The Brooklyn Rail

Some of the greatest photographers of any city come from “out of town.” This includes Armenian Antoin Sevruguin in Tehran, Garry Winogrand in Los Angeles, and even Eugène Atget, Parisian, yes, but an untethered, spectral flaneur, beyond the dreams of Baudelaire. Of course, there are cities that act as magnets for the rootless—photographic cities. Buenos Aires is one. It is synonymous with the camera habitués of its streets, from Horacio Coppola, child of Italian immigrants in the 1930s, and Egyptian Sameer Makarius in the 1950s, to today’s Facundo de Zuviria, a collector of the city’s ephemera, glimpsed in the painted signage of its storefront windows.

But before all, there was Harry Grant Olds. If there existed no trace of Buenos Aires but the glass plate and nitrate negatives H.G. Olds left behind it would be possible not simply to imagine a place called Buenos Aires, but to inhabit it, hate it, fall in love with it, and beyond that to believe that it actually existed. These remains were recently hunted, salvaged, and put into the marvelous book form, Espejos de Plata / Silver Mirrors, by photographer and archivist Alfredo Srur.

Who was H.G. Olds? His name is all wrong, neither Spanish nor Italian, the two immigrant nationalities that predominate in Argentina (and largely displaced indigenous people more than a century ago). Olds was an American commercial photographer who lived from 1868 to 1943 and worked in Ohio in the 1890s. His studio failed, which is why he got on a boat for Chile in 1899, and, after failing there, managed to get to a city big enough that he might be able to hang on. Most importantly, a city where there was not a lot of high-level competition. For several decades, Olds, perhaps imbued with the enthusiasm or gratitude of salvation, proceeded to photograph every location and aspect of Buenos Aires and its more distant locales, such as Rosario and Mar del Plata. He made his living on journalistic and other commissions, in addition to postcards, which he and a printer pioneered for the city.

But there were few physical photographs and no negatives, no sources for the images that people knew. One in particular obsessed Alfredo Srur. It shows a hut made of tin cans in the barrio of what is now Villa 1-11-14, but in 1901 was a vast dump for burning trash. A man leans against the hut, smoking, barely noticeable for all the smoke in the background. The image has the starkness of Arthur Rothstein’s FSA photograph of a Depression-era wooden shack in the midst of an Oklahoma dust storm. Srur investigated but made little headway until, in 2013, he met Mateo Giordano, who had received the entire studio hoard—a thousand plates—from Olds’s assistant

It took six months of negotiations for Srur to buy the archive, and he has been restoring, digitizing, printing, and exhibiting it ever since. He established and now directs the Centro de Investigación Fotográfico Histórico Argentino (CIFHA) to sustain the work and extend it with other important archives he has uncovered. Srur even traveled to Sandusky, Ohio, to acquire Olds’s trunk and a cache of his earliest photographs taken before he got to Argentina.

From the book, we might expect a love letter steeped in nostalgia, “mi Buenos Aires querido,” as the tango goes. Or a nationalistic reprise of ambition and expansion. But Srur’s own photographic practice of stark realism impels him to give us what Olds saw, unlaundered. Buenos Aires was first and foremost an immigrant city, teeming, vital, and desperate. Many of the most memorable images were taken in the neighborhood of La Boca, the docks, and except for the signage it is almost impossible to tell that you are not in the world of Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage, New York harbor circa 1907. The difference is that Olds was far more visually committed to individual humanity than Stieglitz ever was.

At the same time, the elegance of Buenos Aires was almost preposterous, astounding, enough to earn it the designation as a Paris of the palms. Unlike Atget, who photographed the city around the same time, Olds was not interested in a world passing away, but rather astonished at what had been built—and was growing. His overhead and ariel views of the city make it impossible to miss the prominence of Buenos Aires as a modern city, a world capital eclipsing all but Paris, London, and New York. It had its Plaza Hotel and its Edificio Kavanagh, a deco tower straight out of Flash Gordon. It also had its railyards and stockyards, and in the outlying districts its pampas and gauchos, celebrated in Borges’s early poems.

But most compellingly, it had its people. Fruit sellers, grave diggers, dock workers, policemen, street vendors of all kinds, remnants of indigenous communities, dwellers on the absolute margin who would never enter a photo studio. Olds has been likened to the German portraitist August Sander; his subjects have that dignity, but the photos have no pretensions to social typology. The people are just there, in their immediate reality, looking at us across the centuries. Regardless of whatever may have been Olds’s political sentiments, these photographs remind us that the glittering future is always purchased at the price of lives that will endure but never enjoy it.