El jugador de ajedrez de la serie Ecos del interior / The Chess Player from the series Echoes from the Interior, 1999, Martín Weber, silver dye bleach print.
Courtesy and © Martín Weber
Transcript
[gentle guitar music]
Male narrator Argentina is a vast country with a complex history of colonialism, urbanization and political strife. Since the mid-1800s, photography played a critical role producing – and at times, dismantling – national constructions, utopian visions and avant-garde artistic trends.
Martín Weber’s photographs invoke the complexities of Argentina’s rural and immigrant communities. Weber’s interpretation of the legacy of Argentina’s history is part of a common thread shared by many other Argentine photographers, especially those featured here.
[music ends]
Senior Curator in the Department of Photographs and co-curator of this exhibition, Judith Keller.
Judith Keller For the Echoes From the Interior series, Martín Weber set out to present the rural population of Argentina, and he wanted to do it through staging the images and involving the local people, the residents of these individual towns. As you see in this particular image, The Chess Player, he would ask the people there to pose for him.
[music resumes]
Here you have the woman on the right representing the native population, the Criollo population.
Male narrator They were descended from the indigenous peoples and the Spanish.
Judith Keller The man on the left, the blue-eyed fellow, is representative of the immigrant population, the newcomers or, as they’re called in the provinces, “gringos.”
[music ends]
Male narrator Beginning in the 19th century, Argentina’s leaders and elite encouraged European immigration. Europe represented civilization and sophistication, while the indigenous people were seen as comparatively inferior and unsophisticated.
Weber frames the two characters tightly, forcing them to share a space. In this context, the chess game heightens the tension. These are real people in a real place, but in Weber’s staging, they become symbols of Argentina’s history.
Judith Keller The underlying technique or basis of all of these works, what they have in common in terms of the way the artist or photographer approached their work, is that the works are all constructed. They’re fabricated for the camera, rather than being found.
[music resumes]
Male narrator From obviously staged works, to others made to look like historical record, this exhibition traces how photography brought into focus and impacted the often times contradictory history of Argentina.
[music ends]