Exploded Albums: Re-working the Family Photo Album in Women’s Protests against State Terrorism in Argentina

In the following discussion, I offer a radically expanded conception of the format, function and scope of the family photograph album, by considering the activities of the Argentine protest organisation Madres de Plaza de Mayo – Línea Fundadora (Mothers of May Square – Founding Line). Established in 1986, the organisation (hereafter referred to as the Madres) emerged after a split in the original Madres de Plaza de Mayo group, formed in 1977 by women whose children had been suspected of subversion and ‘disappeared’ (that is, abducted, tortured, and killed) by the military dictatorship during the Dirty War (1976 – 1982). The Madres have frequently mobilised photographs of missing family members in diverse ways in their demands for truth and justice. Here, I examine one such photo-protest tactic that first took place in parks and other public spaces in Buenos Aires in the 1980s, where women compiled and assembled collections of family photographs, sequenced them into a meaningful narrative, added handwritten captions, and then displayed them to passing strangers, often offering oral accounts of the lives of the missing subjects. Presented in placard rather than book format, these assemblages, I propose, function as ‘exploded albums’, drawing explicitly on the language of the family photo album, but with the intention of going far beyond the album’s conventionally anticipated audience and purpose.