Sara Facio — Photography as Witness

Sara Facio became famous photographing close-ups of many knows faces. Julio Cortázar with a cigarette between his lips. Jorge Luis Borges. Pablo Neruda. Gabriel García Márquez. Ernesto Sábato. María Elena Walsh. Many of her portraits became so familiar that they helped determine how generations came to picture some of Latin America’s most important writers and artists. Argentina

But that is only part of Sara Facio’s story.

She believed photography had a responsibility beyond making memorable images. In a biographical statement prepared in the 1970s, she described wanting to leave the studio and photograph the world around her—“what she loves, what hurts.”

That idea runs through both of these photographs.

Neglect is also a form of violence

In 1966, Facio and her longtime collaborator Alicia D’Amico received an unusual assignment from Argentina’s Ministry of Health.

They were supposed to photograph the physical deterioration of state psychiatric institutions: broken windows, damp walls, doors that would not close, buildings badly in need of repair.

Then they went inside.

Facio later remembered that once they saw the condition of the people living there, they could not simply photograph the architecture. The neglect of the buildings was visible. The human abandonment was far worse. 

The women in this photograph sit against a damaged wall. There is almost nothing happening. That is precisely what makes the photograph difficult to leave.

Institutional neglect is often imagined through dramatic acts of cruelty. Humanario records something quieter: people left for long periods with little activity, privacy, comfort or control over their own lives.

Facio and D’Amico photographed that absence.

The project became Humanario, a book of forty-five photographs divided into sections devoted to women, men and children, with a text by Julio Cortázar. The photographs had been made in 1966, but the book was not published until 1976. Its appearance coincided with the beginning of Argentina’s military dictatorship; Cortázar's work was suppressed, and the book was kept from normal circulation. Google Books

The people inside those institutions had already been removed from ordinary society.

For years, the photographs that showed what happened to them were pushed from public view as well.

Childhood still reaches for the world

Aproximación a la vida came earlier.

MoMA dates the photograph to 1963, although Facio later remembered making it for a Buenos Aires photography competition in 1961. The picture became an early turning point in her career and was later selected for reproduction by Argentina’s postal service—an unusual public recognition for an authored photograph at the time.

The window separates two worlds.

The children cannot yet control the circumstances into which they were born. They have inherited a place, a family, an economic reality and all the limitations adults have created around them.

But they are looking outward.

Facio understood that documentary photography did not require an extraordinary event. Sometimes the condition of a society could be read in a psychiatric hospital no one wanted to enter.

Sometimes it could be read in the face of a child looking through a window.

A militant for photography

Facio’s contribution went far beyond the photographs she made.

In 1973 she co-founded La Azotea, a publishing house devoted to photography and one of the pioneering institutions of its kind in Latin America. She later helped found the Argentine Council of Photography, created and directed the Fotogalería at Buenos Aires’s Teatro San Martín, and played a major role in building the photography collection of Argentina’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Cultura Repository

She spent decades fighting for photography to be recognized as art and for Latin

American photographers to be taken as seriously as their European and North American counterparts. She described that work simply as militancy.

And perhaps that explains the breadth of her archive.

Sara Facio photographed the people whose names everybody knew.

But she also understood that the camera mattered most when it made it harder not to see the people whose names we would never know.

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