“Making images is an event in itself” – Susan Sontag.
Photographs had always been there: in black and white, posed, showing some family member. They were part of the home decor, of the stories about the first half of the 20th century in Chile and, perhaps because of that, no one had taken seriously the work of Aurora Badilla de Calvo. Until a friend who likes to know the past, genealogical trees, and the ancestors of his loved ones told her:
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—I found out that your grandmother, Aurora, was one of the first photographers in Chile.
Carmen María Guzmán Calvo was surprised, she says. Until then, Aurora had simply been her grandmother, the woman who welcomed her as a child in her huge room in the house on Londres street and who taught her to paint. “I was the only granddaughter who came to paint with her. At that time she had left photography and had dedicated herself to oil painting,” Carmen recounts in her home in Lo Barnechea.
That experience, which happened in 1953, was so decisive in her life that she still paints today. As for the rest, she has few memories of her grandmother, who passed away only three years later, in 1956, when Carmen was just a child.
To know who Aurora was, Carmen insists, you have to talk to her only living sister: María Inés Guzmán Calvo.
At her recently turned 91 years old, Inés does remember. She recalls in detail how in the house on Londres there was a hidden room that had functioned as a laboratory and, in the dining room, hundreds of glass plates. She remembers that the camera was still a large, heavy, and unusual object and that Aurora always asked her family – first her children, then her grandchildren – to dress up, to pose, to not move so she could photograph them. “My mom said she was terrible and that her father told her: ‘Come on Aurora, let the little girl out’,” she comments with laughter.
Born in 1879, Aurora Clara del Carmen Badilla Padilla’s first photographs date back to 1894, when she was just 15 years old and almost a decade before her marriage to Alfredo Calvo Mackenna. By then, photography had existed for just over half a century and was still far from becoming an everyday practice.
Aurora, however, already had her own laboratory, as recalled in the article “The Chilean past in unpublished photos,” published in La Segunda on July 25, 1986: “Aurora Badilla came to have a studio and laboratory in her parents’ house, at Alameda with Lord Cochrane, where she mainly dedicated herself to portrait and the human figure, for which she used her siblings as models. Aurora did not participate in photographic salons or contests and remained on a family level, always as an amateur.”
Once married, the habit continued: she mainly made self-portraits and scenes of everyday life, indoors with backdrops, where several family members posed. “For us it was something normal,” says Carmen. Inés agrees: “It was her hobby.”
—In one way or another, it was decisive enough to remain in the memory of all who knew her and her descendants…
—That’s for sure —affirms Carmen.
—What is it, then, that you remember about Aurora?
Together, the two sisters build a story: they describe a woman who was “very special, totally independent.” “She did what she wanted and was always dressed in mourning, gray suit with a white stripe, floral blouse, white with purple,” Inés comments. She was attentive to every detail, cheerful and kind, president of the San Vicente de Paul Conferences at the San Lázaro Parish and director in the children’s soup kitchens. She was never idle: when it wasn’t photography, it was sewing, crochet, or painting decorations on dresses. She played canasta with three friends, had a “huge” room, with antique furniture, desk, dresser, screen, and “a million glass plates.”
Mónica Silva Guzmán did not know Aurora. But she did know her daughter, the archaeologist Mayo Calvo – known for the series of interviews she conducted with people of Mapuche origin in the early 1960s. “My grandmother Mayo always said that her mother had a photography workshop at home and hundreds of negatives. Also that it was mandatory to pose for the photos, and it was almost torture. That’s why there are so many family records,” she comments.
Aware of the need for her relatives to know the stories, faces, and family traditions, before passing away in the early 2000s, Mayo typed two books. Printed, ring-bound, and given to her loved ones, these contain her memories, newspaper clippings, obituaries, and, of course, Aurora’s photographs.
In those pages, Mayo tried to do with words something similar to what her mother had done with a camera: stop scenes before they disappeared.
She writes, for example, about how they celebrated Christmas: “A month before we put wheat in wet cotton, which was the base for the decoration, and it gave us the necessary time for it to sprout. We moved the billiard table next to the wall and started working. We covered groups of books of different sizes and heights with brown paper to give them the appearance of a mountain range and then painted them simulating a snowy mountain range, and at their feet we placed the grass, which was the newly sprouted wheat. In the center we put the nativity scene. My mom was happy watching the preparations, realizing the effort we made. Since she was very neat, she gladly helped us.”
The house that appears in Mayo’s memories – in Art Nouveau style, designed by architect Josué Smith Solar and which disappeared after the inauguration of the La Moneda metro – was also a place crossed by an era that today is hard to imagine.
“Alameda de las Delicias, as it was then called, was an avenue of large trees, with earth around them, no grass. There were stone benches scattered everywhere. Water ran through two canals, without any protection, and continuously when we played the ball was lost in them. In the afternoon we went out to ride bicycles,” Mayo recounts.
