Framing Mexican Violence and Femicide in César Saldívar’s Conceptual Photography

• In Event: Media, Violence, and Precariousness: Case Studies

Abstract

In an era dominated by visual experience, some of the most disseminated and consumed images across the globe are those of violence and human suffering. In Mexico, the harsh realities of narco-warfare and gender-motivated crimes are captured daily via the photographic lens and exposed to the public in graphic form. The display of the mutilated body has become a site of contention and dispute amongst academics, particularly in relation to the imaging of the femicides in the bordertown, Ciudad Juárez, that have occurred since the turn of the 1990s. Depictions of the female corpse are fraught with arguments of an ethical nature that question the re-exploitation of the victims and the eroticisation of female pain.
In opposition to these abject images circulated by the media, Mexican photographer, César Saldívar has created a corpus of conceptual works to aesthetically re-present these ongoing murders. This paper will analyse Saldívar’s black and white, studio-produced photographs and discuss his symbolic and theatricalised framing of death and precarious existence at the border. Drawing upon theories of photography and spectatorship, I will consider the politics of representing and viewing the pain of others.

Author

• Anna Kingsley, Royal Holloway, University of London