Exile in Focus

Transnational Networks of Photographers from the Cold War Southern Cone

Amy Kerner

Exile in Focus foregrounds the political migrations of photographers and their works to delineate the transnational and globally entangled meanings of the exile experience from the Southern Cone region in the 1970s. The project foregrounds the difficult history of an evidentiary medium in exile: photography. For artists and cultural producers from Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil, the 1970s represented a time of urgency to document the repression at home, even as unprecedented numbers were forced to move away from their countries of origin. Exile in Focus asks how political migration recast the work of Southern Cone photographers at a moment when photographic evidence was increasingly central to Cold War claims about human rights violations. It prioritizes understanding the relations of creative production to the effects of state terror as it was experienced from a distance. In addition to illuminating the transnational dimensions of the exile experience, and to placing Latin America within the history of Cold War photography, Exile in Focus will provide a much-needed prehistory of the photographic memory work that has been central to the post-dictatorship decades.