In Escenas de cine mudo by Julio Llamazares, a critical analysis of a photo album unfolds the past of a mine town, where the protagonist spent his childhood during Franco´s dictatorship. "Punctum", a concept derived from Barthes´ Camara Lucida, offers a reading strategy to evidence what is absent, it makes possible to grasp a "here and now" from a fact that took place at a "there and then".
This article analyzes Llamarares´ fiction through the narrator´s interrogations on the photographic device as a reminiscence machine. It focuses on how this device allows making the past present and how this condition redeems History´s anonymous or forgotten victims.