Álbum de los mutilados de la Guerra del Pacífico. From the Medical Record to the Aestheticization of the Wounded Body

Abstract

In this article, we study the aestheticization of the wounded body in Álbum de los mutilados de la Guerra del Pacífico (1884). This album collects 130 photographs of war mutilated soldiers, accompanied by a brief text describing the type of wound and the soldier's data. These pictures are problematic since they must deal with the physical and symbolic vestiges of war. The exhibition of this mutilated body responds to a medical and administrative objective, however, the album, as well as the photographs it contains, shows sometimes else. By appropriating photographic forms typical of other spheres such as the bourgeois portrait or the idealized forms of the Fine Arts, the album tries to embellish the wound. These appropriations attempt to nullify the potent traumatic burden of the mutilated and its political consequences. They are, in addition, strategies that reveal the difficulty to deal photographically with the mutilated body and their political consequences.