La Creciente

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La Creciente

When I first arrived at the islands of the Paraná River Delta, I felt I had entered a place where time had stopped — or rather, where time moved differently, not forward but in circles, at the rhythm of the river's rising and falling. An hour from Buenos Aires the Delta begins, but once inside, you can navigate for hours without arriving anywhere. The further you go, the more desolate and mysterious it becomes. The channels narrow. The vegetation closes in. The city disappears completely, replaced by something older and indifferent to it.

The question I brought with me was how to represent that. A place dominated by water and its whims. And then it became clear: the moon controls the tides, and the tides control everything here. So I would work by moonlight — in that liminal time between day and darkness — and let the light that governs the water govern the images too.

I stayed for three years. Every day I crossed the river in a small motorboat called Espejito — Little Mirror — meeting islanders on docks and in bars, earning their trust slowly. Eventually I asked them to do something unusual: to recreate moments from their daily lives, but at night, under the full moon, standing still for up to ten minutes while a large-format 4x5 camera absorbed the available light.

La Creciente was made at a moment when documentary photography was reinventing itself. In the early 2000s, photographers who had spent decades working under the umbrella of major media organisations were beginning to develop their own languages — more personal, freed from the urgency of the press. The project belongs to that moment, but takes it somewhere more radical.

The people portrayed in La Creciente are real. The places are real. But the scenes are staged: nocturnal recreations of moments I witnessed during months of fieldwork, accompanying the islanders through their daily routines. Each portrait is a collaboration — I propose the scene, the subject inhabits it. The question the project leaves open is the oldest in photography: what does it mean to document?

The images exist in a visual limbo between day and night, between documentation and staging, between the real and the dreamed. The islanders — lumberjacks, fishermen, hunters, families — inhabit the frame as themselves, in the places they know, doing what they know. The fiction is only in the light.

— Alejandro.

Technical Sheet

Years: 2007–2010 · Location: Paraná River Delta, Argentina

Camera: Large format 4x5 · Moonlight, flashlights, strobes, lanterns

Long exposures 5–10 minutes · 39 photographs

Published: La Creciente, Nazraeli Press, USA, 2010. Foreword by Martin Parr.

Included in: Art Photography by David Bate, Tate Publications, London, 2015, p. 52.

Critical Texts

Martin Parr — introduction to La Creciente (Nazraeli Press, 2010):

"By the time I had seen the third image in Chaskielberg's folio I was convinced this was a major new photographer. I had never seen any images like this before and few with such maturity from a new photographer. The photographer has combined subject and methodology so convincingly that you know he has resolved this brilliantly. So much so, you hardly notice the thin line between subject and style. This remarkable body of work ticks all the boxes. It is art, it is stylistically innovative, it documents a fragile community, and it helps to give substance to the new emerging photographic culture to be found in Argentina."

David Bate — Art Photography, Tate Publications, London, 2015, p. 52:

"The series La Creciente creates a wildly visual atmosphere for these rural island communities, situated around the watery arteries of the Paraná River Delta in Argentina. Chaskielberg also makes us see that there is value in rethinking the techniques of photography as a means to disrupt the all-too familiar patterns of visual thinking. The aesthetics of Chaskielberg's images challenge the viewer's perception of a subject and its meaning, which is what tends to be forgotten as a more critical aspect of the history of pictorialism."

Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, 2011:

"A dreamlike work where perceptions of color, light and space are challenged."

Selected Exhibitions

2007 · Galería Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires — curated by Solana Viamonte

2009 · Museo Emilio Caraffa, Córdoba, Argentina

2010 · Brighton Photo Biennial — New Documents, Brighton, UK — selected and curated by Martin Parr

2010 · El Ojo Salvaje Festival, CC Cabildo, Asunción, Paraguay

2011 · Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

2011 · Michael Hoppen Gallery, London (first solo exhibition in Europe)

2011 · New York Photo Festival

2012 · Ring Cube Gallery, Tokyo — curated by Ihiro Hayami

2012 · 916 Gallery, Tokyo