“Whoever leaves home, returns”, Jorge Luis Borges wrote in “For a Version of the I Ching”, a poem that is the prologue to this classic of Oriental philosophy, which together with the teachings of Lao Tsé and Confucius, constitutes both a text of wisdom and an oracle. I remembered that verse when I had Metropolis, Adriana Lestido’s newly published book, before me. It forces me to review her career path, that goes from Mataderos to Iceland passing through Villa Gesell. With a revisionist distance from her life and work, Lestido proposes a return to her origins, or should I say, to her decisive first way of seeing, as Adriana, the young photo-journalist, who’s name would soon become well known and would later become her brand. So, this book is like looking at who I was before who I am.

If we look for the roots of Lestido’s aesthetics it no doubt takes us to Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, the legendary photographers of the Depression in the USA. Marked by that influence and then detaching herself from it as she got closer to the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, Lestido manages to articulate the confluence between art and denunciation as she developed her own form of personal expression.

In the prologue to Metropolis Juan Forn reveals how the book came about. In Villa Gesell, on the Atlantic coast, at the end of 2018, the Argentine filmmaker Fernando Spiner was looking for photos of the 90s to use in a film about a photographer in Buenos Aires. He consulted Lestido who was about to head off to Iceland for the third time. Lestido rushed to the city and returned with a full backpack. As soon as Juan saw those images, with his instinct as an editor, he got very excited: “There’s a book here”.

The photos were taken between 1988 and 1999, corresponding to the mythic and golden period of the supplement Metropolis that came out with the newspaper. It came out every week in the 90s, dedicated to a different suburb. It’s also worth mentioning that’s how “Y Rep hizo los barrios” (And Rep created the suburbs) was born. Already from those images it was clear that Lestido’s intention was to narrate. At the time she was also working on “Mujeres presas” (Women in Prison) (2001), her choral document on the female condition behind bars, a theme she’d later pursue deeper in her following work; “Madres e hijas”(Mothers & Daughters) (2003), in which the narration depends on a series of stories centred on family relationships and gender in their different levels. The intimate transitions that move from storm to tenderness.

It’s impossible to isolate this pioneer endeavour in “Metropolis” that through time and space becomes the setting that determines the confinement of those women or the conflicts between mothers and daughters; a rough, raw landscape, a tough urban wilderness. Meanwhile a vast sector of the middle class ran to Ezeiza airport, with destination Miami to go and purchase household appliances and other junk. So, while the social looting went on, while the magazine “Caras” showed the mansions of the rich and famous; civil servants, politicians the showbiz world and a varied fragment of stupidity. While that vast middleclass sector looked the other way, Lestido searched in the streets for the heart wrenching testimonies, searched for beauty in the outcasts.

A while back I mentioned the conjugation between art and denunciation. For the latter to fulfil its commitment, before pointing at humiliation, it’s crucial to ask oneself how to show it, which is the strategy towards what you observe: in other words Lestido’s method, portrayed in an extensive body of work; “Lo que se ve” (What Is seen) (2013), “La Obra” (The Work) , “Interior” (2010), “Antártida negra” (Black Antarctic) (2017).

Lestido has always been committed to her surroundings, since she was a child, that’s, shall we say, her context. A humble childhood in Mataderos, the stench of meet processing plants, the tanneries and infinite skies. Not an easy place but being there meant paying attention to the dramas of hardship and the brief, possible moments of happiness.

Adriana has stated: “I am my own daughter”. Well that’s the starting point, Lestido made her way up and Metropolis is therefore a vital initial material in which her own style takes shape, the strong, incisive use of black and White, the focus placed on her subjectivity and the surroundings that are occasionally hazy, a background crossed by fog and darkness instilling the sense of silent tragedy to a scene, even when those human beings smile in hope. A hope that is repeated yet remains and illusion, because the world Lestido captures and places in front of us is the desolation of the city of broken hearts. I speak, without hesitation of ideology.

Due to the development of a capitalist way of thinking and its double standards, the 90s marked the end of history and ideologies, triumphant speeches cut out for those in power, their accomplices, opportunists and those in denial. Lestido’s images in that peculiar supplement of the newspaper, made an ideological reference; “The practice of political emancipation is legitimate”, wrote the Irish Marxist Terry Eagleton. “Nobody is, ideologically speaking, entirely innocent”. And also: “The study of ideology is, among other things, an investigation into the way people can invest in their own unhappiness”. Where am I leading to with these borrowed ideas? To the question of origin intimately connected with classes. Look at that defeated dog on Avenida del Trabajo, look at those humble women in Primera Junta waiting to be employed in domestic service, look at the immigrant in Retiro, look at the kids here, there and everywhere, victims of a system that assigned them a place in the great mass of the dispossessed. However, I suggest that as you flip through the pages of “Metropolis”, this delicate piece put together by Lariviere Publishers, you keep track of the places, the days and nights. The craft of writing, in this case the beginnings for this photo journalist, implies putting your body into your work, entering in zones of danger, be it the repression in a demonstration, the violence of personal suffering or capturing hidden, crouched shadows, delving in hostile landscapes with a light that might shine on the “dark night of the soul”. No wonder her work drew the attention of John Berger.

At the beginning of these notes I mentioned the I Ching, a text that Lestido resorted to in order to explain: “When you contemplate the forms of the sky, you can explore the changes in time. When you contemplate the forms of men you can shape the world. Love is the content and justice the form”. That and none other is her message. No other word translates her objective more clearly. The world could be a better place if we payed attention to her visions.

Página 12, March 6, 2022.

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