Santiago Porter

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1971

            Santiago Porter says he stumbled upon photography by chance. His first photos were taken with a friend from school. In his house, they had set up a photo-developing lab, a legacy from a cousin who was leaving the country. They bought some black and white rolls of film and borrowed a Voigtländer camera from Santiago's father, which was only half working. The excuse was to generate images and then going to the lab to develop and copy them. In the beginning, the magic of alchemy was more appealing than the act of making; despite not having the technique, if they followed a few steps, the image would appear. The memory evokes terrible bad prints but fascinating times. His curiosity was about getting it right when it went wrong. It was, at that time, at the age of sixteen, that he decided to enroll in the first photography course at the recently inaugurated Escuela de Fotografía Argentina, a step that prompted him to eventually set up his own laboratory. 

            Over time, that initial curiosity turned into a profession. As a photojournalist, he worked for the Clarín newspaper and experienced first-hand the transition from analog to digital. But he always kept space for a more intimate search in which he portrayed his daily life using roll film machines, mostly in black and white. In the midst of this journey, he discovered the photographer Robert Frank, which marked a breaking point in the way he understood and connected with the practice of photography. Although he used to think that photography had to be done in a certain way, when he got to know his work, Frank's universe burst into his face and enabled him to work in many other ways.

            One of his most relevant photographic series is Bruma, in which he portrays monuments and landscapes with historical weight, including the clandestine detention center Pozo de Arana; the Cathedral of Buenos Aires stained with red paint, resembling blood, after a political protest; an unusable bridge on Route 9 that was never finished; a watchtower erected in Ezeiza for a prison that was never built; and the Casa de la Moneda. Porter shot this series with a large-format camera very early on Sundays and holidays, when it was cloudy, so that the shots would have the same light and no people in them. With a sensitive eye, he has been working for more than thirty years in images that, with different intensities, blend the country's history and intimacy to leave a trace of what happened.