Just before Freedom: Alicia Sanguinetti’s Photographs of Political Prisoners in Argentina

Abstract

This Curated Spaces features a visual essay of photographs made by Alicia Sanguinetti, an Argentinean political prisoner of Alejandro Lanusse’s military government, on the last day of her captivity in Villa Devoto prison in Buenos Aires. Sanguinetti and her fellow political prisoners of the 1966–73 dictatorship were released by the democratic president Héctor Cámpora on the day he took office. This event, which occurred on May 25, 1973, is known as the Devotazo. Sanguinetti took these photographs—a roll of thirty-six black-and-white images—with a camera that her brother smuggled into the prison. The text includes comments by Alicia Sanguinetti from her interview with the author.