[Versión en Español acá] Why did I take this portrait? I found it going through old negatives. Almost all the photos I took in Chile until 1994, the year I left the country, have been lost. If it wasn’t for the fact that I found it almost by chance, I never would have remember it.
It was at the Central Market in Santiago de Chile around 1991, when the market was not an attraction for tourists. During those years, almost no foreigners were seen in the country, perhaps only in the south in summer, but outsiders rarely ventured into the capital. A gray city, closed in on itself, xenophobic, fearful of difference.
How else could it be after 17 years of Pinochet’s military dictatorship. I have this childhood memory: it was the late 70s, I must have been 7 or 8 years-old, I was with my family in the car and we saw a black person walking on the sidewalk (probably the first black person I ever saw) and my father, staunch pinochetista, said: “they die with the cold”. The comment stuck in my memory; I couldn’t stop thinking about that person who would inevitably die the following winter, as if he were a bacterium.
The truth is that the army found fertile ground to impose a dictatorship. What has happened since then? my father died in 1982, at the beginning of an economic crisis that sparked nationwide protests and an armed movement against the regime. Later, in 1988, in a legendary plebiscite, the majority of the population (me included, in my first vote) rejected the dictator’s aspirations to remain in power 8 more years, which would have allowed Pinochet a total of 25-year presidency. Chile today is a different country, but an erratic condemnation by some political sectors of the human rights violations during the dictatorship has give rise, when the country is about to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the coup d’etat, to a disturbing reevaluation of that period.
Returning to the photo, what I remember is that when I took it, I was with my older brother, it was around noon, I was on an assignment to photograph people on the streets reading a book. We were at the market and I guess we were going to have lunch.
This couple was there. Perhaps they asked me to take a picture of them. Do you remember when people used to ask for that, to have their photo taken, a photo that they would never see? An intriguing gesture that digital photography has made disappear.
Now, almost 30 years later, I have the image in front of me, and looking at it comforts me because in them I see a country emerging from the recently ended dictatorship. She is beautiful, much more beautiful than the woman in the advertisement on the wall. She is drinking coke while her partner has already had 6 bottles of beer. I can venture that they have spent the night before drinking and making love and now they are on a Saturday morning getting rid of the hangover. They were happy and I think they knew it.
