The experience of seeing sixty portfolios in five days was an intense immersion, one made pleasurable in this instance by the quality of the work and the generosity of the photographers, who took time and care to talk about their work and the issues that were important to them. Visiting a country for the first time, and presuming to understand that country's art well enough to curate an exhibition, requires a certain arrogance, especially if the visitor doesn't speak the native language. But groundwork for this immersion had included studying photographs presented at the Houston FotoFest in 1992, and discussing materials in the museum's artist files and library with Silvia Mangialardi, director of Fotomundo magazine, and with Pampa Risso Patrón, director of Pan American Cultural Exchange and a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Over several years, Ms. Risso Patrón has given the museum many books, articles, slides, and résumes on Argentine photographers and their work.
When I finally began the pleasurable but difficult task of selecting eleven photographers from sixty, the first decision was that the photographs would be about Argentina. This eliminated some excellent work made in other countries. It al so eliminated some fine photographs in which the ideas embodied in the work arose from traditional genre, such as nudes or natur'e studies, and were of a more universal nature, rather than drawing from specifically Argentine experiences. These perimeters left more than eleven fine portfolios to be considered. In consultation with Jean Caslin at the Houston Center of Photography, the final group was chosen with considerable sadness about those who were excluded. I hope that the resulting exhibition is coherent and that the individual images are as moving for audiences as their initial and subsequent viewings were for me.
There are certain qualities shared by the selected photographers. A number of the photographers document contemporary events while also seeking to evoke past events. Photographers spoke with mixed emotions about their rapidly changing culture. They were both hopeful and suspicious of the future, and often critical of the presento Regarding the past, they remembered some things with fondness, and others with horror. Nostalgia and regret are evident in the characteristic darkness of so many of the pictures, and in the Iyricism of other presentations. Yet, the pictures eschew sentimentality by the acuity of their observations.
The majority of photographers focused on urban centers, but some featured other geographic regions and the industries and cultures evolving from these terrains. Among the latter are Marcos Zimmermann's shimmering photographs of the Río de la Plata, the grand river that defines Argentina's border with Uruguay, and Cristina Fraire's loving document on the shepherds in the highlands of the Córdoba province. Zimmermann photographed the river, its estuary, and the ocean into which it empties. Subtitling his book on the river, Río de los Sueños, he alludes to the dreams - both realized and dashed - which are embodied in the river's locations and diverse industries. Humanity is present in settlements and in vessels that range from small up-river cargo boats to ocean-going tankers, and one of Argentina's historie frigates. He represents the eternal force and cycles of nature in delicate fish eggs, pounding waves, and i(He clouds. Cristina Fraire photographs mountain communities that are so isolated that there are no roads, no electricity, and no telephones. Sheep skins, wool, and meat are their sole economic resources. In the bleak, often wet, but almost barren, rocky terrain, the ancient connections between generations were unchanged until urban ways recently began to reach these communities through tourists and solar-panel generated televisions. The shepherd's clothes reflect the blend of ancient and new; the accents of indigenous costumes are layered over blue jeans and tennis shoes. Fraire photographs the sheep as being so indigenous that they are almost indecipherable from the rock walls that contain them.
Documentary photography remains a strong tradition in Argentina, but these documents are in the tradition of the Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo, rather than his U.S. contemporaries, Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange. In Argentine photographs, crisp facts are emotionally charged by unexpected juxtapositions and are sometimes wrapped in Iyrical mysteries. When photographing children with AIDS, Helen Zout sought to protect the children's and mother's identities by letting them wear masks or sit behind veils. These weakened children now present fierce faces which parody the fear they evoke in the uninfected populace. In the most haunting picture, she contrasts the idealized and irrepressible happiness of Mickey Mouse against the brutal reality of a child's imminent death.
Children are also the central subjects in Gabriel Díaz's photographs of survival on city streets and in Adriana Lestido's observations on women in prison. Both reveal hard roads for these fragile members of a thriving society. In Díaz's pictures, concrete and metal constructs offer non-nurturing shelters. The children are only a small, but riveting component in the pictures. Children are also one of Adriana Lestido's two criteria to select her subjects, who are all mothers and prisoners. In Argentina, a mother can keep her baby with her until the child is two years old. Other's children are present in the pictures on their mother's walls and bedsides. Her photographs convey the distress and inherent tensions in introducing motherhood to prison life. The women express a complex range of emotions from teary resignation to contained hostility.
For the last fourteen years, Becquer Casaballe has photographed the festival of San Cayetano, which is held annually on August 7. Long lines form, and worshippers dutifully purchase wheat sheaths bound by the saint's image, but they wait to pray to the saint of employment with neither joy or visible hope. Excited chatter is not exchanged while waiting. A similar bleakness pervades the photographs of Gabriel Valansi. His ostensible subjects are the puzzling residues of human acts which he finds during nighttime wanderings: an isolated dress in a cellophane bag, shoes and a shoe box scattered on the sidewalk, and a parking meter wrapped inexplicably in cIoth. Photographed at night while the camera is in slow motion, these pictures are not traditional "documents." Through mood, rather than detail, they evoke the waste and emptiness of urban cIutter. In both Valansi and Casaballe's work, a subdued inaction dominates their series.
Eduardo Gil's photographs brim with activity, but still possess little joyo In one picture, youths run with arms linked, but Gil focuses on aman who seems pained by their frivolity. In other instances, people seek help for injured or dazed companions. In a fourth picture, lines of men wait. They seek help from whom? They wait for what? There seems to be no relief from undefined troubles. Gil says his pictures are metaphors for Argentina. Fernando Gutiérrez's photographs were selected from a series created as a visual ode for the "Desaparecidos," or the "Disappeared." (Desaparecidos are the estimated ten to thirty thousand Argentines who disappeared during the military dictatorship in power between 1976-1983.) This series won the 1996 Casa de las Américas photographic essay prize in La Habana, Cuba. In order to evoke events that cannot now be photographed, Gutiérrez employed iconic objects. For instance, present day military trucks and planes evoke the earlier military regimes. The river symbo1izes the watery graves of those abducted. Unfinished and abandoned buildings suggest the unfinished business of reconciling these events which divided the country and damaged so many lives.
The darkness, despair, and angst that is so prevalent in many contemporary Argentine photographs, as well as paintings and sculptures, neglect other qualities that I enjoyed in those I met in Argentina. Therefore, I welcome the photographs of Marcos López for their bright colors, extravagance and humor. Even in a visit as brief as mine, I learned to recognize López's locations as central axis points in Buenos Aires. He spoofs America's commercial interests in Argentina by juxtaposing the statue of liberty with a gigantic American Airlines billboard. He parodies his country's president, the wealthy cIass, and Fidel Castro. AII is done in great fun and seriousness.
I end these observations with the works of Martín Weber, because they are about hope, the desire for uplifting change. He engages his subject as collaborators by asking them to write their dearest wish on a small blackboard. What would improve their lives? What do they need? Their answers embrace basic human needs and dreams: good heath, companionship, jobs and transport. Their dreams make sense when we see the settings and companions with them while they wish for change. Their desires are both Argentine and universal. Its past and future, despair and hope, resignation and industry, desperation and humor, these are the opposing faces of Argentina's daily theater as envisioned by its photographers.