(Photography credit: Stephen Lewontin) When I heard the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong had been attacked by Beijing supporters, I was reminded of a photograph I recently discovered in the SoWa studio of Boston-based photographer Stephen Lewontin during a First Friday event. Lewontin covered the dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile during the 1970s and 1980s as a photographer for the Gamma agency, and has many fascinating photographs he took of his time there on display in his studio. You can see a very small version of one of my favorite photographs of his to the left - to see a bigger picture, click on the link associated with his name above in the photography credit, which will lead you to his website. And to see the full-size picture, nothing beats dropping by his studio during First Friday and admiring a print of it for yourself.
What fascinates me about this picture is that it depicts a pro-Pinochet demonstrator during the last few years of the dictatorship, expressing her anger at the photographer or the rest of the world for, apparently, condoning unrest aimed at bringing an end to the Pinochet regime. (Lewontin has more anecdotes about the picture and I hope he does write a book about all his memories of that complicated time.) From our standpoint of citizens in democracies, it is hard to imagine anyone wanting to live in a dictatorship - but some people have always been able to cosy up to the powers in place and others have always preferred stability over everything else. Some people find their interest in odious regimes (think too of collaborators during the French Occupation.) It's sadly too easy, and vastly mistaken, to believe that every anonymous Jane living under a dictator secretly hopes for the regime to ends. I was trying to touch upon a similar idea when I wrote my novella "Isolde 1939", which is based on the true story of a French soprano who sang for the Nazis. But Lewontin's photograph brings home this message far more powerfully than thirty thousand words.
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