In 1975, six South American military dictatorships conspired to concoct a secret plan to eliminate their left-wing opponents. Not only would the intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay trade information with each other and kidnap, disappear and kill their own domestic foes, they would also cooperate in identifying and killing exiles from partner countries who had taken refuge elsewhere.
By the time Operation Condor ended in the early 1980s, as many as 60,000 people may have been killed. Precise numbers are hard to come by, because of the clandestine undertaking, and in the years since, political amnesties, the destruction or decay of public records and the reluctance of survivors to revisit the trauma of their imprisonment and torture have impeded the compilation of a definitive history.
But those were only some of the challenges that the Portuguese photographer João de Carvalho Pina, 33, faced a decade ago when he began a project to document Operation Condor. The torture and detention centers themselves have also been largely abandoned or converted to conventional uses, and there was a larger overarching conceptual problem for Mr. Pina to solve: how to illustrate something that by its very nature was both abstract and hidden.
Still, Mr. Pina, who has worked for The New York Times and The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek and other magazines, kept at it, and his labors are now bearing fruit. He has a book coming out this year, and he will be exhibiting about 100 of his photographs with a multimedia show at the Paço das Artes in São Paulo beginning in late September.
From Jan. 29 through Oct. 3, he will also be one of five photographers exhibiting recent work at the Open Society Foundations in Manhattan as part of its “Moving Walls” documentary photography project. This month Mr. Pina talked with Larry Rohter by telephone from Portugal about the origins and objectives of “Shadow of the Condor.” Their interview has been edited.
You were born in 1980, as Operation Condor was winding down. What drew you in?
Well, it comes from my own idiosyncrasy and my family’s history. I’m the grandson of two political prisoners in Portugal, and those memories were present from a very early stage in my life. My granddad died before I was born, but my grandmother, when we were on vacation we would listen to these amazing stories and adventures, first clandestinely for the Portuguese Communist Party and then as political prisoners. So I was born with all that baggage and had to deal with it. But my friends, they had no clue about it because in Portugal, as in Brazil, there isn’t much conversation about the subject. As a result, when I started to work in the early 2000s, I decided to go after the subject here in Portugal.
And that’s what led to your first book, “Por Teu Livre Pensamento” (“For Your Free Thought”)?
Right. And in 2002 I started to work a lot in Latin America, where the political prisoner question was an issue and still is. When I made my first trip to Argentina, the military dictatorship [which had ended in 1983] was still a big thing, a big trauma. That was 2004, also the year of my first trip to Brazil. So I slowly started to understand what had been the reality in South America.
Eventually, I did go to New York to do photojournalism and documentary photography at school. This was after I had already produced my work in Portugal, and people in New York and elsewhere were slightly amazed by it. Like, “Wow, this happened in Portugal? Nobody knows about this.” That encouraged me to continue this type of work.
I’d like for you to talk about methodology, about the practical problem of trying to document as a photographer an operation that is long over and even when it was taking place was shrouded in secrecy.
Well, my first concern is who do I want to represent here? What’s my goal? Who do I want to address and who do I want to talk about? That was my main goal: how do I link all six countries together? So the first thing I did was to understand the history of each country and to select victims, meaning people who survived, families of people who disappeared, which is a big issue in the region, as you know, and the places where things happened — the concentration camps, the different places where torture was practiced, the places where a person was last seen. I also had places where people think other people are buried, like in the Araguaia [River region of the Brazilian Amazon] or the Atacama [desert of northern Chile].
I wanted to show these fairly normal places, some of which are actually pretty creepy because they have been abandoned for a long time. The idea was to share those places and show the memories that are still there. So when I went there, I tried to think how a victim felt. How was it to be locked up here for three months? I tend to spend a lot of time in those places, and sometimes pictures come to me and other times I went and talked to people.
Can you give an example of a picture that came to you in a torture center?
There’s a particular photograph of a floor in Chile. I was talking to someone there, who said, “Well, the survivors recognized this place because of the floor.” They could do that only because when they were walking in with blindfolds on their eyes, they could glance down and see the black and white tiles on the floor, leading to a wooden stairway. So when they walked in, they saw the floor, measured the number of steps to the stairway and said, “It’s here.” I would never think about that, but suddenly I looked at the floor, I saw the tile and photographed the tile. To me it was obvious that that was a picture.
