Tú no sabes si vas a volver takes its title from a sentence that hangs over every departure it describes. Published in Santiago by Cenfoto-UDP, the Centro Nacional del Patrimonio Fotográfico at the Universidad Diego Portales, the book is a documentary photobook written by Lilith Kraushaar and released in September 2024, with an official presentation at the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile in March 2025. The first edition is a 372-page hardcover, measuring 20 by 27 centimetres. It is not the work of a single photographer. Kraushaar’s text is built around a gathered archive: more than three hundred photographs drawn from crime reporting, medical records, donated collections and private documents, assembled into an argument rather than a retrospective.
The subject is the visual and affective life of sexual and gender dissidence in Chile, traced through the streets, clinics, brothels and entertainment venues where desire, self-presentation and institutional scrutiny intersected. Figures such as Pedro Lemebel and Néstor Perlongher appear, as do places that carry their own mythology, among them the disco Fausto and the legendary Tía Carlina. Kraushaar reads these materials critically and without sensationalism, asking how cultural, social and media representations of bodies, genders and eroticism have both framed and constrained the people they depict.
The book’s significance lies in that double movement: it recovers and re-reads an archive while refusing to treat the archive as neutral evidence. It won the Research category of the Premio al Mejor Libro de Fotografía del Año at PHotoESPAÑA in 2025. The award recognises projects that return to archives of consequence and offer a new approach or a re-reading of established bodies of work.
For collectors, the interest is structural as much as thematic. Close attention to how three hundred heterogeneous images are sequenced and captioned; the bringing together of a writer’s inquiry, institutional support for photographic heritage, and pictures by many photographers, among them Alfredo Molina La Hitte, Julio Bustamante and Samuel Rojas; and a subject whose visual history is still being written in Chile. It is a book for readers who want the archival argument, not the album.
