Esteban Pastorino – The Architecture of Francisco Salamone

Cemetery, Laprida

Townhall, Rauch

Slaughterhouse, Guamini

Via the Cord Prize I had the chance to re-see Esteban Pastorino‘s series on the architecture of Francisco Salamone. The photos depict fantastical art-deco structures that were built in small towns of the southern part of Buenos Aires province in Argentina between 1936 and 1940. They were part of a program by the then-governor to construct city halls, cemeteries and slaughterhouses (only in Argentina!). A change of government ended the program and Salamone constructed very little for the remainder of his life.

Pastorino’s photos depict the strange buildings at night, weirdly lit and in isolation. They seem to belong not to just another time but to another planet. The jpegs on the Cord site are nice but the prints are an event to see in person. They are large gum-bichromate prints on heavily textured paper and have a dramatic presence. Interestingly, the images of the series on Pastorino’s website show the texture and it’s interesting to compare the jpegs with those from the Cord site. While showing the texture, these jpegs don’t really manage to capture the presence the prints have in person.

Cemetery, Laprida

Slaughterhouse, Guamini

Pastorino is a total bad-ass with a bunch of interesting projects. He often constructs his own cameras and puts them to use in making photos that have a conceptual resonance with his invented cameras. In other words, it’s not just masturbatory gear-geekiness. As if to drive home the point, the top page on his website displays a certificate for a Guiness Book of World Records for the longest panoramic photo. How many photographers have a Guiness World Record?

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Eduardo Hirose – Expansión 1

Eduardo Hirose, Expansion 1

Eduardo Hirose, Expansion 1

Eduardo Hirose, Expansion 1

Peruvian photographer Eduardo Hirose documents his country’s construction boom with clean, precise, architectural photographs of messy, never-complete buildings that characterize much of Peru’s contemporary vernacular architecture. The series is appropriately titled Expansión.

I was lucky enough to see these in person at the Galería Lucía de la Puente. What you can’t see from these jpegs is that these images are incredibly detailed. Lima is a desert city smothered in fog for 9 months out of the year and mostly lacking in vegetation. The final images in the series show the last peripheral edges of Lima, improbably green after rare spring rains.

Eduardo Hirose – Expansion 1

Happy Days in the new quarters of the periphery of Lima by Max Cabello Orcasitas of Supayfoto

Max Cabello

Max Cabello

Max Cabello

Via the Photographic Museum of Humanity, an online site that features documentary work from around the world, I discovered the photo essay, Happy Days in the new quarters of the periphery of Lima by Peruvian photographer Max Cabello.

The series depicts birthday parties and celebrations in the poor slums surrounding the city. The photographs depict a situation that is both tender and pathetic. Peru’s recent economic growth has allowed its citizens to enjoy some of the fruits of consumerism but it comes in the form of  glitter and pink styrofoam instead of roads, schools, parks and good jobs. I like how the series humanizes the slums, rather than presenting it as a cool spectacle a la Thomas Struth.

Cabello is part of the photographic colective Supayfotos which I blogged about last year for a series of theirs about Iquitos.