Between Two Worlds
Edel Assanti Project Space, London, UK
Marcos Lopez, Camicera (2005)
Edel Assanti Project Space is a short walk from the bustle of Victoria station. The neighbourhood is fitting for their latest exhibition, a showcase of the work of nine contemporary photographers from Latin America. The gallery looks onto streets jostling with tourists, while the noise of the Vauxhall Bridge Road bleeds into the space as a reminder of the pace of 21st-century global traffic.
Oscar Fernando Gómez Rodríguez, 24 de mayo 09 (078) (2009)
Curated by photography critic and broadcaster Sue Steward, ‘Between Two Worlds’ is carefully balanced, featuring five male and four female artists, who collectively represent six different Central and South American countries. The title is a play on the compositional formula used by Mexican photographer Oscar Fernando Gómez Rodríguez, who began taking photographs framed by the window of his taxicab in Monterrey in 1998. The untitled series of everyday scenes (2009) is tinged with sadness, as the album was intended for his daughter who died at birth. Recording on a cheap camera (first a Kodak and then a 35mm Canon), the artist has stressed that ‘for me, the important thing is not technique’. Appropriately then, they are hung here in a grid format that makes them read like CCTV cameras capturing the grit and humour demanded by Mexican street life.
Adriana Lestido, 09. Alma y Maura (1995–8)
Human suffering is documented most poignantly by the Argentinean Adriana Lestido, who began taking photographs after her husband was ‘disappeared’, going on to receive a Guggenheim Grant in 1995. Her silver gelatin prints (the only analogue inclusions in the display) tenderly document mother daughter relationships: in Alma y Maura (1995–8), a bare-breasted girl is sat at the kitchen table, gazing across at her mother who has hidden her face against her knee in a gesture relating to some untold despair. The product of three years of intimate work with her subjects, Lestido’s black-and-white photographs have the seeming patina of family snapshots.
Juan Pablo Echeverri, Mucho Macho (2008)
They contrast well with the visceral colour of the two c-type prints hung opposite, by fellow Argentinean Alessandra Sanguinetti. In one a skinned hare has been lashed to a wire fence; in the other, a man washes his bloodied hands, while a Doberman dog watches on. In 1996 the artist returned to her father’s rural farm armed with a Hasselblad, where she spent six years working on the series ‘On the Sixth Day’. The raw imagery has a gothic, cinematic appeal that runs through much of the exhibition, most notably in Carnicera (2005) by Marco Lopez. The choreographed portrait is of a woman – with beads of sweat on her brow and neck, a bloodied knife in one hand and a bone in the other – standing against hanging carcasses, with two flanks of meat flaring out like wings on either side of her. She stares intently at the viewer.
A more sardonic performance takes place in the work of Dulze Pinzón, whose series ‘The Real Story of the Superheroes’ (2005–10) features genuine Mexican workers dressed as comic book characters and photographed in their usual workplace, with their names, jobs and earnings listed on a label below. The homage to their daily heroism is brilliantly slight, railing against the brassiness of American television dramas such as Heroes. Although modest in scale and with some works inevitably less accomplished than others (such as Byron Marmol’s portraits of Guatemalan youths dressed as their manga alter egos) the exhibition offers fascinating insights into the state of contemporary photography in Latin America today. As Diego Rivera wrote of the great photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo, this is an exhibition in which ‘anguish is omnipresent and the atmosphere is supersaturated with irony’.
Eleanor Nairne
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