Alejandro Chaskielberg

“Chaskielberg uses very slow exposures on a large-format camera to dislocate the naturalism… in photographs of rural and landscape…carefully lighting and sharply focussing it, balancing and blending artificial and natural light sources… The resulting effect is a combination of focus and blur in effect reconfiguring the old pictorial.

“Chaskielberg uses very slow exposures on a large-format camera to dislocate the naturalism… in photographs of rural and landscape…carefully lighting and sharply focussing it, balancing and blending artificial and natural light sources… The resulting effect is a combination of focus and blur in effect reconfiguring the old pictorial.

“Chaskielberg uses very slow exposures on a large-format camera to dislocate the naturalism… in photographs of rural and landscape…carefully lighting and sharply focussing it, balancing and blending artificial and natural light sources… The resulting effect is a combination of focus and blur in effect reconfiguring the old pictorial.

“Chaskielberg uses very slow exposures on a large-format camera to dislocate the naturalism… in photographs of rural and landscape…carefully lighting and sharply focussing it, balancing and blending artificial and natural light sources… The resulting effect is a combination of focus and blur in effect reconfiguring the old pictorial.

“Chaskielberg uses very slow exposures on a large-format camera to dislocate the naturalism… in photographs of rural and landscape…carefully lighting and sharply focussing it, balancing and blending artificial and natural light sources… The resulting effect is a combination of focus and blur in effect reconfiguring the old pictorial.

“Chaskielberg uses very slow exposures on a large-format camera to dislocate the naturalism… in photographs of rural and landscape…carefully lighting and sharply focussing it, balancing and blending artificial and natural light sources… The resulting effect is a combination of focus and blur in effect reconfiguring the old pictorial.

“Chaskielberg uses very slow exposures on a large-format camera to dislocate the naturalism… in photographs of rural and landscape…carefully lighting and sharply focussing it, balancing and blending artificial and natural light sources… The resulting effect is a combination of focus and blur in effect reconfiguring the old pictorial.

In 2014, he travelled with his one and a half year old daughter Lara to remote Patagonia, where he discovered the El Hoyo labyrinth. He was mesmerized: The labyrinth seemed to transform everyone who meandered through it. Children became elfin, adults became childlike. Everyone seemed under a spell as they made their way through the maze. Chaskielberg, a photographer who also works as a cinematographer, decided to put to use his cinematic experience to fully capture the magic of the labyrinth. Inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which famously concludes in a hedge maze, he took on the role of director. He created scenarios – he painted trees, used torches, moved people around, had them pretend to sleep on the ground and stretch out on the top of the hedges. In effect, he created a magical piece of land art that he then documented. Chaskielberg’s photographs visualize the feelings people experience while wandering through the giant maze. He created tableaus and made light visible. The images are spectacularly beautiful and seductive, showing us the transformation –and the fragility – of nature.

In 2014, he travelled with his one and a half year old daughter Lara to remote Patagonia, where he discovered the El Hoyo labyrinth. He was mesmerized: The labyrinth seemed to transform everyone who meandered through it. Children became elfin, adults became childlike. Everyone seemed under a spell as they made their way through the maze. Chaskielberg, a photographer who also works as a cinematographer, decided to put to use his cinematic experience to fully capture the magic of the labyrinth. Inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which famously concludes in a hedge maze, he took on the role of director. He created scenarios – he painted trees, used torches, moved people around, had them pretend to sleep on the ground and stretch out on the top of the hedges. In effect, he created a magical piece of land art that he then documented. Chaskielberg’s photographs visualize the feelings people experience while wandering through the giant maze. He created tableaus and made light visible. The images are spectacularly beautiful and seductive, showing us the transformation –and the fragility – of nature.

La Creciente series creates a wildly visual atmosphere, making us see that there is value in rethinking the techniques of photography as a mean to disrupt the all-too familiar patterns of visual thinking that inhabit wider social forms of representation. His aesthetics challenges 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”. David Bate. Art Photography. Tate Editions, London.

La Creciente series creates a wildly visual atmosphere, making us see that there is value in rethinking the techniques of photography as a mean to disrupt the all-too familiar patterns of visual thinking that inhabit wider social forms of representation. His aesthetics challenges 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”. David Bate. Art Photography. Tate Editions, London.

Following the most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan, the sheer scale of the tsunami that smashed into northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011 –together with the nuclear disaster that came along with it -, was unprecedented. Coastal communities were devastated by waves, which at their highest reached 40 meters above sea level, traveling up to 10 km inland. This project presents a visual documentation of destruction and loss, by connecting portraits of the Otsuchi survivors with family photographs recovered from the waters, swept away by the tsunami. The survivors of Otsuchi were portrayed in the spaces where their former homes and workplaces were located. The importance of the colors becomes crucial in this approach. The colors from the destroyed photographs - deformed and blurred images, altered by the effects of the salty water, sometimes creating new colors or mixing the former ones - are revalued on an exercise of color archeology, where each of the colors found in the destroyed photographs were used to colorize the portraits of the survivors.

Following the most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan, the sheer scale of the tsunami that smashed into northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011 –together with the nuclear disaster that came along with it -, was unprecedented. Coastal communities were devastated by waves, which at their highest reached 40 meters above sea level, traveling up to 10 km inland. This project presents a visual documentation of destruction and loss, by connecting portraits of the Otsuchi survivors with family photographs recovered from the waters, swept away by the tsunami. The survivors of Otsuchi were portrayed in the spaces where their former homes and workplaces were located. The importance of the colors becomes crucial in this approach. The colors from the destroyed photographs - deformed and blurred images, altered by the effects of the salty water, sometimes creating new colors or mixing the former ones - are revalued on an exercise of color archeology, where each of the colors found in the destroyed photographs were used to colorize the portraits of the survivors.

Following the most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan, the sheer scale of the tsunami that smashed into northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011 –together with the nuclear disaster that came along with it -, was unprecedented. Coastal communities were devastated by waves, which at their highest reached 40 meters above sea level, traveling up to 10 km inland. This project presents a visual documentation of destruction and loss, by connecting portraits of the Otsuchi survivors with family photographs recovered from the waters, swept away by the tsunami. The survivors of Otsuchi were portrayed in the spaces where their former homes and workplaces were located. The importance of the colors becomes crucial in this approach. The colors from the destroyed photographs - deformed and blurred images, altered by the effects of the salty water, sometimes creating new colors or mixing the former ones - are revalued on an exercise of color archeology, where each of the colors found in the destroyed photographs were used to colorize the portraits of the survivors.

Following the most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan, the sheer scale of the tsunami that smashed into northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011 –together with the nuclear disaster that came along with it -, was unprecedented. Coastal communities were devastated by waves, which at their highest reached 40 meters above sea level, traveling up to 10 km inland. This project presents a visual documentation of destruction and loss, by connecting portraits of the Otsuchi survivors with family photographs recovered from the waters, swept away by the tsunami. The survivors of Otsuchi were portrayed in the spaces where their former homes and workplaces were located. The importance of the colors becomes crucial in this approach. The colors from the destroyed photographs - deformed and blurred images, altered by the effects of the salty water, sometimes creating new colors or mixing the former ones - are revalued on an exercise of color archeology, where each of the colors found in the destroyed photographs were used to colorize the portraits of the survivors.