Friday, October 28, 2022

The Home and the World

VASA Online Exhibitions introduces five perspectives by Argentinean artists that "photograph in the streets and at home. In some cases homes are turned into streets and the street becomes a home. In this sense the "street" becomes a performance platform for expressive gestures."

The five different perspectives on street photography is by five Argentinian artists: Patricia Ackerman, Ivan Komin, Jose de Rocco, Sofia Ungar, Diego Wisniacki.

The exhibition was curated by The Home and the World

Diego Wisniacki has some of my favorite images in this show - he certainly has a wide and diverse array of images, ranging from cats to someone on the throne... this subtle and beautiful photograph was my favorite.

Photo by Diego Wisniacki

He writes:

The house as the street

The confinement due to the COVID-19 pandemic turned our family home into the only liveable space. With a lot of time at my disposal, I began to take photos of my family capturing our daily lives. I was in my element, I always liked to portray intimacy and the confinement brought this opportunity to my daily living. As a street photographer I have my camera with me all the time looking for images while reacting to the environment and the new way of living.

Jufre is the story of my family in a pandemic. A family which was already used to a certain isolation during beach vacations in a remote part of Uruguay. This experience facilitated our beginning of the pandemic isolation and made it easier for us to adapt to living together in the same space 24 hours a day. But it was different, it had no expiration date, it was our new reality.

But it is Patricia Ackerman who steals this show -- there's not a single mediocre photo in her large number of entries in this show and her images are by far the most interesting set of images, where Ackerman shows an enviable sense of composition and that critical aspect of a great street photographer: capturing the unusual from an even more unusual perspective.

Photo by Argentina's Patricia Ackerman

Her succinct artist statement explains why:

I could stand on a corner or sit in a park for two hours looking up, looking around, trying to find the different constellations we make with the surrounding space and with the others. Everything is changing but at some point it freezes in a fleeting scene. That is what I try to find when I walk anywhere. With eyes with history and new at the same time. Eyes speak.

See the whole show here.