Photojournalism can document what’s happening now and chronicle our past so we can create a new future. Enrique Shore has spent a lifetime doing just that.
When you read a published article on News Decoder, you’re only seeing part of the story. Who is writing it? What went into reporting the story? Why were they interested in this topic in the first place?
To answer some of those questions, we present “Correspondents in the Spotlight.” In a series of video conversations, we introduce you to the professional journalists behind News Decoder, go in-depth on their latest articles, discover their career paths and learn about their writing process — and how they overcome some of the same difficulties that young writers face.
In today’s Spotlight, we speak to photojournalist Enrique Shore..
When Enrique Shore moved from Argentina, where he grew up, to the United States to study photojournalism, a brutal military dictatorship ruled his home country. When he returned a few years later, a democratic government had taken charge.
Newly-elected president Raúl Alfonsín set up a national commission to investigate the fate of the tens of thousands of people who had been “disappeared” by the military junta. A professor of Shore’s joined the commission and asked him for help. They needed a photographer.
Shore became the official photographer of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) presided by esteemed writer Ernesto Sábato.
Shore’s photojournalistic career has now come full circle. Four decades after his first major job as a photojournalist he returned to Argentina to exhibit his most important body of work: “Evidencias”, a series of photographs taken in the 1980s to document the testimonies of the thousands of disappeared and their families. It opened in Buenos Aires 25 April 2024.
Shore wrote about his experience and the exhibit in an article for News Decoder, “Evidence: Photos document the brutality of a dictatorship.”
“They decided to set up a commission that would investigate all the state terrorism abuses that had happened before that resulted in thousands of people disappearing,” Shore said. “So that’s when I became the official photographer of this commission investigating the disappeared,” said Shore. “And that, today, remains the most important thing I did in my life workwise.”
Chronicling the past
“Evidencias” (or “Evidence”) is a collection of photographs taken as part of CONADEP’s case-building against the military government. Shore documented the atrocities committed by accompanying those who were there back to the sites of the crimes.
In an interview for News Decoder, an emotional Shore spoke of his work and the importance of the photos taken throughout that year in the early eighties.
Civilians were taken from their homes, universities, off the streets and locked up in prisons and makeshift cells across Argentina. When the government fell, their families looked for answers. They brought their and their family members’ cases to Argentina’s Supreme Court of Justice. The testimonies of survivors needed to be verified. That meant visiting the places they said that they were imprisoned or tortured and where they had seen people be murdered.
As the official photographer, Shore was called upon to document the visits to the sites of the crimes.
“Pictures have a role in helping memory,” Shore said. “And particularly these types of pictures. I mean, there’s a reason why it’s called ‘Evidence’ — because these are things that I photographed, that happened, that nobody could deny. It’s fact.”
Much of his evidence helped build the case against the previous government and led to families finding out what had happened to their loved ones.
“The material that was documented by that commission was used as legal proof that was the basis of that trial,” said Shore.
The power of a single photograph
At the opening of his recent exhibition, Shore was approached by a woman who works at a centre for the memory of the disappeared, a site of remembrance dedicated to the memory of victims of these atrocities. The woman brought with her a photo Shore had taken which was not in the exhibition. Shore hadn’t included it as all it showed was someone pointing at the floor — a seemingly uninteresting photo.
“She told the story that the guy was pointing at a stain on the floor,” said Shore. “That guy was a survivor that was telling the story of how somebody had been killed in that place. So thanks to that, they took a sample of that precise part of the floor and they took it to a specialized lab in the States.”
Through a DNA test on the blood they were able to determine the identity of the person killed. “And that happened this year,” Shore said. “That happened a few months ago.”
It had taken 47 years but the family would finally know what had happened to their relative. Shore had no idea that this photo would become so important.
While his year documenting the work of CONADEP may be some of the most important in his career, it is by no means his only important work. For decades, Shore worked as a photojournalist with the Reuters global newswire. He was Reuters’ chief of photography for Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina before spending 30 years in Spain working as a photojournalist, editor and manager.
Documenting reality
Shore’s interest in photography first stemmed from an interest to document what was happening around him. “I guess part of that was the lack of freedom we experienced when I was young and there was this military government,” said Shore. “Photography was one way to kind of document reality. I guess that’s the underlying thing, then that evolved.”
The interest evolved into a career in which Shore documented important moments such as the meetings of the United Nations General Assembly and competitions at multiple Olympic Games. Throughout the conversation, Shore’s sense of responsibility to document happenings and to show them as they are, as they happen, shines through.
“I felt a lot of responsibility that came along with the fact that I was allowed to witness history in the first row,” said Shore. “It’s an amazing opportunity to be close to many important events but that comes together with the huge responsibility of showing the rest of the world what’s happening.”
It’s a career that opened the door to innumerable experiences from meetings with heads of state or religious leaders to social protests. “There’s a lot of variety when you work in a news agency,” said Shore. “You know, one day you are with the powerful in the morning and then in the afternoon, you are in the middle of a slum.”
Shore says that it is a responsibility of a photojournalist to be ethical and honest and have an open mind. “When you take a picture, you are isolating a small piece of reality and you have to do that with a very ethical standpoint and not distort the reality that is in front of your eyes,” he said.
“The most important thing that a documentary photographer or a journalist can aim for, the trust, the reliability that what you do is correct; that you are not faking, you’re not distorting,” he said.
The Buenos Aires Legislature will exhibit “Evidencias” beginning 20 September 2024. A number of Shore’s photographs from the exhibition can be seen in this short photo essay produced for News Decoder.
Watch the full interview with Enrique Shore here:
Correspondents in the Spotlight: Enrique Shore
Find more of Shore’s work here:
Enrique Shore Instagram
Enrique Shore Website
Cathal O’Luanaigh is News Decoder’s program and communications manager. Cathal is an educator, linguist and creative with a particular interest in international development, global citizenship and the arts. He has a background in Geography (BA), Commercial Music Production (Diploma) and Development and Emergency Practice (MA). Irish, raised in Brussels and now based in Madrid, he has lived and worked in Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Spain, Uganda and Vietnam.