{"id":8823,"date":"2023-07-03T16:01:29","date_gmt":"2023-07-03T14:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chateaudeau.toulouse.fr\/agenda\/%onct-event-type%\/raymond-depardon-david-burnett-september-in-chile1971-1973\/"},"modified":"2023-11-14T16:37:52","modified_gmt":"2023-11-14T15:37:52","slug":"raymond-depardon-david-burnett-september-in-chile1971-1973","status":"publish","type":"onct-event","link":"https:\/\/chateaudeau.toulouse.fr\/en\/agenda\/raymond-depardon-david-burnett-september-in-chile1971-1973\/","title":{"rendered":"Raymond Depardon – David Burnett \nSeptember in Chile,1971\/1973"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photographs, originally intended for the press<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/section>\n\n
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On the afternoon of 11 September 1973, Chilean military aircraft bombed the Presidential Palace of La Moneda in Santiago and the army took over the seat of power. The socialist President Salvador Allende refused to surrender to the putschists and committed suicide after three years of a left-wing regime that had represented great hope in the country, among peasants and the working class for example, and throughout a continent accustomed to military coups and violence often manipulated by the United States. General Pinochet’s dictatorship was in place and lasted until 1990, accompanied by human rights abuses, 3,200 deaths and “disappearances”, and around 38,000 people tortured. Several thousand people, perhaps a million, went into exile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two years earlier, in 1971, Raymond Depardon, a young reporter with the Gamma agency, of which he had been one of the founders a few years earlier, came to Chile to mark the first anniversary of the victory of the People’s Union. He was accompanied by his friend, the journalist Robert Pledge, who worked with Zoom magazine at the time. In addition to a meeting with President Allende, he focused mainly on the world of the peasants, in which he found echoes of his origins.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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In September 1973, David Burnett, a reporter for Gamma New York who had just signed a contract with Life magazine and who later joined the Contact Press Images agency when Robert Pledge set it up in New York in 1976, covered the aftermath of the coup d’\u00e9tat in difficult conditions. Arrests, detainees marching to the National Stadium – where they were tortured and executed – book burning, the huge cemetery where the victims are buried, the funeral of poet Pablo Neruda, who died twelve days after the coup – and who is increasingly thought to have been poisoned – he chronicled the beginnings of what was to become a bloody dictatorship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These photographs, which were originally intended for the press and the news industry alone, are now historical documents, and part of our memory. They also bear witness to the aesthetics of the journalistic image at a time when photography was dominant and decisive for the press. That’s also why we felt it necessary to present the different print runs, those that were distributed to newspapers in the past, and those that are now used for the exhibition and the book.
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Christian Caujolle, Artistic Advisor<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/section><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/section>\n\n

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\u00a9Raymond Depardon _ Magnum Photos\nDemonstration to support the UP organized by the powerful Central trade union of CUT workers Santiago, September 15, 1971<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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The basement of Santago’s national stadium, where interrogations, torture and executions take place. September 22, 1973\n\u00a9 David Burnett (Contact Press Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/section>\n\n
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Text of Luis Poirot, extract of ” September in Chile “,1971\/1973 \u00bb, Atelier EXB<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/section>\n\n
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SEPTEMBER 1971, Raymond Depardon<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Chile, where I was born in 1940, was for many years until 1970 a country where we who lived there used to say: “Nothing happens here”, looking towards Europe or the United States, impatient to see what was happening elsewhere. Our long territory resembled a place of exile from which we had to escape.
Suddenly, Allende arrived and changed everything: the rest of the world turned its attention to us. Intellectuals and journalists came to see and try to understand what this unique experience of socialism combined with freedom was all about. Those of us who lived here were no longer thinking of leaving.
It was at this time that Robert Pledge and a silent photographer with wide surprised eyes arrived. Like many visitors, the latter photographed the great social theatre of the streets of Santiago, occupied for the first time by workers and peasants in a great song of hope and joy. But there was something different about this photographer. He wanted to visit the remote territories of the south, the territories of the Mapuche Indians and landless peasants, ignored for decades by our centralising culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I discovered through his images a country I didn’t know when I was in exile in Paris after the coup d’\u00e9tat, and today I can establish a relationship between these photographs and those that Raymond Depardon took years later in France, in equally remote territories. These distant photographs from 1971 were the prologue to a vision that was now visiting the land of his ancestors, a culture ignored by city dwellers here and elsewhere, past and present. Like Paul Strand who, after years of travelling the world, told us that everything he was looking for was right on his doorstep. So when Raymond Depardon visited us in 1971, silent with wide surprised eyes, he was already looking for his inner world, the world that great photographers photograph.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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SEPTEMBER 1973, David Burnett<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

As soon as the coup d’\u00e9tat took place, the military tried to control all information, particularly photographic and cinematographic images. They systematically destroyed the archives of the major publishers and media that had recorded Chile’s social, political and cultural life since 1900, as well as the Chile Films press and documentaries, which were at the origin of a renaissance in national cinema. Only photographers approved by them, who had to wear an accreditation around their neck and an identification bracelet on their sleeve, were allowed to work in the street. To show oneself otherwise with a camera was to risk being reported to the patrols that roamed the city. The news was all word of mouth. I learned of the death of President Salvador Allende on the night of September 11, from an Argentinian radio station; the murder of singer Victor Jara almost a month later and the death of Pablo Neruda in a short paragraph published among other news items, with no details of his funeral.
The military wanted to write a history about Chile that would have begun with them on September 11, and stay silent about everything that had preceded them. They certainly imagined that foreign photographers like David Burnett would give an exemplary vision of the army. But David could only take up the legacy of Robert Capa who stood by the Republic during the Spanish Civil War, that of W. Eugene Smith with the unfortunate people of the world, and respect the memory of August Sander who stood by those persecuted by Nazism, and all the photographers who gave a voice to those whom the authorities wanted to silence.
David and his incorruptible memory have become our own: the systematic abuse of power and violence, the despair of relatives waiting for news at the gates of a stadium, the cemetery alleys filled with anonymous graves, and an act of resistance, perhaps the first, the funeral of poet Pablo Neruda surrounded by soldiers. Nevertheless, the participants sang the national anthem and the \u201cInternationale\u201d, and his friend, the poet Francisco Coloane, recited: “You are not dead, you are not dead, because flowers do not die in spring”. He photographed all this for us, for Chilean photographers, who could not be witnesses to our history.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/section>\n\n

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\u00a9 Raymond Depardon _ Magnum Photos. The Pr\u00e9sident Allende, Chile 1971<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\u00a9 David Burnett _ Contact Press Images. Following the coup d’\u00e9tat, soldiers burn books banned by the junta in the streets, Santiago, September 19, 1973\n\u00a9 David Burnett (Contact Press Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/section>\n\n
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