Inhabiting the Image: Domestic Photography and Poetics of Resistance in Postwar Spain

Presentation of the project

"Over the past decades, the study of Francoism has been situated within international theoretical and philosophical debates on the image in relation to memory, documentation, testimony, political experiences of the last century, and their capacity to generate a civic and memorial repertoire functioning as an alternative history. Within this framework, Inhabiting the Image offers a journey through domestic photographs and family albums of the Spanish Republican community, which during Francoism served as spaces to negotiate a disrupted reality and era. These images are seen as sites where those who survived the war and defeat sought to live another life–outside of time, or outside of a reality that had become unlivable. These photographs, turned into spaces of refuge, encryption, or escape, reveal tactics of resistance that have left traces in their forms. Their capacity to trigger flows of memory and remain politically active over time demonstrates that they continue to be resistant images today. Moreover, although focused on the experience of Republican defeat and its forms of elaboration and resistance, the research proposes a methodology applicable to other contexts in which strategies of resistance are developed through the re-signification of photographs and personal archives. Thus, the concept of 'inhabiting the image' as an analytical tool can be applied to studies of other subordinated groups."