Postcards from Chile and Images from an Archive: Lighting the Nitrate of the 1973 Coup

Abstract

This article examines a mass produced postcard image as a picture of conflict. It considers the postcard as a Benjaminian ‘prismatic fringe’ through which an archive can be viewed, wherein documents of the British trade in Chilean nitrate are juxtaposed with those of General Pinochet’s 1973 military coup. The archive itself is explored as a site of loss and its postcard, an unvarying idealisation, as a particularly problematic but powerful image that renders conflict out of sight.

Keywords

• postcard
• archive
• conflict
• nitrate
• memory
• trace
• Chile