COLLECT PHOTOGRAPHS, A ROUTE TOWARDS PLEASURE

Fotógrafo no identificado: Retrato de Fructuoso Rivera. Río de la Plata, circa 1865. Carte-de-visite, 7 x 5,9 cm. 



Antonio Pozzo: Plaza de maniobras de los corazeros (sic) en Puan. (Expedición al Río Negro. Abril a Julio de 1879). Álbum con 38 fotografías, en torno a 26 x 38 cm. 





ABEL ALEXANDER

Argentine photographic historian (b. 1943), researcher, restorer, collector and conservator of photographic collections.

He is the author of several books, essays, catalogs and articles on Argentine historical photography. For decades he has been working as a journalist specialized in vintage photography for the Clarín newspaper in Buenos Aires.

5th generation descendant of the German daguerreotype and photographer Adolfo Alexander (1822-1881).

Curator of several exhibitions on daguerreotypes and of vintage photographs at national level. He has directed various Photographic Museums and Historical Photo Libraries. In 1985 he was a founding member of the "Dr. Julio F. Riobó" Research Center on Ancient Photography in Argentina.

Towards 1992, he began together with Miguel Ángel Cuarterolo and Juan Gómez the renowned Congresses of Photography History of national and international significance through 12 meetings.

He currently chairs the Iberoamerican Society for the History of Photography (SIHF).

For 15 years, together with Juan Travnik, he organized exhibitions on national historical photography at the San Martín Theater Gallery, in the City of Buenos Aires.

From 2006 to 2018, he served as Historical-Photographic Advisor for the "Benito Panunzi" Photo Library of the "Mariano Moreno" National Library, in Buenos Aires.

He has edited various photographic collections such as "Photography in Argentine History", "Scenes of Daily Life", "A Century of Argentine Photography" and other titles on this historical theme.

In September 2017, he participated as co-author and guest speaker of the exhibition "Photography in Argentina (1850-2010). Continuity and Contradiction" organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California.



By Abel Alexander

In the history of Argentine photography, the interesting practice of collecting was born with the first carte-de-visite albums (1) that, around the 1860s / 1870s, transcended the family sphere to include in their initial pages the portraits of the most prominent personalities at the national and international level. Today true iconographic treasures, show us the private and social life of the time.

A short time later, those albums built for this purpose included photographs of a more generous size, the portrait cabinet (2), and gained luxuries in terms of ornamentation. True decorative jewels, these albums adopted cast bronze mounts, musical boxes, and even painstaking silverwork by goldsmiths including artistic monograms with their owners\' initials.

And in the expansion of the photography market, came the albums of views, mostly urban and with an incipient rural presence, although this involved making registers on the outskirts of the city of Buenos Aires, as Christiano Junior did with the taking of a family composition in the courtyard of a ranch, resembling a typical scene in the heart of the pampa, obtained on the borders with the territories still occupied by the aborigines. The practice of mobilizing to remote territories with all the teams, recognizes as pioneers the cameras of Esteban Gonnet and Benito Panunzi, who made their own photographic view albums, venturing into the interior of the country with the registration of groups of gauchos enjoying social gatherings after the hard work tasks.

In the exciting world of nineteenth-century collecting, sometimes finding happens, making the skin stand on end, such as the rescue of a complete collection of great albumine prints on the Campaign to the Desert, works carried out with great technical effort by the legendary Italian photographer Antonio Pozzo on that controversial military action started in 1879.

We are here in the kingdom of albumin print and among the clients of those professionals who edited their bound and epigraphic collections, we find travelers who returned to their points of origin bearing a memory of these lands with characters and scenes, for them captivating at exotic.

Already towards the last decades of the 19th century the irruption of the practical dry plates and paper copies to the silver gelatin (3) further developed the business and the collecting of photographic images. Now, yes, driven by true publishers who bought negatives from professionals scattered throughout South America and who even financed photo tours. These iconographic entrepreneurs offered the possibility of creating their own album and clients selected the images of their interest.

Today, more than a century and a half away, collecting those moving heritage photographs is to rescue and also preserve a valuable historical legacy. Public and private institutions and a rich universe of private collectors give life to this passion that favors our gaze and understanding towards a complex past.

In the world of old photography, the generous participation of collectors who without hesitation facilitate their heritage for study, public display and the necessary historical publications, is aware that, in this way, they are collaborating in the consolidation of this new discipline that joins art and history. As an example we can cite the Congresses of History of Photography and the rich Memories of them.

Thorough research carried out in Hilario to reference each work offered for sale, has allowed us to advance on the biographies and productions of numerous active photographers in Latin America, contributing new data to the existing documentary support. In an infrequent decision, this commercial firm has already edited seven annual Photographic Catalogs that enrich the information available through more than a thousand works and are now part of a documentary corpus for easy consultation.

The truth is that this challenge of cataloging each photograph that comes to Hilario, has been an engine of permanent dialogue with colleagues from the country and from other Latin American nations. In addition, the professional style of this bookstore and gallery of art and antiques, already converted into a prestigious auction house, has given rise to the Miguel Ángel Cuarterolo Photographic Library - consultation library created in December 2013 -, an inescapable source of information, today formed with more than a thousand volumes.

The noble profession of photography cultivated from its origins by my ancestors, counts me among these passionate researchers. I have cultivated this passion for long years and I recognize that the path traced by "Hilario Artes Letras Oficios" and its indexed catalogs, is naturally associated with the works published by Ediciones de la Antorcha, as well as with the Memories of the Congresses of History of Photography and editions of Fundación ArtexArte, pioneering entities that have been linked to this new historical discipline for decades.


Notes:

1. Carte-de-visite: With the improvement of the negative / positive system, in 1854, Adolphe Disdéri patented an innovative method in France that made it possible to popularize photographs, making them accessible to even the most disadvantaged audiences, promoting the formation of special albums to treasure these images in collections. Using a four-lens camera, eight portraits were taken in different poses on two plates of wet collodion negatives. The photographer finally copied twelve images on paper to the albumin mounted on fine cardboard, and in the standardized size of 9 x 6 cm. 3.54 x 2.36 in., which he handed over to the client. It was then that the photographic advertising printed on those cards appeared with the references of the studio that sold them.

2. Portrait cabinet: Universal format that began in England from 1864, and whose validity lasted until the beginning of the 20th century; its largest size -16 x 11.5 cm. / 6.3 x 4.52 in.- finally displaced the carte-de-visite. The early portrait cabinets were copied on albumine paper and, towards the end of the century, on silver gelatin prints. This larger format allowed to obtain better plans in the field of social portraiture and photographic publicity gained more space.

3. The technique allowed the use of dry plates similar to those known until then, but instead of being impregnated with wet collodion, they were coated with gelatin in silver bromide. The system provided numerous benefits in terms of greater sensitivity and comfort in professional handling, and the possibility of using it months after its preparation. So it was that in 1873 a first factory of these plates was created in Liverpool, England, from where they were commercialized for the whole world. The copies born from these glass negatives are what are now called silver gelatins, or silver bromide gelatin.

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