texto: Álvaro Sarmiento; fotos: Fina Torres - Neruda: entierro y testamento - 1973

Great Latin American title with 48 captivating black and white photos by Fina Torres and text by Alvaro Sarmiento and Pablo Neruda, Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1971.

Cited in Horacio Fernandez: The Latin American Photobook (pages 102 and 103).

Condition:
Photo-illustrated paperback (as issued) in overall very good condition. Inside clean with no markings and no foxing. Cover shows only minor signs of handling.

In September 1973, Fina Torres, a photojournalist active in Venezuela at the time, was in Santiago during the coup that overthrew the government of the Unidad Popular. She photographed the damage caused by artillery to the facade of the Palacio de la Moneda, the armed soldiers in the streets, and other unsettling scenes of everyday life at the time: cleaning painted slogans from the walls, people lining up to buy food, embassy surveillance, and the anguished seriousness of those waiting outside the morgue. Similar scenes can be found in the photobook Chili September 1973 by Koen Wessing, one of whose images is almost identical to another taken by Torres. Both captured a dark-haired girl standing at the morgue door, showing the ID photo of a soldier. Torres chose to repeat the image to more clearly show the features of the young man who had disappeared, and Wessing did the same.
Ten days after the coup, poet Pablo Neruda died in a clinic in Santiago. Torres photographed the funeral procession, which also laid to rest the Unidad Popular and an entire era of leftist aspirations. The procession turned into a demonstration, despite the menacing presence of numerous armed soldiers.
In the documentary film Chilean September by Bruno Muel, Théo Robichet, and Valérie Mayoux, you can hear the emotion of people giving eulogies for the dead, and this pain is also present in the photos of Torres and other photographers such as Marcelo Montecino, who from his Mexican exile published his own images of that day in Con sangre en el ojo (With Blood in the Eye, 1981).
Fina Torres left another testimony, that of the vigil held around Neruda's dead body. As she recalls, she was "the only photographer in the writer's residence on the day of his death." The house had been entered and looted by soldiers, an event almost foretold in the lines "Traitor / generals: / behold my dead house" from Spain in the Heart. The photos show empty shelves, ashes from the auto-da-fé, open closets, flooded rooms, and other signs of plunder and destruction—images of the desolation that the deceased poet's relatives, also captured by Torres's camera, seem not to notice.
Horacio Fernandez, The Latin American Photobook, pages 102 and 103