Humberto Rivas

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1967 – Barcelona, España, 2009

            Humberto Rivas quickly exchanged sport for art: At the age of seventeen, he started a drawing course by mail and sold his racing bicycle, with which he was training to become a circuit cyclist. He bought a painter's easel, and a year later he bought his first camera, a 35 mm Argus with fixed optics, and began to occupy that veiled position of an observer. He was attentive to detail and had a motto: Observe and be silent. In Buenos Aires, Rivas worked at the Di Tella Institute for many years and photographed prominent Argentine art figures, including Borges. In the 1970s, he emigrated to Barcelona, where he soon became well known. The impact of his work in Spain was an important stimulus for a group of artists who wanted to valorize photography, which at that time, was considered a marginal discipline compared to other arts.

            The photographer Marcos Zimmerman recalls in a note in Página/12 that when he visited the studio on 25 de Mayo Street, Rivas showed him several slides he had made of a Candelaria style vessel. The images differed by barely an eighth of a diaphragm from one another. “Me acuerdo de Miguel Rodríguez, mi maestro, y a mí, inclinados sobre el negatoscopio, intentando ver lo que no veíamos. Gracias a las indicaciones de Humberto, a la navaja afilada que tenía en el ojo, vimos esas sutiles diferencias, solo él era capaz de verlas a primera vista y de mostrarnos que dos tonos casi idénticos eran en realidad distintos" [I remember Miguel Rodriguez, my teacher, and me leaning over the negatoscope, trying to see what we couldn't see. Thanks to Humberto's indications, to the razor-sharp eye he had, we saw those subtle differences, only he was able to see them at first sight and to show us that two almost identical tones were actually different].

            What he saw was enough for Rivas to generate historical images; he did not work with abstractions or assembled scenes. Landscapes and portraits, in their natural contexts, are the center of his work, an attempt to obtain the inner qualities of what is observed through photography. He was the creator of a new way of documenting, and his images, which throughout his career contain very few variations in their conceptual approach, seek to capture the mark of time and memory with a sober but high-impact style that invites the spectator to dialogue and reflection.