Sharing absence

Perspective and community in the photographic series 'Ausencias', by Gustavo Germano

Abstract

This essay focus on Ausencias, a series of photographs by the Argentinean born and settled in Catalonia Gustavo Germano. Through a concern with the photographic support and the montage process, the text aims to stablish some relations between the photographic series and the aesthetic perception problematics, based on some notes by David Lapoujade towards the possibility of photographs’ reception to be configured as a participation or a transference of point of view. In the same way, the essay aims to analyse the photographs as ways of un-automatization of seeing and of exiting an “anesthetic” effect of art and perception as noted by Susan Buck-Morss. The essay seeks also to demonstrate the uses of the “face” as a means of identification in the photographic series, understanding it as a kind of pre-linguistic communication that tries to overcome the difference from the other without effacing it completely. Therefore, Germano’s photographic gesture gives the basis to imagine an expansion of the disappearance’s standpoint beyond the enclosures of family or of the politics of memory in the public sphere, staging an art of the Common, leaving the public-private dichotomy and entering a south-american sharing of the past.