The panel is designed to encourage discussion between panelists and audience members, and as such we have selected three panelists who will limit their presentations to seventeen to eighteen minutes each. We will begin the panel with " Digital Photography, Cultural Amnesia, and the Ruins of Memory" by Marcela de Oliveira e Silva Lemos. The author examines photographs of disputed ruins, specifically those which are not officially recognized as such: sites of memory of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985) that are either still controlled by the police or private owners. Despite their significance, these sites have not become memorials despite several public campaigns for reparations. With the aid of archival photographs of the Brazilian authoritarian period, de Oliveira creatively and digitally manipulates photos of those spaces to reflect the conflicting narratives imposed upon them. Both ruins and film photography are subject to the time that wastes them away, however our contemporary world introduces a new form of disappearance: the transformation from material to digital. Inscribed in the materiality of this chain of disappearances is the memory of past destruction. The author argues that the digitization of photography and photographic archives is a mode of disappearance that challenges cultural amnesia as it manipulates the past instead of emptying it or reconciling it with the present.

Continuing the discussion of the photography of ruins and disappearance is Anthony Pearce with “Presence, Absence and Temporality in the Ruins of El Frontón.” San Juan Bautista de la Isla ( the former island prison known as El Frontón) is a mere five kilometers from the Peruvian coast. Despite this closeness, the Peruvian state prohibits visitors to El Frontón—notwithstanding its proximity and visibility, the forbidden island remains a kind of ever-present void on the horizon. In 1986, over two hundred Shining Path detainees died during a prisoner uprising, including over ninety extrajudicial killings by the Peruvian state. In the years since the massacre, the prison now sits abandoned. In 2009, Limeñan photographer Gladys Alvarado Jourde began a project to document the ruins of the site. Her photographs highlight the presence and absence of these ruins of memory in the Peruvian consciousness. The author examines how Alvarado’s photographs unearth the history of the island and its ruins, opening up its themes of gaps and openings, present absences and out of sync temporalities through both photography and text.

The last paper of the panel shifts our focus away from ruins towards wreck. Thomas Chen’s “Ruin Cinema, Wreck Photography” takes as its point of departure Johannes von Moltke’s concept of “ruin cinema.” Rather than a delineation of ruin photography, Chen examines what he terms “wreck photography.” A wreck photography is distinguished temporally by the everyday. In lieu of verticality reduced to horizontal rubble, its lines are pedestrian, its locale par excellence the side of the road, the site of an abandoned vehicle, a makeshift hovel, or a family of stragglers. A photography of wreckage insists on the banal: the mundane poverty of postcolonial life on the Indian reservation, as seen in the work of Aaron Huey, or violence on the small scale, pictured not in city blocks flattened by bombs dropped from above, but in human beings who are shells of themselves, living wrecks who cut figures not tragic-heroic enough to be ruined. They are simply exhausted, waste material released into the postindustrial air, or fragments cast ashore from the shipwrecks of depressions and recessions great and minor.