Fundación Imagen 83, Photoimagen 2026 and the Quinta Dominica have inaugurated the exhibition "El Fotógrafo de la 40, la imagen como memoria" ("The Photographer of La 40, the Image as Memory"), created by photographers Erika Santelises and Orlando Barría.
The show is part of the Photoimagen 2026 festival and engages with urgent questions about the use, circulation and reinterpretation of images. The central ceremony took place in the courtyard of the Quinta Dominica, a historic building in Santo Domingo's Colonial Zone that today functions as a cultural venue.
Thanking Collaborators and Families
During her remarks, Santelises opened by thanking the people and institutions that supported the project. She singled out Luisa de Peña, director of the Museo Memorial de la Resistencia Dominicana, for allowing the use of part of the museum's valuable archival material, and, she said, above all for continuing to "remain, resist and keep working" so that these stories can still be known and are not forgotten.
Santelises also thanked the Centro Cultural Rainieri for opening its spaces and allowing pieces now part of the exhibition's collection to be photographed.
She gave special recognition to Gladys and Gustavo Fuentes, who she said opened not only the doors of their home but also of their history and memory, allowing access to a family account marked by pain, silence and absence. She said that without their generosity, neither the film nor the exhibition would have been possible, adding that the work also belongs to them.
The Photographs of La 40
The photographs linked to La 40 originated in a setting of surveillance, fear and state violence. La 40 was a detention centre in Santo Domingo used during the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, and the images at the heart of the exhibition were produced within a structure of power that sought to control not only bodies but also the way those bodies would be seen, recorded and remembered.
According to the organisers, "El Fotógrafo de la 40, la imagen como memoria" looks at those images from the present in order to raise an essential question: what happens when an archive created under coercion becomes, decades later, a tool for memory. The exhibition does not aim to close a chapter of history but to open a space for reflection on how photographs outlive their original conditions of production and take on new meaning when revisited by a community.
From Documentary to Exhibition
The exhibition grew out of the documentary "El Fotógrafo de la 40" and carries its narrative world into a gallery setting. Rather than reproducing the film or illustrating its content, organisers said, the show expands its language, its images and its questions.
The cinematic story unfolds here in a different timeframe and through different forms of encounter. The images are separated from the continuity of the film's editing, gain physical presence, and let viewers pause in front of them, draw connections and build their own path through the material. This translation into an exhibition format preserves the essence of the documentary while opening new possibilities for reading, reflection and collective dialogue, according to the organisers.
Memory Built in the Present
Closing her remarks, Santelises said that both the film and the exhibition represent a way of returning to that history without closing it off, opening instead a space for reflection.
She said memory does not belong only to the past, and that it is built from the present every time people choose to look, listen and remember, and refuse to let these stories fall back into silence.
