Like many young Chileans of my generation, living all our childhood and a large part of our adolescence in a country ordered under the narrowness of a military dictatorship caused us to not only suffer the numerous restrictions imposed on us by uniformed characters; we also were left marginalized from an elemental cycle of man, living in a community.

And so, after a two-year stay in Boston, MA., doing photography for documentaries with Northern Light Productions, I decided that what I had to document was my own story – how I saw my country and its people, in order to begin to analyze my future.

The absence of contacts, confidence and dialogue turned into a reencounter with a series of photographs taken the morning of September 11, 1973, inside La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace. According to a publication in the newspaper La Nación in February 2007, said photographs – the only ones known from the coup d´etat, and close to President Salvador Allende – were authored by some of the collaborators of the first democratically-elected Socialist government, something which had not been revealed in 33 years, making one of them the only World Press Photo award winner still anonymous.

If it’s true that this is what connected me to the photograph, it was the author’s gesture that caught my attention. Why would someone deny world fame and recognition? What was there behind this gesture of apparent disinterest? Whatever the answer was, it could only indicate the decision, strength, courage and drive we’d lost as Chileans.

Anonymous Image is a film that not only looks to find the author of one of the most controversial photographs of former president Salvador Allende, but one which also tries to confront Chileans with their personal pasts and presents, to make a pause, look at themselves and see how modernism and apparent development have forever changed the face of a country where, at one point, there was an Unidad Popular.

rodrigo llano, august 2008