Darkrooms and migrant memories in Lila Quintero Weaver’s Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White

Abstract

This essay discusses the way in which Lila Quintero Weaver, in her graphic novel Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White, exploits the ontological differences that separate photography, a hot medium, from comics, a cold medium, to use McLuhan’s famous definitions, in order to reconstruct and problematize the migratory experience of her own family, that left Argentina in the 1960s to move to Marion, Alabama. In many of the pages that comprise the comics, the panels attempt to mimic the photographic images that often compose the family album. These family photographs are here remediated through the author’s graphic style. Their meaning is complicated by  their juxtaposition to other photos: those that appear on official documents, necessary for emigration; those that are found in glossy magazines, which invite consumers to adopt the American Way of Life, and testify to the assimilation drives that the family is subjected to; and, finally, images belonging to the public archive, including the Selma to Montgomery marches, that remind the reader of the complex historical moment in which the author’s family migrated to the US. This visual solution aims to show the relationship between public history and private stories. The choice to use a black and white palette is also highly symbolic as it reminds the reader of the racial conflict that pervaded US society, but also testify to pressures to conform to one of the two groups that the author’s family was subjected to, as from an ethnic point of view it belonged to neither. The remediation of photography is not only intended to create an illusion of reality, usually attributed to photography by virtue of its supposedly indexical nature, but also to problematize those moments in private or public history of which there exist no photographic traces, but which need, nevertheless, to be recovered.