Photographing the absence: how to portray the emptiness created after disappearance in Mexico?
Journal of Gender Studies
Published online: 18 Oct 2025
ABSTRACT
The work of Martell and Gómez Lucini underscores the importance of remembering those who have been lost, advocating for the right of the disappeared to be searched for, cared for, and recognized. Their photographs and projects transcend documentation; they are acts of remembrance and resistance, demanding justice and attention to the systemic violence of the disappearances in Mexico and the impunity surrounding them.
How can the absence of a person who is a victim of disappearance be represented? Along this piece, I am addressing this question throughout the work of Mexico-based photographers Mayra Martell (b. 1984) and Zahara Gómez Luchini (b. 1983), the author of the recipe book Recetario para la Memoria (Gomez Lucini, Citation2020; Rea & Lucini, Citation2021), created in collaboration with the buscadoras (women searching for the disappeared). In a context where extreme violence and disappearances have become deeply normalized, hence tolerated, these two artists serve as a counter-narrative, shedding light on the often-overlooked aspects of intimacy, emotion and domestic life in the face of a severe human rights crisis.
These artists evoke a profound sense of social memory and collective mourning by portraying the personal and cherished belongings and places of those who have disappeared. Each object photographed is not just an item; it is imbued with emotional significance, offering a poignant critique of the crisis while connecting deeply with themes of care work and the everyday lives of families impacted by violence. Their work invites us to re-evaluate the spaces we often regard as ordinary – homes, domestic life and family relationships – revealing how love, hope and the essence of daily existence persist even amid conflict.
Representing emptiness has been a question for canonical modern and contemporary artists. Often, when discussing these subjects, art historians analise 4′33″, a piece created by US-American composer John Cage in which the score instructed performers not to play their instruments for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Sound and rest: The absence of sound creates music. This piece invites the spectator to become a participant in this uncomfortable silence (Roberts, Citation2013).Footnote1 Yet, far from conversations about abstraction and void in art, in other contexts, the question of absence has different implications compared to avant-garde US-American artists. How does one represent absence not as an emptiness of elements – the lack of a world to be portrayed, as Cage – but as the absence of someone from their world? How can the absence of sound – their voice, the noise created by their movements of their body – provoked by the disappearance be shown to the world?
Mayra Martell’s and Zahara Gómez Lucini’s oeuvre shows another kind of uncomfortable silence. Martel’s photographs are about the rooms belonging to disappeared women, addressing disappearance and feminicideFootnote2 in Ciudad Juárez during the 1990s and 2000s. Furthermore, the similarity between the photographer and the subject is striking: she is a woman who begins her work in her twenties, an age similar to that of the other female victims and is also a native of Ciudad Juárez. On the other hand, Gómez Lucini’s pictures show a recent crisis of disappearance (starting in 2006 with the so-called “War on Drugs’’ of President Felipe Calderón) in Central and Northern Mexico.Footnote3 Through this text, I will be looking for representation in terms of the adjacent, not the absent, addressing what remains after someone is missing. There is a particular intimacy that is created between the observer (us) and the missing person, even though we do not know them and, most probably, never will.