“Take down the frame”: the history of a performative photography

Abstract

On March 24, 2004, President Néstor Kirchner ordered to take down the frames with the photos of the dictators Jorge Rafael Videla and Reynaldo Bignone, former directors of the Colegio Militar and de facto presidents during the last civil-military dictatorship (1976 to 1983), to be taken down from the Patio de Honor del Colegio Militar. Taking down the pictures was a didactic and at the same time instructive act, an action that reduced the original power of the images to show a change of era, the need to refound the armed forces under the premises of human rights. In Bredekamp's (2017) terms, it was an iconic act and, in this particular case, a substitute iconic act. One image was downloaded to produce another. Taking down the paintings was also an iconoclastic act. Images were removed from their place of honor as a form of “creative destruction” (Mitchell, 2017) to generate new images. The action that operated on a symbolic level was synthesized above all in three photographs and in a live television broadcast that was later reproduced in documentaries, news programs and TV shows. The political power of this photograph oscillates between a double power. The possibility of condensing one story and at the same time promoting another. In that sense, it became a performative image. The article describes the details surrounding the action of downloading the pinctures and the subsequent events. Analyze the resulting photographs, their conditions of possibility, the drifts and disputes that arose from that act. The image was incorporated with its own force into the political debate, helped build a militant identity based on that symbol and continues to influence current Argentine political life and the struggles for memory.