Punto ciego follows the recovery of people killed under Franco’s repression in Paterna, near Valencia, between 1939 and 1956. Santi Donaire approaches that history through the present-day work of families and forensic teams: locating graves, exhuming remains, identifying the dead and returning them for burial. The title, meaning “blind spot,” suggests an absence in collective sight. The photographs turn toward the people who continue to confront that absence, making remembrance an ongoing activity rather than a closed chapter.
Donaire’s commitment to this subject gives the project its particular scale of attention. Rather than using the grave as an isolated symbol, the book follows a process in which relatives, investigators and the recovered remains occupy different but connected positions. The publisher explicitly describes a narrative running alongside the stages of recovery. Read this way, the sequence asks the viewer to attend to duration and care: identification and return are actions performed by people, with consequences for families whose histories have remained unresolved.
Published by PHREE in 2025, the 112-page book belongs to the Ary collection. Texts by David Uclés and Donaire accompany the photographs. Underbau’s design uses a hardcover with a cloth dust jacket at 318 by 243 millimetres; the documented printing combines tritone and CMYK offset, with photomechanical work by La Troupe and printing by AG Palermo. Those precise production details place the photographic record within a substantial physical volume, intended to be encountered as a sequence rather than a series of news images.
Punto ciego received PHotoESPAÑA’s 2025 First Publication award. For collectors interested in documentary practice and the visual treatment of historical memory, its appeal rests on the connection between a specific site, a sustained act of witnessing and a deliberately constructed book. The stated 1,000-copy edition records the production scale; it does not establish current scarcity. More significant is the opportunity to study how a photographic publication makes the work of recovery visible while keeping the dignity sought by families at the centre.
