Writing with light

Writing with light: photography reveals its magic with nocturnal rainbows, plants with eyes and a garbage can-camera
In times when telephones allow us to record everything, minute by minute, an exhibition at the CCK proposes to recover wonder with a return to “the elementary concepts of photography.”
The pigments and sensitivity to light of plants helped Fede Ruiz Santaesteban to create the Revelations of the Magic Garden
A soda can, a garbage container, a telescope and even the dark room of a building, with a beam of light passing through the window: all of this can become a camera. This is demonstrated by an exhibition curated by Francisco Medail, with works by more than twenty emerging and established artists, which can be seen until the end of the year at the CCK. In the Beginning Was Magic proposes “a return to the basic concepts of photography” in times when phones allow everything to be recorded, minute by minute.
Daniel Tubío, on the other hand, took months to capture each of the images exhibited. In different places – from Avellaneda and Saavedra to Sarandí or the Tigre Delta, and even in a kiosk located in front of the old Post Office Palace – he located cans with a small hole and photosensitive paper inside. He thus converted them into pinhole cameras, without lenses, which allowed him to create solarigraphs: photographs without the intervention of chemical processes, in which the visible path of the sun is recorded for long periods of time. He then scanned and processed the negatives digitally, to achieve images that look like nocturnal rainbows.
A similar operation was carried out by the Bazofia collective with a garbage container, which he transformed with a hole into “an instrument of expression.” In different parts of Buenos Aires, Rodrigo Agüero Zubiaurri, Natacha Ebers and Rocío Pilar Mendez Brisighelli captured the activity of anonymous characters and the dynamics of the city.
Medail went even further, converting an entire room at the CCK into a camera obscura for this exhibition: the thread of light that enters during the day through the window, covered by a sheet of metal, allows it to be reflected on the wall in an inverted manner. the building located on the opposite sidewalk, on Leandro N. Alem Avenue. “This is the first optical system observed in the history of humanity,” explains the curator.
A reverse process inspired Facundo de Zuviría during the pandemic. Instead of creating dark chambers, he placed books from his library on sheets of emulsified paper under the sun on his balcony. After a few minutes, each copy left a white “shadow”, surrounded by a Prussian blue frame. These cyanotypes, in addition to being represented in this exhibition, starred in another until yesterday at the National Museum of Fine Arts. There, weeks ago, a book was presented that brings together almost fifty of those original quarantine memories.
“The cyanotype is one of the first forms of photography and, in fact, it accurately embodies its etymological definition: photo (light) and graphos (writing): written with light,” recalls De Zuviría. This technique, he adds, “was created by William Henry Fox Talbot in England, around 1840, and developed a couple of years later by Anna Atkins to record the species of algae found on the English coast. Atkins compiled and edited these images in an album she called British Algae (1843), today considered the first known photobook.

Vegetables can even become a support for images. Their pigments and sensitivity to light helped Fede Ruiz Santaesteban create the Revelations of the Magic Garden: through the antiotypy technique, he managed to make mysterious looks appear on a great variety of leaves. They are reminiscent of those that Graciela Sacco, master of heliography, printed on decals that she distributed and pasted in the corners of Venice during the 2001 biennale.