At the beginning of the 90s many of my beliefs like; that Rod Stewart was corny, that Bill Murray was a terrible actor, crumbled from month to month, leaving the arid shell of my ignorance wide open. At the time I worked at Página/ 30, the magazine belonging to Página/12 newspaper. I was newly arrived in that world in which everyone knew who Gordon Lish was, while I didn’t even know who Raymond Carver was. Adriana Lestido was on the staff. One of the most important photographers of our time, eight books published, awards, her work in museums and private collections, and back then she worked as a photo-journalist. One day while she was editing images of Marilyn Monroe, I said, thinking I’d impress her, that Marilyn had a “vulgar beauty”. She didn’t even bother to look at me. She simply answered: “I think your remark is very limited”. My remark wasn’t mine, I’d heard it from my mother, who I believed to be an original and intelligent person. However, Lestido’s phrase revealed the silliness it contained and it helped me look without prejudice and not follow the herd. Some years ago, I interviewed her in a cafe in Buenos and she said: “I work a lot but not necessarily taking photos. I believe the real job is to sustain a creative attitude and that’s very hard work because it has to do with dealing with our inner darkness. It would be great to reach a point in which I didn’t have to do anything, not even take photographs, simply contemplate”. The other day I received her latest book, Metropolis, published by Larrivière Publishers in Argentina and distributed in Spain. It gathers photographs taken in the 80s and 90s for the newspaper’s supplement called, precisely, Metropolis. As I opened it, I had the overwhelming yet false feeling of reconstructing all those moments in which I saw her come back to the editorial department with her negatives and look at them in the lightbox. I shuddered at the thought of having shared time and space with such amazing talent. I remembered each of the stories those photos covered: the Evangelical preacher at Plaza Once (Once Square), the domestic employees at Primera Junta railway station, the picket underneath the highway. They were stories of a less glamorous, lost city. A city in which we went to arthouse cinemas with straw seats to see Wim Wenders films, and where the best meal we could pay for was a cheap plate of spaghetti at a restaurant called Pippo. Her way of seeing, even then, was full of austerity and force, of the audacity she has to be unseen. In her last work about the Antarctic – blindingly still landscapes, monastically bare, as if she were approaching the idea of contemplation, she mentioned that day in the cafe. Now she’s advancing on a project about another white abyss, the Arctic. A poem by San Juan de la Cruz has been haunting me for weeks: “I left without being noticed/ while my home was calm”. Only now do I understand why Lestido is leaving her calm home, heading for the cold mass. I see her slide towards that awesome dawning and I feel terror and devotion, all at once. Because the commitment of artists like this is an implied blessing yet also a sacrifice.

Cadena Ser, April 3, 2022.

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