In front of the house, she details, there was an iron kiosk, where music was played in the afternoons. “The town had taken it as a platform and from there fiery speeches were made, especially by supporters of don Arturo Alessandri Palma, whom they called the Lion of Tarapacá,” she adds. When it got dark, a man walked along the avenue lighting the street lamps. He pulled a small chain hanging from each post to turn on the light.
There were also neighbors: the Amunátegui family – including the writer and historian Miguel Luis – and the poets Diego Dublé and Vicente García Huidobro.
There were also long trips by ship to Europe. On one of them, the family met Pope Pius X. “According to my mom, in him there was a kindness and a holiness so special that it was like something supernatural,” Mayo writes.
It is through these details that Mayo reconstructs the world in which she grew up. And it is also through them that Aurora’s photographs can begin to be seen in a different way.
María Soledad Abarca, director of the National Library of Chile, specialized in conservation and restoration and with a master’s in photographic preservation, emphasizes that photography is a heritage document “because it does document a moment in history,” whether common history or private, of a family.
Aurora’s plates belong to a stage when photographing still required time, knowledge, and equipment. They were gelatin negatives on glass, large format, very different from the small and accessible cameras that would come later. They required people to remain still for long seconds to achieve a sharp image. Hence the rigid poses, carefully prepared interiors, and the scenes that appear again and again in photographs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“That’s why it’s important: even if it’s a 19th-century photo of an unknown person, you get information about clothing, ways of life, the technology of that moment according to the photographic technique, etc. Those clues reflect their era,” says María Soledad.
“Obviously, for a family having an album of their relatives has value; but when those images reach museum and library collections, they acquire these other values linked to the production era, visual codes, materialities, and means of production and circulation,” she adds.
-What changes in our understanding of Chilean history when we recover archives produced by women like Aurora who, at the time, were not made visible?
—She had no formal studies, she was an amateur photographer. They were very intimate practices. I think it is always interesting when photography is confined to an intimate world and looked at with the perspective of years. They become important because they show you a world that no longer exists: the clothing, the hairstyle. When looking at these photos you find many clues to study how houses were decorated, how people dressed. Now, it is clear that she (Aurora) was a person with great artistic sensitivity for the composition of her photos.
The photographer and visual artist Julia Toro agrees. Through her son Mateo Goycolea, we sent her some images of Aurora. “She was interested and found her very good. My mom with that kind of judgment is like either she likes it or she doesn’t, and in this case she loved it, she found her a very good photographer,” she comments.
Great-great-grandson of Aurora, Nicolás Guzmán Silva decided to do something with the family collection. It is, in a way, a way to pay tribute to Mayo, with whom he lived and from whom he heard many stories about the family photographer.
“Both Aurora and Mayito were women very ahead of their times, very uncommon in our society. They were disruptive, devoted to their passions and, despite everything, simple. But in the family, what they did was seen as something curious, perhaps anecdotal, but nothing more than that, because we were all inserted in that reality,” he comments.
In recent years, something else happened: Nicolás began to hear his younger cousins talking about Mayo or Aurora as if they had never existed. As if the woman who interviewed Mapuche people and the woman who lived in a giant house and photographed everyone were fictional characters. “It’s absurd, because there is real and tangible information about them,” he comments, pointing to the ring-bound book his great-grandmother made and that is now on the table, between him, Carmen, and Inés.
His idea is to make a new version of Mayo’s book, more professional, for the family. But there is more: in 2025 he got in touch with the En terreno foundation – specialized in Chilean photographic heritage – to learn how to care for the dozens of glass negatives he has from his great-great-grandmother. For now, he keeps them in a sealed yellow box, away from sun or heat, in envelopes. But he was also able to digitize some of those images, which illustrate this report.
Still, he thinks it is little: “I feel that as a family we have a responsibility with all that.” It is possible that he inherited that feeling from Mayo, who in her stories wrote: “I have referred to my mom’s hobby, which was photography. When would I have thought that over time this activity of hers that seemed so insignificant to me would bring me pride and so much pleasure, since now her merits have been recognized.”
The text is followed by a letter dated January 4, 1985, from the then director of the National Historical Museum, Hernán Rodríguez Villegas, who thanks the “valuable donation” of 130 glass negative plates taken by Aurora Badilla de Calvo between 1894 and 1925: “This set of images represents an important documentary testimony of our past and shows the high professional level achieved by its author. We hope that in the future these images can be exhibited and Aurora Badilla’s name added to the history of photography in Chile.”
Mayo, meanwhile, remembered her mother differently: “Life’s things: at seventy years old my mom started painting and left very good paintings. I remember she told me: ‘Don’t waste time on photography. I should have dedicated myself to painting much earlier.’”
The family imagines what an exhibition would be like that would bring together the glass plates, the digitized photographs, and the paintings Aurora made in her last years. “We have to pass it on to people,” says Mónica.
Carmen agrees, clarifying that “it’s not for the ego” of her being her grandmother. But “because it shows a part of our country’s history, customs, of an era.” Inés smiles just imagining it: “How beautiful, how beautiful.”
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