The presence of absence in black and white
The retrospective exhibition of Adriana Lestido at the Caraffa Museum, gathers different series of over 30 years of photographs and a depth reflected in her book: What Is Seen.
By Viviana Ponieman
Many of these photographs were seen at the National Museum of Fine Arts last year for the presentation of the book edited by Capital Intelectual (the publisher), then it travelled to South Africa as a part of the Argentine presentation in the week of cultural exchange before heading to Photoespaña and the Castagnino Museum in Rosario.
Even though they’re the same photographs, the montage is a challenge. Each space has its own spirit, so it implies diving into a complex and rich process in which images relate to one another in different ways. In this case it has Juan Travnik’s expert hand.
This is how 147 images were gathered as a ensemble connected by texts from Sara Gallardo, John Berger, Alejandra Pizarnik, Clarice Lispector, Carl Jung, Raymond Carver and Pedro Salinas, they’re like the oil that gets the ‘making sense of it all’ mechanism going.
The artist points out: “ The objective of the exhibition is to go deeper into the meaning of what I see. To connect the different essays I´ve made along the way as a photographer and tell just the one story. To be able express the thread that links all my work. The meaning of my life, the roots.”
This is more than clear, especially considering the author’s seal, her sensitivity, a simple gaze, without any disguise or imposition. “Lo que se ve” (what is seen) throughout this exhibition is the relationship the artist establishes with her characters, the balance she finds between being involved and interfering.
She focuses on the rims not as a subject matter to study but to shine a light on the enormous humanity within. And she gives us the chance to witness it.
The various photo essays made since the 80s deal with different aspects of maternity. The first series have a social slant such as “Hospital Infanto Juvenil” (Infant-Juvenile Hospital) (1986-88) in which she presents the vision of a children’s world inside a hospital or “Madres adolescents” (Adolescent Mothers) (1988-90) that portrays the loneliness and fear of maternity in a home for pregnant adolescents.
“Mujeres presas” (Women in Prison) (1991-93) is the result of spending a year with the inmates at Prison 8 in La Plata, going once a week and spending time with them. Even though her work is distressing, they transmit far more that just the hell those women are submitted to.
It’s possible to tour the exhibition in many ways, perhaps to choose some of the iconic images, such as the one of the mother holding her daughter in her arms, both with white head-kerchiefs crying out for her missing husband, in the March for Life that opened the exhibition in the Cronopio room at the Recoleta Cultural Centre in 2008.
Lestido acknowledges her roots and feels the other key photograph is the one in the prison of a woman with a knife in her hand looking straight at the camera. Everyone tends to be taken aback by the knife, “ however I feel more impact from her face, the knife gives weight to that expression, but I’m interested in the face”. She confesses.
With the series Mothers and daughters (1995-99) she questions the conflicting relationship that exists, at least for women.
It’s extremely intimate work, in which hardly anyone looks at the camera, yet it makes us feel like intruders peeping at the hug of others, being left out and where the relationship is not with the author but between that mother and daughter.
All the series have female protagonists and in their bodies we can feel both the confinement and the capacity for survival; in their sadness the chain to their men is perceived, it’s written in their arms, and in the little girls, her name is tattooed like a flag. Where it can be seen literally and unforgettably. What the artist then questions is the mother’s marks on the daughter’s body.
In El amor (Love) (1992-2005) and Villa Gesell (2005) the photographer sets out to seek the presence of absence, perhaps the man that does not appear in her images.
The shots are broader and Lestido submerges into the landscape, full of mist and melancholia, where a crater in the earth can symbolize our own holes.
There’s another attitude towards the world, there’s more air, perhaps it’s the result of a more open and free situation, a different moment, where pointing out things isn’t so necessary, where the body to body gives way to nature.
The artist takes the words of the writer Sara Gallardo for the title of her book in an awareness of the way she works. She chooses black and white because it goes to the core, without distractions, as if they were dreams, “ I like what can be seen through me, how to blend into the heart of what I’m looking at”. She reveals.
This artist is like a medium, she gives us the possibility of seeing that which we cannot look at. She’s there in the photographs, but in a way she’s invisible in the scene, free of self, as if she’d erased herself, and remains simply aware of the relationship of those she photographs through the lens.
That’s how John Berger expresses it in his warm letter: “What makes your work so unusual and mysterious is in the nature of your presence (the photographer’s). What we see happen, exists as if you were not there. Noone gives the impression of being photographed. However at the same time, each image has been chosen and collected with great love and compassion. You are absolutely there with what you are photographing, yet you’re not there at all!”
“They’re like prophecies of what has already happened. The lens is a unusual form of telepathy”. Concludes Lestido with enormous sensitivity.
The artist was the first to win the Guggenheim grant in photography in the country, she continues to work analogically. This allows her to look at the rolls, to search until she finds something in the contact sheets, to take as much time as she needs to discover the life in an image, see it breathe.
That’s how this monochrome expressionism goes straight to the bone, her gaze, a stylus that draws realities past and present, she wanders through the rails of the present and as she herself says, quoting Rilke:“ The only thing that validates creation is need”.
“Adriana Lestido looks into life through photography and opens a flaw in the mundane mystery that you can spy into to recognize yourself. To look into that crack is a poignant challenge. For the blade to skin whoever sees and leave an open wound. But that’s how the circle of art would close. After this tour something will have moved inside.” Marta Dillon writes.
The photographer builds an unconscious spiral of what’s missing, from the image of the mother and daughter in Plaza de Mayo to the absence of men in her work when she realizes perhaps she’s talking of the love of her youth, Guillermo Willy Moralli, kidnapped and disappeared by the military dictatorship on July 18th 1978 and "source of inspiration and light" of her work.
So, she brings up the wound of a generation expressed over 30 years.
And in the ellipsis that runs from the cry of the mother and daughter at Plaza de Mayo, the founding image that marked the rest of the work that followed; from confinement to the misty landscapes of love. Even though the last of the series has elements of the whole path in which the artist allows herself to toy with the lens and the focus.
She photographs the sea, she shows us a crater in the earth, a hole that opens at our feet, the awe, the great wound, the absence of our collective history in her own.
She no longer speaks of absence but what to do with it, what can be built after, with the eye outside the body.
Perhaps what these images evoke and provoke isn’t the lack of love or of a man but on the contrary, the path of resilience, of survival without drowning in the pain of the blow or the loss.
How is that done? Adriana focuses on women, the mother-child, even in the women in prison, in the strength of living on, in the force in their eyes.
It’s women and their circumstances and with them the photographer elaborates her own history and ours, to get to where we are now, to the open landscape that tells the story.