It seems that the 33 miners of the San José mine will soon be reunited with their families. The operations are scheduled to begin sometime next week, and everyone hopes that things will turn out for the best. Needless to say, the most important issue at this point is the safety of these men.
Or is it? It is now obvious that this dramatic episode has also turned into a worldwide news show, and it will probably be studied later by news organizations, journalism schools and consulting agencies as a case study in crisis communication. It has been reported that the miners are currently receiving media training to prepare them to face the press when they come out. Apparently, it is important to make sure that the miners will be able to handle the press properly. While the rescue experts are probably still worried about getting them out of there alive, the government wants to make sure they will give decent interviews.
The result of this preparation, I’m guessing, will be that televisions and newspapers all around the world will be telling the same feel-good story about resilience and solidarity, technological prowess, family values and patriotic unity. The time for controversy and conflicting versions will come later, as is always the case. In the meantime, what we can expect in the next few days is a well-coordinated media event, where the 33 survivors can express their gratefulness, their pride, and pose next to President Piñera. That’s fine with me. I do admire these miners, and the talent of the men who are going to get them out of this deathtrap. I’m hoping that all of them will come out of the mine without a scar. And ultimately, I won’t mind hearing the clichés that will inevitably come with the journalistic coverage of this extraordinary event.
Still, I’d like to make a bet. For all the brightly-colored flags flying in the wind, for all of President Piñera’s hugs to the men and their families, and for all the worldwide live coverage on all the news channels of the planet, no one will remember these images in ten years, except when tv shows use them to look back at what is probably the most spectacular mining rescue in world history. No one will remember them precisely because they will be formatted as a media event. These pre-packaged, pre-formatted photos will leave little trace in our minds, just as no-one will remember any of the numerous pictures of President Piñera holding up the now famous piece of paper saying “Estamos bien en el refugio, los 33.”
If anything remains in the visual culture of this country, it will be another moment, another image. I am convinced that the emblematic picture of the whole sequence of events will the very first one: a ghostly face emerging from the darkness and approaching the camera – a man rising from the dead, and from oblivion, the Christ-like face of a miner who had lost so much weight during his captivity that he had become unrecognizable – so much so that various families thought they could recognize him as their father, their son, or their brother.
Christ-like, really? Yes, really. This vision brought us back to the origins of photography, when it was considered a marvel, a technological wonder, a miracle. As many theorists have demonstrated, the true impact of the photographic image came from the fact that it was a trace of nature (an index – if one wishes to use semiotic terms). What amazes us, to this day, is not so much that an image looks like the things or the people it represents. Painting can do that just as well. What touches us is that we assume, when we watch a photograph (or any of its variants such as video, film…), that the subject left its mark on the image. The image is also a vicarious presence. In that sense, the true ancestor of the photographic image is not painting – it’s the Holy Shroud of Turin, the trace of a face. The picture of the first miner was another image of resurrection, the imprint of a living face, and there’s a revealing connection between the genealogy of the photographic trace and the developing religious fervor which grew in Campamento Esperanza.
Remembering Roland Barthes[i] also helps us understand that this is the reason why photography has always had such a close connection with our modern sense of death. A picture is always the image of something which is gone, of a moment which is already in the past, which became a memory the very moment, the exact second when the picture was taken. A photograph is a picture of time. Click and gone. Click and already dead. And yet still vivid, eternally present: photography is the technological invention of instant nostalgia.
One last example, perhaps, to show that the power of this incredible picture is not casual, not a matter of circumstances, but that it has to do with our “technological imagination”, with the values we associate with this medium: in the 19th century, men such as Louis Mumler (EEUU), Frederick Hudson (Inglaterra) o Edouard Buguet (Francia)[ii] all claimed that the spirit of the departed were visible on photographs. White, blurry traces shaped like silhouettes seemed to float in photographic portraits, and many people came to believe that these shapes were the ghosts of the dead. Photography seemed to open the door to the afterworld (an idea spectacularly exploited by Alejandro Amenábar’s movie The Others, almost ten years ago). When we saw the first miner, this myth came true. He embodied the spirit of these 33 men, telling us without a word that they were waiting for salvation, shadows in the depths of a modern-day, industrial purgatory. This face was waiting for us to bring them back to the world of the living.
I’m praying that this will happen next week, as planned. But I doubt that any of the pictures produced by the predictable media circus surrounding this rescue will come even close to the emotion we felt when this bluish face looked at us from the center of the earth.