About Marcos
Marcos Adandia began studying photography in 1988, and since 1993, has worked as a photojournalist for the news agency, Noticias Argentinas. He has published work in several newspapers and magazines, including Rolling Stone, Elle, Tres Puntos, Jornal do Brasil, Mother Jones, and Luna Cornea, a Mexican photography publication.
Adandia's photographic essays have documented the military dictatorship and economic crisis in Argentina, AIDS and sexuality, mothers with HIV, drug addiction and families in the streets, Che Guevara's return to Cuba, and most notably "Diana", an award-winning essay about an HIV-positive transvestite who was disowned by her family and turned to a life on the streets as a prostitute. Adandia followed her as she moved from jails to hospitals, with no one to turn to for help. When she died in 1996, only Adandia was there to claim her body.
Adandia teaches workshops on "The Approach to the Photographic Essay" and exhibits his work throughout Mexico, Cuba, and Argentina.
Marcos Adandía
“ Mothers of the disappeared ”
Introduction:
There is no word for a mother who has lost her
son. There is no way of naming such a pain.
In my country’s recent history, during the years of the military dictatorship, the violence of state terrorism took thirty thousand lives.
And in a perverse design of the future that the authorities had in mind for this society people were tortured, murdered; children, women, the old, students, workers, journalists, artists, intellectuals and all belonging to any form of expression that was not within the frame work of their plans.
Plans that depended on a society that from then on would remain paralyzed in fear.
In this context, it was only the love of a mother that was able to make one group of women, in the darkest days of Argentine history, come up with the valor to step forward and state its claim before a society in terror; taking the streets, banging on all doors, and before the indifference and mockery of the authorities, they settled for ever in the Argentine people’s most symbolic site, the Plaza de Mayo.
One by one, they covered their heads with a white linen diaper, which once, in times when their dreams were of a different hue, had belonged to their sons and daughters.
And with those diapers as a sign of hope of some day recovering their children, they joined in a circle that would never ever end.
From then on, and to this day, every Thursday afternoon, they have walked in a circle around the Mayo pyramid (symbol of Argentine freedom).
A ritual of love and of peace of every Thursday and for ever.
Then these diapers became inexhaustible white scarves, and many of these women already had become old ladies, with their illusions intact. Eyes beaming with the question why, and an open wound that still bleeds as on the first day.
All Photos
Marcos Andandia 2003©
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