Political surveillance photography and generational memory in Puerto Rico

Images of a vanished world?

Abstract

During the Twentieth Century, pro-independence and leftist movements in Puerto Rico, a colony of the USA, endured an intense surveillance and persecution, the memory of which has transformed the political militancy of subsequent generations. This article contrasts images produced by political surveillance with images that seek to exalt it. On the one hand, it examines an instance of represen-tation of police work in National Geographic Magazine; on the other, photographs made of stu-dent militants at the University of Puerto Rico. Making reference to Walter Benjamin, it analyzes this visual documentation as fragments for a revolutionary tradition inherited from a period of so-cial conflict that would seem to have evaporated, rather than as evidence. It studies the complexities of looking at these images while considering them as snapshots of an unfinished and contentious story that demand an alternate set of captions under the photographs of past and present.