Photographs by Rafael Calviño, Text by Amalia Sanz
Translated by Ted O’Callahan
I
The first photograph Rafael Calviño remembers is not even an actual photo. An image that never was, it nevertheless taught him a way of looking at the world. He was perhaps ten or twelve. His family was at the train station in Constitución to send his brother off camping in Patagonia. He remembers seeing the station’s enormous ceiling, the locomotives, and the crowds. He remembers flashes of passing faces. And he saw it all through the viewfinder of a toy camera. “I believe the fascination I felt in that moment is still what drives me to take photos,” he says. “The fascination comes from participating in the reality while simultaneously framing it into a photograph.”
His real engagement with cameras, ones that actually take photos, came years later, when he was in his twenties, and even then it happened by chance. There was a borrowed camera which let him explore his favorite place, the streets. And a friend taught him how to develop film. This was the 1970s, one of the darkest periods of recent Argentine history. The military dictatorship was in power and the country was sinking into a hole that to Calviño and thousands of other young people of his generation looked like the end of the world.
Calviño’s need to find work, compounded by his desire to find a vocation, eventually pushed him to something he more or less knew how to do: photography. First he worked at Noticias, a newspaper associated with the Montoneros, a Peronist group engaged in armed struggle against the dictatorship. After that came moved on to long hours with little pay shooting for agencies. He says the people he worked with during that time taught him all he knows about photojournalism, which is a great deal.
At that point, he started to ask himself, as he still does, “What should I be attempting to show? What must be seen?” In addition to these questions, he had some revelations: he realized that street photography was what he cared most about. And he knew that he could walk all day with a camera. “I was young,” he says, and laughs. “I had energy to spare.”
II
“It was one of the most ominous places I could have been during the dictatorship,” he confesses, in reference to his years in Atlántida, where he edited a number of magazines that supported the military government with varying degrees of subtlety. The 1980s began; Calviño remained loaded with internal contradictions and he continued to cultivate a low profile. “I was very much on the periphery, far down the zoological scale.” By covering social events he stayed out of sight. Out of danger. But it was in that apparently frivolous world that he found his manner of resisting.
He carried two sets of equipment, one with color film for the magazines and another with black and white film for himself. Thus he plunged into Buenos Aries’ celebrations, its discos, its people. He did so with the certainty that these “absurd discos” had absolutely nothing to do with him. “I’ve always been interested in entering a world that is utterly foreign to me but which I could come to understand through photos,” he says. What he discovered can be seen in his essay La Noche, published here in Nuestra Mirada. He adds, “I’m also fascinated by the haphazard way one ends up in any given place.”
Clearly those places, in those times, were not just anyplace.
Calviño portrayed the feeling in fashionable Buenos Aires discos at a time when the dictatorship’s death throes were mixing with an explosive decade. After years of confinement and fear, those nights turned long, noisy, and excessive. So much so that it is common for the people who were there to say, “Anyone who remembers the 1980s didn’t live them.” Rock, alternative lifestyles, and new drugs created a scene in which delirium was king. Omar Chabán, prince of those nights, danced chacareras twirling a raw steak instead of a white handkerchief. The Gambas al Ajillo, a group of women with a ferocious sense of humor, masturbated on stage with roll-on deodorant tubes. That life was a wild cocktail in which no one was quite clear what the ingredients were.
Calviño’s photos hold onto something of that ungraspable moment: there are shadows; neons; disguises; a body caught in a dance step; the harsh light of a flash freezing a self-assured gesture. Behind the foreground figures there are secondary figures, sometimes mere fragments — legs, backs, necks — but as vital to the composition as the protagonists. Calviño says he was made of stone as he shot the celebrations but he remembers them “with affection.” He adds that he didn’t have much time; the personal photos had to be taken around the edges of his paid work. “That limitation continued, even when I had the option for more time. I believe that one can make limitations into a virtue. I began to think that I didn’t want to separate the professional work from the personal. It never interested me to begin from nothing with a news piece or an essay,” he says. And he began to construct an approach where impulse is the law.
III
From one side, a gun is aimed; from the other, a shot captures the look of a man prepared to kill.
Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky baptized the image “The Photographer Shot First,” and many people know it this way. Rafael Calviño, the photographer, named it with a purely descriptive title, “First Lieutenant Maguire Aiming.” What’s certain is that this photo, which portrayed a menacing supporter of the military coup, received the King of Spain Prize in 1988. And Calviño, who had been experiencing a vocational crisis, no longer doubted: “It was a vindication of sorts,” he admits. “And more than that, the photo served for something. It communicated a situation.” From there, he let the camera be his license to try what he wanted. “It is something very instinctive, a sensation, I raise the camera and shoot – it comes together with astonishing simplicity,” he says. Obviously years of working as a photojournalist helped him develop some feel for it, in the same way that a soccer player knows who is behind him because he feels “something.”
There is indeed something in the photos of Rafael Calviño. Something that crosses the boundary between the artistic — although he is reluctant to speak of art — and the quotidian. As if, with chance on his side, the camera might capture what is there but unseen. He understands, and to some extent agrees, with the surrealist notion of the found object. “Yes, clearly, I’m interested in what is found in the moment, with a touch of humor or a fresh look that comes from an object or person being somehow out of place.” There is nothing prefabricated in his search, nothing planned, “I have no drive for the extraordinary thing. I look for the thing that becomes extraordinary because it doesn’t correspond to its context. That is found by being a person who wanders the city and watches,” he says.
There was a time when Calviño locked himself away, working as an editor. He moved out of the city. He was away for years. When he returned to the streets as a photojournalist he made the decision “to always leave the house with a small, black and white, 35mm autofocus camera with fixed-optics, to be able to make a sort of photographic diary. I wore out that camera; I took hundreds of photos of whatever the street would give me.” And the street gave. He walked Buenos Aires during the years that the country returned to sociopolitical crisis, when it was once again on the brink of the abyss. He captured the intimate glance of the public during a period — 2001 to 2004 — when the city was first disintegrating then showing signs of rebirth as hopeful as they were fragile. Those photos became his book The Street, one of his most celebrated works.
Sometimes, he thinks that photography can be a tool for knowledge. Mainly knowledge of a personal sort. He is rarely interested in talking about photography as art. “Photography is modernity, it is reproduction, and that moves away from the canon of art. It doesn’t fit. There are artistic photographs, yes, but that’s not how I think about photography.” He states this without any spirit of provocation. It is simply one of the things that photography has taught him. “I didn’t plan a career, or set out to make myself into an author, or artist, I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t know how to do that,” he says. He makes clear that he admires many colleagues who have taken that step. He recognizes that inside himself there is a daily battle between the amateur and the professional. Also there is a deep drive that keeps him going. He calls it “an infatuation,” although in putting it that way he is downplaying its actual importance to him. “I am a photographer. I know it, but I don’t think about it,” he concludes. And it is easy to believe him.
First Lieutenant Maguire Aiming
Tags: Buenos Aires city, history, photojournalism