LA TOMA

The Promised Land

Jürgen Heinemann

Chile 1971, on a cold winter evening on the outskirts of Santiago, men, women, and children are teeming in an abandoned lot, measuring packages, hammering border stakes into the ground, erecting their first makeshift huts. During President Salvador Allende’s term of office, photographer Jürgen Heinemann became an accidental witness to this illegal land grab. No other photographer, neither before nor after Heinemann, succeeded in recording the course of these covert actions, which were kept secret.
Between the years 1962 and 1983, Jürgen Heinemann (born 1934) took photographs on ten trips throughout Latin America. Also taken in Santiago in 1971 is his series of images of a Pentecostal Church parish. In these two series, the themes of withdrawal into religious faith and a struggle for a better standard of living augment one another.