When I see your work online, I notice that there is always comment about your unusual choice of equipment.
I’m very comfortable working in medium format, with a Hasselblad with one type of film that I’ve developed with one developer for the past 15 years. So it’s a very natural language to me. One thing I particularly like about that camera is that you don’t put it in front of your face. You look down, so I can interact with the people I am photographing much easier than if I had put this huge camera in front of my eyes, and having me and them and a big camera in the middle.
And then I really love the square format. So I did the project in black-and-white film because that’s what I wanted, and also because I couldn’t afford a digital camera. So it was all for very simplistic reasons. I didn’t intellectualize it.
So you were working with a shoestring budget?
The first five years of this project I did self-funded. I was very lucky that the International Center of Photography, the school I went to, has this amazing darkroom. Every time I would gather more than 100 rolls of film, I would fly to New York, they would give me access to the lab because I studied there. I would develop the film, and it would be much cheaper than sending it out to a lab in Portugal or Argentina.
In this project, you are both a creator and a curator, since you have also included archival photographs from the countries involved in Operation Condor.
It was interesting, because Elisabeth Biondi, who used to be the visual director at The New Yorker, she started following this work from an early stage. One day we were looking at the pictures and she said, “Look, you have the representation of the past, you have the present, what’s going on now, but you’re still missing the past.” And I was thinking, Hell, it’s true. I should go and look at archives. And she asked, “Is that accessible?” I said I would ask around and manage something, and that’s what I did. I made two more trips to the countries involved and started asking local photographers and at courthouses and public archives.
I started looking at these amazing images — Paraguay has thousands and thousands of images from this period. Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, all of them had either local photographers or law enforcement documenting all these things. Though a lot of them are accessible, others are secret, unknown. That was the most fascinating part: going to courthouses, explaining to judges what I’m doing, and looking at their archives for what I could reproduce. It was really incredible.
What was the reaction when you asked to see official archives, either military or civilian? Were the bureaucrats cooperative or resistant?
I had a bit of everything. (Laughs.) It depended on the country and the specific situation. Paraguay was the most open, by far. I was talking to people, they’d call up the director of the archive, and he’d say, “Yeah, come on over,” and two hours later I was there, and he’d say, “Sure, do you want to start now?” To which I’d say, “Don’t I have to write a letter and get approval?” and he’d say: “What? No, you can do it.” So I came back with my tripod, and they were really, really helpful.
You mention local photographers. I imagine that for many of them the reaction was, “Great, somebody is interested, so this is not going to be forgotten.”
They were all very supportive of someone interested in this subject, and photographing the present looking for the past. They all agreed that I could use some photographs free of charge. I think that people who lived through this understand very well what I am doing. It really helps that when I go there, I show them photographs I’ve already done, I tell them why I’m interested in this. No one really says no, neither victims nor the people around them.
And what qualities are you looking for in the archival photographs?
I’m looking for the historical, really. Latin America has always had incredible photographers, so I know the quality and the information is going to be there. What happened in this particular place, that has or has not been documented, and how can I show this, that’s what I was after.
Those before-and-after mug shots you found in the Paraguayan archives are very powerful. They remind me a bit of the notorious photographs from the Tuol Sleng torture center that the Khmer Rouge maintained in Cambodia.
I give a lot of play in the book to those pictures. They also reminded me of the Nazi period; they show people with hair and without hair. It made me think of concentration camps. They are all very scared-looking and miserable, they had pretty much all gone through torture. They have 11,000 files there, of each prisoner. My editor in Spain is saying we should go there and do a book, reproduce all 11,000 images to do a little book.
These guys were not amateurs, they knew what they were doing. The fact that it is public and very well organized, with the little resources that Paraguay has, is really amazing. The bureaucrats are always good that way. In 50 years we’ll see all the Homeland Security photos somewhere, and it will be really fascinating when they are declassified.
The Open Society Foundations’ “Moving Walls” Exhibition will open on Wednesday, Jan. 29, at the society’s New York headquarters in Manhattan, and remain on view through Oct. 3.
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