A Reserve of Light: Photography, Ethnography, and Lucid Memory in Contemporary Chile

ABSTRACT This article takes shape as a shared inquiry between an ethnographer and a photographer, in continuity with the photographic archive of Luis Poirot. Through sustained encounters with his images and archival practices, the text does not position itself outside the archive that motivates it, but unfolds from within it . At its center is what Poirot calls lucid memory . It is not a theoretical category, but a fragile and demanding practice of persistence. Through it, photographic materials and the relations that sustain them illuminate a dark zone of history, not by restoring order or chronology, but by allowing presences to persist, return, or even resist appearance within an anarchic temporal register. Photography, ethnography, and writing are approached here as practices that remain internally related, extending one another through shared exposure and material persistence. The archive does not appear as a sequence of past moments to be contextualized or interpreted, but as a stratigraphy of presences , where different historical textures remain active, sedimented, and unevenly available. Situated within Chile's unfinished political history, this relational archive foregrounds lucid memory as a sustained and demanding coexistence of presences that resist chronological ordering and erasure.