The Class is a color photograph of a black and white photograph intervened by Marcelo Brodsky thirty years after the original was shot. It is a class photo taken by a photographer when he was in his first year of secondary school in 1967. A girl in the first row holds a sign that reads: “Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, 1º año, 6a div. 1967.” The school is the most prestigious in Argentina and the thirteen-year-old students pose without knowing of the tragedy that lies ahead. The first shock is that two boys’ faces have been circled and crossed in red. They were taken by the military at the time of the military dictatorship (1976-1983) when thousands of people who opposed the regime disappeared. Other students are marked with other colors; “Gustavo prefiere no aparecer por el pasado” (Gustavo prefers not to appear because of the past). Brodsky carried out research to determine what had happened to every one of his schoolmates and made notes in the class picture using color pencils to add information about each boy and girl in the photo. He wrote “vive” (alive) or “Carlos es diseñador” (Carlos is a designer). The Class is part of a photographic essay carried out in 1997 called Good Memory that includes contemporary portraits of the survivor classmates posing in front of the original photograph and short comments on the biography of every person in the group. The Class is a powerful exercise of memory and a political gesture of recovering the story of those who were victims of the State Terrorism and how that affects the present.
Marcelo Brodsky was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was exiled to Italy with his family after his brother Fernando was kidnapped by the military and killed at the age of 22. He studied economics at the Universidad de Barcelona and photography at the Centre Internacional de Fotografia de Barcelona with photographer Manel Esclusa. In 1997 he made the photographic essay Buena Memoria, which has been exhibited around the world ever since. In 2000 he made an installation called The Wretched of the Earth, where he exhibited books buried during the military dictatorship, a common practice by people afraid of being found with one of the banned books. In 2002 a new installation discussed the terrorist attack to AMIA (Argentine Israelite Mutual Association). He exhibited fragments from the bombed façade of the building in 1994. In 2007 he showed Correspondences, a visual dialogue with Manel Esclusa. In 2014 he recreated the same idea of The Class taking a photograph of a group of students from Colegio Nacional Buenos Aires with everyone holding a letter to create a message to bring attention to the forty-three missing students from the Mexican city of Ayotzinapa. He said at the time, “This allows students from the school to understand that an image is a lot more than a selfie. You can produce images with a political sense, a social purpose, which is a lot more complex than it seems.” A recent work by Brodsky has a similar approach. It is a photograph of a photograph by a photo reporter of Syrian refugees. Again, Brodsky has inscribed information on some of the figures in the photo with color pencils. After the inscriptions, he takes a new photograph that is amplified for the exhibition.
