The story of Alejandro Chaskielberg, a photographer who left for Patagonia in a pandemic to photograph fire

The declaration of a health emergency surprised him 1,554 kilometers from home. Accompanied by Lara, his daughter, the photographer Alejandro Chaskielberg (Buenos Aires, 1977) was traveling through Patagonia dedicated to a visual project in the most desolate region of the plateau, attentive to the volcanic landscape, with impressive geological formations. Both had to decide quickly whether to stay or return to the city to lock up. Both lovers of nature, Chaskielberg believed that the healthiest thing for her 7-year-old girl would be to experience mountain life, surrounded by animals, instead of staying in a Buenos Aires apartment.

They chose to stay in a motor home in the middle of the forest, with a poor internet connection. What was left over were books, sketchbooks and nights to go out to photograph. “The experience became extraordinary over time. Being in contact with nature begins to open your mind and imagination ”, explains the Argentine photographer by phone. Chaskielberg devoted himself to his photographs as he could not have done in pre-pandemic times, without the previous daily pressures, with all the time in the world, imagining himself within a season of “The Walking Dead”, the protagonist of a low-budget apocalyptic film. Once a week they both went to the nearest town where there was a telephone connection and only then could they find out how the evil was spreading in the capital. Later, with better Internet service, Lara did her third grade in school virtually, yes, without video.

Social distance, digital connection

Narrated like this, it could be thought that the images that Chaskielberg presents in El Ojo ajeno, gallery of the Image Center, is a selection of bucolic landscapes, a dream for tourists who crave snow-capped mountains. Nothing further from reality. Indeed, even the very concept of reality is complicated in these nocturnal images, altered by the irruption of color, fire and digital intervention. “From my first projects I have sought to generate a parallel reality. Basically, what photography does is alter reality, return an image that is never faithful, it is always a cutout, something that we deform. There is much artifice even in the photographs that most fly the flags of truth. I propose the opposite: to generate a filter that returns to the viewer a different reality. Here, the idea is like seeing nature from the digital point of view ”, he explains.

Likewise, although father and daughter remained isolated, the photographs that the artist uploaded to social networks became viral phenomena in his country, as if people locked in their homes found in Chaskielberg’s images a digital window to look at the world .

This result is not gratuitous: the Argentine artist had been working in recent years on the link established between the virtual and our daily lives. In “Pixels”, a previous project, Chaskielberg turned cell phone screens into flashlights to illuminate people and places, thus showing how people, so connected to the screen they are, have lost contact with their environment. Somehow, he confesses, that work was foreboding.

“Inevitably we have had to turn a large part of our life to virtuality. In some way, for me the virtual became a completely isolated channel of connection in these months. It helped me survive. It would not have been possible for both my daughter and me, to have been so long in a small house in the middle of the forest ”, says the photographer.

“That virtuality and that way of sharing the project, waiting for the exchange with people, was a great emotional support for me,” he says. From the comments of the people on the networks, the photographer felt a kind of mirror, a place of resonance for the feelings of others.

The purifying fire

In Patagonia, fire in winter not only provides heat in the chimneys, but is also used to burn prunings and brush. It is the ideal season, because in rainy weather nothing can catch on by accident. Equipped with a torch created by him, a large iron T to which the artist hung rags to set them on fire, Chaskielberg managed to plow the air over the snowy forest paths with it, achieving surprising effects in his images.

However, in summer the opposite happens: in times of drought large forest fires occur that the artist has seen up close. “Fire attracts us, we are all fascinated by it. In less than a year I have seen its two faces: the fire that we create, unreal and armed, and the real one, of an uncontrollable power ”, he affirms.

“The idea of ​​fire came to me very strongly with the pandemic. We are in a world that is on fire from climate change. My idea was that we have to burn everything old, re-found our way of living and relating to nature, because we have reached a critical point ”, he laments.

Coming home

Nine months later, father and daughter returned to Buenos Aires, as Lara began her face-to-face classes. Then the family reunions and visits with friends began. For Chaskielberg, every artistic project is a small duel, since the creator establishes links with people from whom, months later, he will move away.

But the photographer could not imagine that the return would be so hard: that time away allowed the artist to notice how much the city had deteriorated and how the quality of life of the people had declined. “I really felt a great distance between how I felt and how the rest of the people, psychologically beaten by Covid-19, were carrying it. Everyone looks upset, and their conversations become unbearable. When you take distance, those contrasts are perceived. Or maybe I have become a hermit, I don’t know ”, adds the photographer.

Place: Image Center. El Ojo Ajeno Gallery, Av. 28 de Julio 815 Miraflores

Season: Monday to Friday, from 10 am. at 7 pm. Saturday and Sunday: From 10 am. at 5 pm. Until Sunday, December 12.

Entry; Free.