‍We see faint green walls, the floor the same colour, a worn-out deep brown wooden desk, two steel bar stools with orange seats, a barren fluorescent tube hanging above the scene and local trumpery as decoration. History bleeds from the highly descriptive and factual, but none less poetic, photograph. This is Bar Melón in Del Carril, Buenos Aires Province, highly exemplary of the many bars in Argentina that Guillermo Srodek-Hart photographed during a period of ten years. His photographs are collected in his perfectly printed book Stories.

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How did this anthology of the rural bars and shops come about? Argentinian photographer Guillermo Srodek-Hart says, “The stores and shops came as my personal interest in small-town rural Argentina. I wanted to create a documentary project without recurring to a ‘street documentary’ style. I wanted to photograph in an anthropological way, create an archive for posterity, a time capsule. I had always admired the style and the intention behind Atget’s Paris, Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York, the FSA work by Walker Evans, and my mentor from the Museum School in Boston, Jim Dow (who worked for Evans). What I saw here, and perhaps it’s more along the lines of Atget, was that these amazing old shops in rural towns were dying with their owners, and hence the whole town was changing because of the imminent closure of such iconic places. These stores grant a particular identity and pride to the town, and they were at a generational changing point. My goal was to try to capture as many as possible before they died, and yes, the death of the owner is directly related to the death of the store.” Saying this, Srodek-Hart resumes that the subject matter is the bars, but the subject itself is the passage of time and death and how photography can preserve a slice of both. “My interest in time and death came when my grandfather passed in 2001. Death and loss became real.”

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Stories

Guillermo Srodek-Hart, born in Buenos Aires and trained in the USA, enjoyed meeting and establishing relationships with the shop owners. “I learn about their ways and listen to their stories, sometimes have lasting friendships. In a way, they are my grandfathers. The more I did, the more I realized there were two common denominators to all of them. One was the fact that what they do is what keeps them alive. They stay busy, they feel vital, useful, and life is interesting. When they cannot work anymore, when the shop closes, their life ends with it.”

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As the second denominator the photographer mentions the passion the locals have for their work. “Carpenters, shop owners, welders, bartenders, general store clerks, tinsmiths, they all love what they do. It is not about money, not about business; it is purely an artisan’s work, a trade that makes them unique. In a way, I feel connected to them as I feel the same way when I ask myself why I decided to be an artist. We both do what we do because we are passionate about it. The profit is the satisfaction that comes from doing something well.”

In order to capture more of their stories, Guillermo visited them years later and conducted informal interviews where they talked about subjects like history, life, passion, and trade. “Later, I turned them into short, 3-minute ‘portraits’ of each individual and uploaded them to my site and to Vimeo. They speak wisdom to me.”
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Globalization

Looking at the photos in the book Stories makes you feel as if time is paused and having trouble starting up again. The invisible artisans and their shops seem to survive the globalisation that created uniform chains of junk food and prefab shops, but probably not for long. There will be a loss of identity, a loss of the original aura of the last remnants of rural, small-town life. “The message of Stories has a lot to do with the changes in the socio-economic world and how it affects the small towns. Globalization, modernity, whatever you want to call it, the truth is that most of the younger generations don’t want to live in small towns anymore. And they have a point. The roads are a mess, health and education are not at their best, inevitably if you want to finish your studies and get a competitive job, you need to move out. That makes people migrate to larger towns or cities. Of course, some like the small-town life and decide to stay, but even so, the trade is seldomly continued.”
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People

The images' beauty can be related to the Atget-like frugality, omitting people and showing the decaying interiors. “I am asked why I don’t include people in the photos, and my reply is that the place is the portrait of the owner. His or her life is right there, in all those details. They have witnessed the town’s history, they are a story in themselves, and they are impossible to replicate. When I walk into one of these stores, I just know that it is a one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable, sacred place. The feeling I have when I walk into one of these places is that I am about to photograph a rare animal in extinction.”
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Argentina

