snapped on a spring Sunday leaping down a hill after a day of fishing and a barbecue in 1975 is not there as his greying surviving brother makes the same leap down the same hill 30 years later. A girl smiling beside her sister before they leave their house one afternoon in 1970 is only a memory whose absence stands beside her sister in the same entry hall today.

Germano travelled across Argentina for two years, from 2006 to 2008, meeting families and friends of disappeared people who provided him with snapshots and then posed for the recreations. Through an interpreter, he says that "although the disappearance of my brother is the origin, I wanted to make it about the group to show the struggle that they all went through and make it collective".

The dots in the captions of the present photos make for a striking indication of who in each photo is no longer there. They are markers of absence and speak to the idea that a photograph, as John Berger wrote, "reveals what is present as well as what is absent in it". The exhibition does not display any biographical information alongside the photos, but a flyer that accompanies it gives details of the disappeared and the circumstances of their disappearance and their ages at the time.

Germano's brother's remains were identified by the Argentine forensic anthropology team in May, which he says will "in time, bring some peace to us and allow us to mourn".

The exhibition has travelled around the world since 2008, but this is the first time it has been shown in Africa. Germano is sure South Africa's own history of violence and repression will enable viewers to connect with his project. He also worked on an absences series in Brazil covering the disappearances during the 1964-1985 dictatorship.

Next door to Germano's show is a retrospective covering the career of one of Argentina's most recognised and awarded photographers, Adriana Lestido. Titled What Can Be Seen, Lestido's exhibition is dedicated to her partner, who was disappeared by the regime in 1978. It features one of her best-known photos, of a mother and child on the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the Buenos Aires square where women protested against the regime and sought answers about the disappeared.

Although social issues and, in particular, the experiences of women and children have been at the heart of Lestido's intimate black-and-white work, she sees herself as a photographer dedicated to the expression of "plain sentiment and feelings. Basic emotion is what gives meaning to my work and that is what I'm all about." Lestido's work includes series on women in prison and mothers and daughters, all shot in black and white, a medium she still uses because she believes it to be "pure. It's essential and gives the skeleton of the pictures."

Together, the works of these photographers offer viewers a glimpse into often different, sometimes similar facets of a country they may not be familiar with, but whose people and emotions they can relate to. For both countries, the celebration of democracy and liberation has come at a cost and these photographs serve to remind people of the necessity of acting together to prevent brutal history repeating itself.