Artist

In “El Lamento de los Muros” (The Wailing of the Walls), Argentine photographer, Paula Luttringer, recorded the testimony of fifty women who had been abducted and imprisoned under the regime of the Argentine dictator Videla. She accompanied them with photographs of the about 350 clandestine prisons that Argentina had during the years 1976-1983. After the fall of the dictatorship the policemen and soldiers responsible were given amnesty. The consequence was that many women, particularly in small villages, were forced to live next to the men who had illegally imprisoned or tortured them. Only recently have these women dared to break the silence about their imprisonment and go public with their stories.

Paula Luttringer (Argentina, b. 1955) fled to Uruguay in 1977 after she had been imprisoned for five months in Argentina. She only returned to the land of her birth in 1992, where she devoted herself to photographing the history of the recent dictatorship. She received financial support from both Argentine and American sources (Grant John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York, USA) for making THE WAILING OF THE WALLS (2000).