ABSTRACT
On 24 August 2004, the digital edition of the Argentine daily Clarín featured a colour photograph of a smartly dressed man in his mid forties holding up two black-and-white family snapshots for the camera (g. 4.1). Like most family photographs, those on display in this image are in many ways unremarkable: a man and woman smile warmly at the viewer. Numerous details within each image accentuate the homely, relaxed intimacy of these family scenarios: the man’s pipe; the bisected gure of the child who leans back into the embrace of the person we assume to be his father to get into the viewnder’s eld of vision; and the arm that aectionately rests across the woman’s shoulder. Although this couple is unknown to us, their pose is more than familiar in its everyday informality and predictability that is the hallmark of family photography as a genre. Displayed in their current context, however, these family snaps, whilst sadly familiar, are anything but ordinary. As the accompanying caption and text reveal, the man who proers the photographs to the camera is Daniel Tarnopolsky, the only surviving child of Hugo Tarnopolsky and Blanca Edelberg, whose disappearance, along with two of their three children, in July 1976 was linked to agents of the military dictatorship. Their still images here bear eloquent testimony in the context of a photo opportunity staged to mark the compensation that ex-admiral Emilio Massera, a key perpetrator in the regime of state terror (1976-83), has been ordered to pay Tarnopolsky. To the right of the frame, completing this politically charged family scenario, sits Estela
Carlotto, the leader of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of May Square), a civic association whose aim is to locate and return to their rightful families those children kidnapped during the dictatorship.1
