When photojournalist Pablo Unzueta traveled to Chile in 2017, he was on a journey to reconnect with his father and heritage. On the way, he found a community still grappling with the trauma of the country’s military dictatorship — a shared story of pain that would inspire his debut photography exhibition, The Memory of Our Skin.
Currently on display at Acción Latina’s Juan Fuentes gallery, The Memory of Our Skin explores how people in Santiago, Chile, and Half Moon Bay, California, process collective trauma. Through 20 black-and-white photographs, Unzueta highlights the memories of violence in both communities: the 1973 Chilean military coup and the 2023 farm shootings in Half Moon Bay. His work documents how these communities process painful pasts while finding solace and healing in shared grief.
“What I have is an accumulation of stories that really focus on how the dictatorship psychologically, mentally and spiritually scarred the Chilean people,” Unzueta said. “And I think it really intersects with the work that I’ve been doing for the past ten years here [in California].
His photographs capture moments of deep emotion: a son comforting his mother after the Half Moon Bay shootings, mourners holding vigils for the disappeared at Santiago’s General Cemetery and everyday people coping with grief through gardening and art. He captures both protests and quiet remembrances, portraying how grief is expressed and shared across borders.
“I want people to connect with [the photos] not in a way where they feel like they’re an outsider to the work,” Unzueta said. “I want them to feel like they belong in these walls as well. Like they have a shared connection with the people in those photographs.”
Unzueta sees this exhibition as two communities talking to each other, sharing wisdom on ways to process grief. In Chile, he depicts a community that has fought for years to resist the state’s repression of memories. In Half Moon Bay, he shows a community that is taking a moment to reckon with the recent trauma they’ve faced, something that he hasn’t found commonly in American society.
“I think here in the United States we don’t really have a full grasp of processing trauma. It’s from one thing to the next,” he said. “With this exhibition, I wanted to bring that to light.”
Unzueta has been a photojournalist since he was 17, following a family lineage of artists and photographers. He says that as he’s matured, he’s become more intentional about how he captures stories, focusing on building relationships with the people in his work, avoiding a detached, voyeuristic lens.
“I’m 30 now and I think I just feel like I have more of a responsibility when I am out in the world with the intention of photographing people,” Unzueta said. “I want it to be more collaborative.”
For Unzueta, The Memory of Our Skin is deeply personal, reflecting both his family’s migration story and the broader patterns of displacement and trauma across Latin America. The art exhibition is the first iteration of a long-term project documenting Chile’s reckoning with its violent past, a memento that he one day hopes to share with his future children.
“If it weren’t for the dictatorship, I would still be in Chile,” Unzueta said. “So I really think about that. All of these migration patterns. [This project], it’s the preservation of life, my history. I think that’s very important.”
The Memory of Our Skin is on display at Acción Latina’s Juan Fuentes Gallery until November 8, open to the public on weekdays from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.