Entremuros, Buenos Aires (Between Walls, Buenos Aires)

German-Argentinian photographer Grete Stern is among the most emblematic figures in modern photography from Argentina. Stern arrived in Buenos Aires in 1936 with her husband, photographer and film-maker Horacio Coppola, fixing her gaze thereafter on the urban landscape of the Argentine capital and thus leaving the legacy of a broad set of images that travel through the streets, buildings and life of the metropolis from the mid-1930s to the 1950s.
This photograph is part of the Entremuros (Between Walls) series from 1936, made just after she touched down in Buenos Aires. Her images were often captured through a window or balcony opening out on to the modern city from a height, thereby recording the heterogeneity of forms, construction materials and architectural styles. A sharply focused foreground contrasts with a background in which the light becomes a haze that barely allows the slender silhouettes of the skyscrapers and the city skyline to be discerned. Stern’s angled framings, the precise choice of the fragment of the recorded landscape and the fast-paced composition she captures all underpin the premises of a photographic language that divests itself of anecdote and Pictorialism to become established as a technological and aesthetic expression of modernity.

Suset Sánchez Sánchez