Abstract

This paper analyzes photography and its possibility as a device for the legibility of history. To do so, we resort to the concepts of symptom, anachronism (Didi-Huberman) and dialectical image (Benjamin). From these notions we analyze two photographs that show us the consequences of State violence in Chile. Specifically, the photographs show the dead of the Valparaíso port strike in 1903 and the saltpeter workers murdered at the Santa María School in Iquique in 1907. The starting point is the idea that those images that manage to go beyond the naivety of essences are those visual constructions that manage to establish relations between the visible and the enunciable from a critical point of view and, therefore, manage to configure themselves as a historical index. That is to say, they are images that not only interweave a certain historical time to which they belong and that can shed light on the past, but at the same time are capable of exhibiting and enunciating a regime of historicity, in which the images manifest a link between the social and the historical time of which they are a part.