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4. The powerful image

MILAGROS DE LA TORRE, Los pasos perdidos, Camisa de periodista asesinado, 1996

Raking around amongst the piles of police reports in the basements of the Court of Justice in Lima, Milagros de la Torre did not find photo identification numbers, or perhaps they did not interest her, on their own merits, as a register of individuals with a criminal background, like the ones which captivated the Brazilian artist, Rosangela Rennó, in the same period. What she did find was "marked" objects; evidence found during police investigations and used in the court cases of several criminals, and she photographed these in turn, very carefully, in black and white in the very place she had found them, transformed for the moment into a photographic studio. On this occasion she discarded the criminal reports and only kept the title which was also an extensive description of the objects and the reason for the photograph: Belts which the psychologist Mario Poggi used to strangle a rapist during the police interrogation. Shirt of a journalist murdered in the massacre of Ucchuracay, Ayacucho. Or even more eloquent in its simplicity: Pistol. Incriminating proof of murder. The object which was the reason for the image nevertheless indicates a fate (that of the victim), but does not explain what was the motive for the crime (or of the murderer).

In this series of images, entitled Los pasos perdidos (Paying discrete homage to the founder of a "theory of significant objects", André Breton, or to one of the first creators of a post-colonial literature, Alejo Carpentier?) Milagros de la Torre explores the limits of context, the powers of ambiguity and the polysemics intrinsic to all images, but which photography, because of its pretension to objectivity, reveals much more than other visual media.

Milagros de la Torre photographs these objects in a very neat, tidy way, impeccable in their photographic classicism, to a certain degree nineteenth century-like: centred on the image, hardly wishing to be seen precisely. They are illuminated like the instruments of crime of the Cluedo playing cards, bathed in a greyish aura which fades at the edges, emerging from the shadows of the memory to reactivate a story, suggesting it more than revealing it. She recreates in her own way, using very well established rules, the fictional place of the police file or the mystery story. In this sense, the images are imbued with mistakes: like the builder of stories with no apparent ending. Milagros de la Torre shows us the true nature of objects but leaves it implicit that stories - both the motive and the crime, and photography - only belong to the observer.

The power of image resides in this forced, obligatory ambiguity. In what is read between the lines, in what is left unsaid. The Carta de amor escrita por prostituta a su amante (Love Letter Written by Prostitute to her Lover) which forms part of the series Los pasos perdidos is perhaps the key document for this understanding of the intentions of Milagros de la Torre because the text of the letter, by its very nature illegible, although it is the proof of a finite history, a summary of a life, does not tell us anything. We hardly have enough time to think of the uncovered body of the woman who lies, cold, immobile, absent, at the scene of the crime. These empty spaces in the narrative, which Milagros de la Torre explores in even greater depth in her recent series of large photographs of "forgotten" pages (rubbed out, removed or scored out) from the population census files of San Marino (Blank series), due to their enigmatic essence, become powerful images as the absence of meaning that is photographed here becomes a revelation. (…)