La muerte en los ojos

What do the Abu Ghraib photographs of human harassment, the Auschwitz album, and the photos of prisoners taken by torturers from the most ferocious dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Brazil or Cambodia have in common? Beyond their content, all of them are "perpetrator images": they embody the point of view of the perpetrators of mass crimes or their accomplices while they consume their violent acts, while constraining us as spectators to look at the pain alien through the eyes of those who provoked it. "Death in the eyes" proposes a method to analyze this visual modality in photography, film and video, combining the technical and stylistic instruments of the image with the historical rigor, not only of the visible, but also of the hidden behind the limits of the frame.