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In its final report published in 2022, the Colombian Truth Commission documented 121,768 cases of enforced disappearance in the country between 1985 and 2016, with statistical estimation models suggesting over 210,000 cases. The signing of definitive peace agreements with the country’s oldest guerrilla group (FARC-EP) in 2017 may have marked an official end to the armed conflict, yet the issue of enforced disappearances remains highly relevant: not only because disappearances continue to occur today, but also because the country faces memorial debt toward its thousands of missing persons and their families.Enforced disappearance is commonly described as an “invisible” crime, deprived of possible images. Indeed, this form of violence aims both at ensuring the impunity of its perpetrators and at the radical erasure—both physical and identity-based—of its victims, leaving their relatives in a state of uncertainty and terror. In this sense, it constitutes a form of violence devoid of visibility, one that seeks to undermine language and representation. Nevertheless, photography plays a particular role in the lives of relatives of the disappeared, both within private mourning rituals and in contexts where such mourning becomes politicized as a form of protest. When photographers engage with these images with an awareness of their uses, they do more than simply reproduce them or evoke absence, violence, or the disappeared and their families. In these recursive processes, the photographic medium speaks of itself, illustrating photography as a vernacular and everyday practice that actively contributes to the construction of individual narratives, memory, and identity.This study intersects the history of violence and conflict, the development of memorial discourse, and photographic representations of enforced disappearance. Given the centrality of enforced disappearance to the construction of historical memory in Colombia—and, more broadly, its place within contemporary national and continental culture—it was essential to compile a contemporary photographic corpus on absence. The aim is to understand the position of these photographs within a given visual culture, and what they contribute more broadly to a visual discourse on disappearance, the Colombian armed conflict, and, more generally, on violence as a social phenomenon.The study is organized into four parts. The first two sections primarily aim to elucidate the historical and theoretical framework of the research, while the third examines the ethical positions and photographic strategies of the works analyzed. References to the corpus, initially occasional or indirect, become progressively more frequent and detailed, culminating in the fourth and final section: an in-depth iconographic analysis of the motifs and techniques used to represent absence through photography.