University of Warsaw

Anthropology of Photography

Teresa Margolles and the role of Violence Photography

By Edwin Andrei Lpez Gaytn
With the advent of mass media, broadcasting and global networks, photography has turned into a
mysterious, yet powerful, object. But, what exactly could be the force behind this mesmerizing power?
To fixate the eye in (or inside) a photograph is not merely a coincidence. As said by W.J.T Mitchell,
images may want something from us; that is to say, they may capture our atenttion in such a way that it
could be said we are 'trapped' by them. And that have never been so true as in our current days.
Marketing, for instance, is the discipline of creating such an image that the client 'falls in love' with the
product. Ads grow more cunning the more we are aware of being 'seduced'.
But advertising is not the only case in which photograph traps us. Let's take a look at the events of our
contemporary world. There is a widespread awareness about anything relevant happening in any part of
the world. Even more, there is a special and morbid fascination around the so-called 'tragedies'. There
are thousands of photographs around the world depicting massacre, murder, war, accidents, etc. At first
glance, we are inclined to think that the constant spread of such material has strictly informative
purposes. But, as we know, there is also the fact that we look at those images with a morbid pleassure,
they attract us.
To study this morbid pleassure, we can study the current state of events in Mexico. In this country there
is a state of constant fear because of the war between druglords, which has reached so far, it now
involves politicians, the national army and even small armies of civilians. It's because of this, that
aggressive photography has taken a special place among the newspaper and mass media in this
country1. There are so much murders, shootings and confrontations that the people has accepted it as
part of their daily life. As such, there is plenty of material to work with when trying to understand the
impact of aggressive photography on the population. But, is this the only way we can understand death
in our times? How can we concieve such brutal massacres in a way we almost could name 'beautiful'?
Let's take a look at mexican artist Teresa Margolles, whose work is all about the deceased, specially the
ones killed in brutal ways. She had worked within the morgue, requesting a special permission to have
access to some of the stuff used to clean the workplace. One of his art pieces, titled In the air2
consists on bubbles made of the water used to clean the morgue. As she comments, the work is
intended to make us think about the state of death, and uses this bubbles as symbols of 'life after death'.
In the image, we can see the bubbles floating around. If no one tells you anything about it, you can say
this photograph is such things as 'peaceful', 'beautiful', and so on. But, when you know that this bubbles
were once bodies, minds, people, and that they were all slaughtered, the conext of view changes
drastically. Even in this new context, the photograph is still beautiful, if also a little disturbing.
Another example. In her piece titled Vaporization 3, we cannot see too much. There's only a thick mist,
where the spectator is allowed to walk by and even breathe of that mist. But that mist, the same as in
Bubbles, is made with the water (sanitized) used to wash the bodies of the deceased. This, again, is to
'bring back the dead from their grave. It's an intense attempt to stamp the reality of violence and death
in the very body of the visitors.

Here, the dead take a corporeal form, and are somehow 'preserved'. As far as we can tell, the works of
Teresa Margolles resemble just to much to those of a photographer. In one way, we find the kind of
'possession' John Berger talks about in every one of her pieces. The retaining of the dead by this means
is not so far of those photographies taken by the European explorers in Australia. The difference in both
things is just a matter of purpose. The photograph depicting the white master and his new, loyal
aborigen friend is to serve as a throphy; a proof of courage and manliness to visit those wild, far lands
and 'conquering' them. As for the works of Teresa, they possess the body not as a memorial; the
purpose is to remember. Although, we can also allow us to think that, even in an inetnded respectful
way, Teresa also shows bodies as throphies; awards of those defeating death, preserved (if only for a
certain lapse of time) in an 'afterlife' 4. As so, even when her work is not about photography per se
(although she has, indeed, worked with photography, as we may see soon), we can find a way to
understand the ways in which pohtograph itself is viewed through a reflection about what her works try
to evidence. We can look at yet another of her works The Promise 5-9, in which she includes
(alongside an installation of the soil in which those houses were supposed to be built) a series of photos
about how government help programmes for building houses for the poor in the north of the country
have been abandoned because of the intense violence around the intended workplaces. The photos
themselves, do not show blood, nor violence, but the loneliness of a lost hope, a half-finished house as
proof of now dead dreams, killed by the same entity that kills countless innnocent persons everyday.
Another controversial work about her was a critique on the wealth of the druglords, who bought a lot of
jewelry using illegal money. She made jewerly 10 using the remains of broken glass of a shooting scene
between druglords (fact: the druglords actually bought some of her jewelry). The media, accordingly,
started to flood us with images of dismembered bodies, lying in a pool of their own blood.
The common boundaries between this two things (Teresas' wok and the violence photographs), lead us
to question the role of art photography all in all. How is it defined? Has art transformed in a social,
revolutionary movement? How can we separate art photography from day-to-day photography when
the context in which the art woks are made is our daily life? Boris Groys says that contemporary artists,
although reticent to be collected inside the museistic space, still need to be collected. He says that the
museum is a space of history, that objects collected inside the museum are objects from the past. And
so, we can say that the difference in this case is that the only difference between art photography and
day-to-day photography under such similar conditions (the now common violence and bloodshed) is
that astists look towards recording this violent acts in history, showing the world how death had
become a daily thing in our country. Somehow, the photograph and installations of Teresa Margolles
are the recording of a protest scream, echoing in the past.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berger, John, Ways of Seeing On Possessing, 1972
Mitchell, W.J.T., What do pictures really want?, 1996
Groys, Boris, On the new, 2014.
http://arteypoliticateresamargolles.blogspot.com/ - Official blog of the artist

Photographic content

1.- Teresa Margolles, Narco Guns, 2006.

2.- Teresa Margolles, En el aire, 2003

3.- Teresa Margolles, Vaporizacin, 2001

4.- Teresa Margolles, Materia Orgnica sore Yeso, 1990

5.- Teresa Margolles, La Promesa, 2012

6.- Teresa Margolles, La Promesa, 2012.

7.- Teresa Margolles, La Promesa, 2012.

8.- Teresa Margolles, La Promesa, 2012.

9.- Teresa Margolles, La Promesa, 2012.

10.- Teresa Margolles, 21, 2007.