Fotografías 1930-1943

Fotografías 1930-1943 is an artistic investigation into archival work and art historiography. Based on the premise that Robert Frank changed the world history of photography, Francisco Medail delves into the public archives of Argentina and constructs a corpus of images that opens up new questions: Did the aesthetics founded by Frank already exist in the third world? Could Frank have been Frank if he had been born in a peripheral country?
As researcher Veronica Tell argues, Fotografías 1930-1943 is a historiographical provocation. The formal associations with Frank –that unstructured and critical gaze that is attributed to his images and that was able to deconstruct the canon of modern Western photography– are elements present in the vernacular photographs selected by Medail from the General Archive of the Nation. The Americans, that foundational work of photography produced from the First World is evoked here through formal and material relations in order to think about how, from the periphery, other images produced for another use possess similar characteristics, highlighted, pointed out and sequenced through Medail's gaze and editing work. At the same time, Fotografías 1930-1943 is presented as a chronicle of everyday life in Buenos Aires in the 1930s that opposes the modern proposals of the time, such as the photographs of Horacio Coppola or Grete Stern. Highlighting the ways of life in this city, the work delves into the Infamous Decade, a historical period that began with the first civic-military coup of the twentieth century in Argentina, characterised by corruption and electoral fraud.

83 photographs. 20x30 cm. 2017  
Gelatine silver portfolio: edition of 10
Single inkjet prints: edition of  5 + 2AP

Curator: Veronica Tell
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