NoPhoto’s Memoria Colonizada projects: (re)creating collective memories?

This article analyzes NoPhoto Collective’s Memoria colonizada photography projects (2011–2018), which feature some of the new agricultural colonies established by the Francoist regime between the 1940s and the 1960s through its Instituto Nacional de Colonización (INC). The stated aim of these projects is to reflect upon “the intervened landscape, the creation of new populations with a uniform architecture, official memory and that of the protagonists, giving special importance to the local actors” (NoPhoto Collective. 2011. Vegaviana memoria colonizada. NOPHOTO. Accessed 28 June 2024. http://nophoto.org/vegaviana-memoria-colonizada;http://vegaviana.nophoto.org/). Yet, the foregrounding of personal and intimate images and stories, while intended as a counterpoint to the villages’ official histories and a means to empower local residents, risks presenting a nostalgic and somewhat idealized view of these communities. Such slippages into idealization and cliché, however, coexist with photographs that mobilize representational strategies that undermine any illusion of photographic objectivity or neutrality, and which thus throw into question both the supposed transparency of the photographic medium and the notion of a collective rural memory that articulates the series as a whole.