In Spanish, historia means history and story at once. Jorge Panchoaga's Historia natural del silencio works in the narrow space between the two, assembling an account of Colombia's drug economy in the 1980s and 1990s from what the children raised inside it learned not to say.

Every natural history museum is a machine for naming. A specimen enters the collection with a label, a Latin binomial, a locality, a date; for most of what the museum keeps, death comes first and the catalog after. Panchoaga, a Colombian photographer, borrows that grammar and drains it of certainty. Images from natural history museums and art museums sit with images from cities such as Medellín, Bogotá, New York, Cali and Popayán, and together they “seek to create an imagined city where animals represent scenarios of violence, stories of death and uncertainty”. The taxonomy remains. The names are withheld.

The history in question is not the one usually told. The essay that accompanies the series begins with workers, men and women from different political, social and economic backgrounds who went underground in Colombian cities and helped consolidate an economy at once booming and illicit, until it seeped into the houses and families of the time. Its best hours came after dark. Where the Spanish version of the essay places those hours in a vigilia, the English version turns them into a wake, and the word contains both senses at once: a night kept awake, and a watch kept over the dead.

Then the children, who in his telling woke up in the middle of this economy's course and grew a personal memory out of situations “that did not seem out of the ordinary, even when they were”. The generation understood early that it had to keep quiet. Memories were fictionalized. Murdered parents, relatives and friends were buried under stories of distant accidents and invented kinds of sudden death, and whispers became the only way to clarify anything. Silence, in this account, is not forgetting but a discipline: the daily labor of not saying.

To recompose the fragments, the series turns to things. Panchoaga's text speaks of an archeology of objects tied to these stories, photographed sometimes within the intimacy of homes and sometimes against abstract fields of a single color. The word is exact about its method. To dig is to work on what survives once the speakers are gone; the object outlasts the testimony and testifies anyway, mute and inexhaustible. Kept inside a home, a thing still belongs to someone. Set against a monochrome ground, it becomes evidence, relic, specimen. The series moves between those two conditions and will not settle in either.

Two sentences govern the rest. Many of the people portrayed, the essay states, do not want to be identified. “Only their stories can be read.” Natural history never asked its specimens for permission; it named them, pinned them, put them under glass. This history starts from the opposite contract. Its subjects keep their names to themselves, and the photograph accepts a narrower jurisdiction: it may hold a story without surrendering the person who carried it. Anonymity is not a gap in the record but its ethic, and finally its form.

The refusal has a target. Television has told the Colombian drug trade of those decades many times over, in the narconovela and the streaming saga, most often as the life of a boss, with the violence choreographed and everyone else reduced to extras. In the memoir that runs alongside the series, Panchoaga writes of a time “that seems to only remember the show and its bloated narratives”, while the ordinary people drawn into the business are, by his account, the part nobody talks about. Historia natural del silencio declines the cast list. It stays with the extras and lets the protagonists go dark.

The epigraph, attributed to the I Ching and noted as found in his father's notebook, sets a sun sunk beneath the earth beside an eclipse and the sense that everything is lost. It resembles hexagram 36, Ming Yi, Darkening of the Light in Richard Wilhelm's translation, a name that can also be read as the wounding of the bright; its image is brightness sunk into the earth. Traditional readings take it as a time when a dark ruler keeps power and the wise endure by veiling their light. A counsel of concealment now heads a work about a generation that learned to conceal, and the series puts concealment itself on display.

Elsewhere in the memoir, Panchoaga states the loss without ornament: “Silence has taken history from us.” His own English heading, Natural History of Silence, has to choose one meaning of historia; the Spanish keeps both, the history that was taken and the stories whispered in its place. A natural history of silence cannot name its specimens or say where they were found. It can only keep them. An eclipse is not the end of the light, only its concealment; how long this one lasts is the thing nobody says.