At the end of 2018 the Argentine filmmaker Fernando Spiner was making a film in which the protagonist is a photographer in Buenos Aires at the beginning of the 90s. He asked the acclaimed photographer Adriana Lestido if she would accept him using her photographs from that period that hadn’t appeared in any of her books or exhibitions. Lestido was on her way to Iceland for the third time in two years, in what was, as she declared, her ‘search for absolute white’ after her experience in the “black” Antarctic. Before leaving for the Arctic winter she wanted to spend a few days in her house in the Atlantic coast. She plunged into an intense search through her archives and once she found a folder titled Metrópolis’90s, she departed towards the coast with all that material in her backpack.

Allow me to side-track a bit. The very beginning of the 90s, marked a glorious time for the newly born newspaper Página/12. The paper put out a weekly supplement about the city called “Metrópolis”. Every week it covered a different neighbourhood. Lestido took photos for it, the back cover was a big drawing by the artist and illustrator Rep (that became a beautiful book: “And Rep Created the Neighbourhoods” ). At the time Lestido was also working on her series of women in prison. She had her focus there: The perfect attitude, as Zen dictates, to wander the streets of different areas, camera in hand. That was how she came to take those photos and she put them away once the newspaper had used them, almost without giving them a second glance. Nearly 30 years went by until Fernando Spiner sent her to seek them again, by sheer chance.

Until the 90s, there was something instantly recognizable in Buenos Aires (an essential quality that seemed its immutable fate, in spite of its changes; you felt it in your skin when you roamed the city). The Menem era erased all that. It wasn’t just the face of the city; with it came a change of habits and mentality. It was the beginning of a new era for the city that exists until today, give or take a few details. Those photos of Adriana Lestido captured that agonizing Buenos Aires as it muted, as it disappeared, overcast by a fantasy that was presumptuous and false but chillingly effective.

I had the chance to see those photographs during Lestido’s final stay at her house in Mar de las Pampas. She sold the house to continue with her Iceland project. I immediately thought of a wonderful book of photographs called London 1958/59, made by the Chilean, Sergio Larrain, in his youth, when he was given a grant to go to London for six months and what he got remained in a drawer until it was published thirty years later, with its original eloquence duplicated by the passage of time. The other thing that came to mind, almost simultaneously, were the photos taken by the Chinese Li Zhensheng during the Cultural Revolution in his country. Li worked for a newspaper, he was given assignments and always kept the last photo in the roll for his return home and developed it for himself. Each one of those photos of Buenos Aires taken for “Metrópolis” seem like the last photo of a roll, taken on the return journey, on time off, later forgotten in a drawer for thirty years before its resurrection in that house on the beach surrounded by half-filled cardboard boxes.

I look at the photographs once again: Puerto Madero is just a suburb, Puente Alsina is still Puente Alsina, twin tenements in Once and La Boca, a preacher in Plaza Constitución, an abandoned dog in Avenida del Trabajo, a hen in San Telmo’s old immigrant’s home, Padelai, a pause for a breather from the cooking oven’s at Güerrín, a mother and her baby in a photobooth in the subway, a gathering with beer in San Cristóbal, a flood in Pompeya, a game of dominoes in the San Martín building basement, a little girl who covers her face in a slum under the highway, a wheel of fortune in Monserrat, a squat in Barracas, tango dancing in Villa Lugano, the river and yonder the metropolis seen from Costanera Sur…

I don’t know about you but if I were shown these photographs, I would immediately want to see the film this photographer was in. The setting is there before our eyes. All we need is to imagine a young woman in a leather jacket, handbag in hand and wavy black hair who manages to make herself invisible to capture these scenes of a Buenos Aires that is about to disappear. What is to come is close but not here yet. Far, very far away in time and space, the absolute white patiently awaits Lestido.

Página 12, Febraury 27, 2022.

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