During 30 years, this Argentinian photographer has captured with her camera the strength of feelings. A mirror of female intimacy that leaves the ghosts of love uncovered.

Sometimes you get the deepest and relevant images in the most trivial circumstances, Adriana Lestido says (Buenos Aires, 1955), while she sips a coffee at a terrace in the center of Madrid. The photographer speaks in a low voice and does not carry a camera (In general, I don´t take many pictures. It is not necessary) and when she looks at you her eyes are concentrated , feline, and cover her dry face with wrinkles . She has just come back from Antarctica and next week she goes to Finisterre to go on with her last work. She says she has been exploring the edges of the world these last months and it is not hard to imagine her in the loneliness of those wild territories, trying to find something subtle in a landscape (a draft of cold air, the turbulence of a geiser…) that will say more about the human spirit than lots of words) “First, the idea was that of going to a desert – the Argentinian woman says -, but Antarctica is the place with less life and I had the need to move towards the whiteness, the silence. A place of death”.

Adriana is in transit in Madrid to present What is seen (Ed. Clave Intelectual), a book that compiles in 152 photographs the 30 years of professional work where she has been concerned with capturing the invisible. A documentary work (awarded with the Guggenheim scholarship and the Mother Jones Foundation award, among others) whose core has been love, absence, separation, but also difficulty of detaching the symbolic umbilical cord that ties mothers and daughters. “When I started I wanted to do a work on maternity in general. I searched for adolescent mothers, prisoner mothers… I thought it would be ready in one or two years but in the end they were 10 years. When I finished with the prisoners, it was my idea to photograph childbirths. But a book came into my hands, “The good star” by Amy Tan, and said to myself: “They are the subject, don’t search any more”. In fact, the only photograph I recovered from my time of photo journalism is the one of the mother and daughter of Plaza de Mayo. All that I worked on later on was already there: the intensity of the bond mother and daughter, the pain for the absent man. That is the foundation on which I build my next work, but only recently did I realize it.

There are hardly any men in the black and white universe Lestido portrays. “It was not intentional. But in none of the stories there are fathers”. How could there be any in a jail where the female prisoner holds her daughter tight, with desperation and fear before losing her? It is that she was giving her daughter away. The prisoners can be with the children until the age of two and the sequence shows the previous time before being separated and taken to a temporary foster family”. And after the loss, Adriana photographs the comfort (or discomfort) together with one of the inmates. The participation among the women can also be seen. A feeling that other times become a challenge, as in one where a girl of two challenges her mother from the bathtub. “The girl was rebellious, and her mother was exhausted”. And there was Adriana, with her camera, waiting for “something” to happen. “Something” can be a curtain moved by the wind, as a ghost, of a gesture of a mother and a daughter that, in that intimacy where Adriana is not an intruder, finally reveals a crack in that intense love and so little idyllic.

Mujer hoy. When did you shoot your last photograph?