Argentina has a mixed sound of success and failure, thriving cities and a vast agricultural industry, a poverty-stricken population, and a painful history. How does this project relate to this South American country? “Argentina has a melancholic feeling. We have a saying here that we are damned to success. The lands are fertile, the weather is a blessing, yet we cannot manage to get things right. Socially, politically, economically, it’s always the same story. Nostalgia is embedded in the culture. It is everywhere, like in tango music, in abandoned railroads, or in these disappearing shops. Here, the past was always better. I have wondered what kind of photos I would take if I would make a trip to another South American country. But I have only gone to Uruguay, which is very much like Argentina. You ask about my comment to the world, and if there is one, it would be to use your time right, make something meaningful, leave something good behind. These shops, I think, have that message. Hard work, passion, love, community, friendship.”
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Ebony field camera

The beautifully composed and utterly detailed photos did not come about with an ordinary digital DSLR, which apparently might also be a curse in these historic environments. Srodek-Hart used a Japanese wooden 4x5 inch foldable field camera.

“I use a large format 4x5 Ebony field camera with multiple lenses. The two lenses I use the most are wide angles, the 90mm and the 75mm. I always try to go for time exposures to preserve the vibe as accurately as possible; I love the way mixed temperatures from different light sources render. If the darkest dark and the brightest light are way off, I compensate for the exposure using a portable strobe. Some exposures might last a couple of minutes.

The photographer tried to avoid Scheimpflug corrections, but that was not always possible. “I try to use the camera as a box to avoid aberrations in the edges, but on occasions, I have ended up doing tilts and shifts to get the picture right. I have found myself cornered up between a wall and my tripod, with very little space to move, covered in dust and cobwebs, but to me, the composition is crucial; I want everyone to see the details seeing before me. It is also through wide angles that the mood of the place permeates the best. I will do what it takes to get the picture right even if I walk out with a stiff neck.”

The 4x5 inch negatives are scanned with a professional flatbed scanner using wet scan technique and are digitalized with minimal retouching in Photoshop. “I never delete or add anything, and I never touch the scene when I photograph it. Many times, I am asked if these photos are staged, and the answer is no. They are as close to what you’d see if you were there with me.”
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Atget and Chambi

Guillermo Srodek-Hart has been deeply inspired by his professors in art school. They showed him that it was possible to become what you wanted. “I adore Chambi because of how versatile and smart he was. I visited his archive in Cuzco and saw how much he produced, how complete and prolific he was. His energy is always there. Also, he is one of the first Latin American photographers to put us on the international map. On an aesthetic level, Eugene Atget and Walker Evans are always present for me, and I also want to name Fernando Paillet, who is one of my heroes, an Argentine small-town photographer from the early 20th century.”
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Guillermo Srodek-Hart was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1977, and grew up in a multicultural and multilingual family. He attended art school at The School of The Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University (B.F.A.D., 2004) and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (M.F.A., 2008) in Boston, MA. When his grandfather, a person of great importance to him, passed away in 2001, Srodek-Hart began to conceive death, memory, and the passage of time as central to his artistic focus.

He has shown extensively with his Berlin gallery Kuckei+Kuckei, as well as in the Architektur Gallery in Munich, Janet Borden Gallery in NY, Museo Es Baluard in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, as well as ARCO Madrid. In 2018 he co-curated a show with Jim Dow called ‘Congruences’ which was featured at FOLA in Buenos Aires, with work by Walker Evans and Fernando Paillet in dialogue with theirs. Later it went to Centro de la Fotografía and Kavlin Center in Uruguay. He has shown in the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Paris Photo, Unseen Photo in Holland, Biennale of Asunción in Paraguay, Biennale of Montevideo in Uruguay, Biennale of Curitiba in Brazil as well as São Paulo Arte, and in 2013, the 55th Venice Biennale in Italy, representing Argentina in ‘The Atlas of the Empire.’