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Text and photographs by Tomas Linch
Translated by Ted O’Callahan

I was born thirty-two years ago in Buenos Aires. In that time I’ve learned to know my city in the same imperfect way that one can know a woman: I believe it’s possible to understand her true forms, the logic of her actions, and her daily defeats; but her ultimate intentions, her hidden desires, her tragic obsessions will never be revealed, not to me, not to anyone. And this is the best thing that can happen. A city — or a woman — without secrets would — to my eyes — lose some degree of sensuality.

I was conceived, born, and raised in Palermo, a neighborhood near the center of Buenos Aires. Because of that, anonymity has always felt quite natural to me. What some associate with a feeling of freedom, or an urban neurosis, for me was always the way I related to the world. I am of a generation — I was born in 1977 — that rarely ever formed close ties with neighbors or local shopkeepers. My father, who was 43 years older than me, was educated in another era, which is essentially the same as saying in another city. At that time, neighborhoods carried markers of belonging and neighbors treated each other like extended family. In those times of tangos and street cars, when the world was less distrustful and Buenos Aires aspired to be the cosmopolitan city it now is, my father — then a young man — boasted that he knew every single person who lived or worked near his home.

Neither that city nor my father exists now. Buenos Aires grew exponentially and the worst urban vices are now firmly established on every corner. That anonymity that I discovered in childhood is today the currency of city life. I do not know who transports me every day from one spot to another. Who produces, processes, and sells the food that I consume? Who signs the check that an unknown bank employee will cash so that I can use it to pay for something bought from another stranger? I don’t know. I never knew, and I never will.

I chose my profession in Buenos Aires: given that I love stories so much, why not make a living telling them? I began to work knowing each person has a story that is worth telling, worth being photographed and published. It’s only a question of knowing how to rescue the story from the multitudes, from the deafening silence.

Buenos Aires’ downtown, our everyday center, is the apotheosis of anonymity. Why are millions of people crowded into such a hostile place? Solely for the money? I prefer to imagine that a force both physical and metaphysical exists — a centripetal force pulling us to this place for some more meaningful reason. It isn’t simple: each person will have to find their own reasons, and the search is hard work.

It took me three years to understand that one of my reasons for being here is to photograph moments — those fractions of seconds — during which people are transformed, through being touched by a certain light, or by the lack of it, and begin to reveal their stories, which can be imprinted on the sensor of the camera. Stories that, because of the ever-present anonymity, I began to guess at or invent: if I could not know them, at least I could imagine what they were not, or what they might have been.

The Centripetal Force has been cause and consequence of my own Buenos Aires. No longer will I be able to talk about her without thinking about some of those stories that are in me now. The only possible city is the one we create. And not the one we simply live in. The great Italo Calvino said it in this beautiful, definitive way: “Nobody knows better than you, wise Kublai, to never confuse the city with the words that describe it.”

Buenos Aires, November 2009

Tags: architecture, art, Buenos Aires city

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 04:41 and is filed under Galleries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.