What is Present, What is Visible: the Photo-Portraits of the 43 ‘Disappeared’ Students of Ayotzinapa as Positive Social Agency

Abstract

Through a reflection on the nature of photography (its referential and political ontology) this article discusses the effective possibility of a political use of photography in a contemporary post-industrial culture marked by the dialectics of hypo- and hypervisibility. Considering the case of photographs of a group of people whose disappearance was politically motivated (the ‘Ayotzinapa 43’), this essay proposes the spectral ambiguity of images as one possible positive-political element of interrogation and restoration of the social.