Visuality of Absence: Sensing a Community’s Rupture Through Rhetorical Transport

Abstract

This paper analyzes Juan Manuel Echavarríaʼs photographic project Silences as a piece of a visual culture produced in the last years to represent and memorialize the war in Colombia. I used Michele Kennerly’s concept of rhetorical transport to describe these images’ power to bring before the spectator’s eyes and mind people, places, or things that are absent. I argue that these images fail to present empty and quiet spaces since it is unfeasible to see them without the presence of bodies. The stillness and immobility transmitted by them are disrupted by the viewer, who is moved to fill those spaces of emptiness with voices, sounds, and movements. In these images, the rhetorical power of condensing simultaneously the present and the absent offers contrasting sensorial experiences.

Keywords

• photography
• absence
• presence
• rhetorical transport