Experiences and photographic experimentation in Argentina in the seventies

Abstract

Despite the fact that photographic experimentalism in Latin America, and particularly in Argentina, has been constantly displaced from the lines of historical and socio-cultural research on the arts and visual culture, in recent years this aesthetic phenomenon has acquired greater relevance in research on the medium. In this article I propose to analyze the discourses and practices on the experimentation of technical images in the Argentina of the seventies. During this decade, exhibitions of the photographic medium were held that showed the interest of several photographic groups in exploring the material possibilities of the photographic image in the key of an aesthetic anti-conventionalism. To carry out this work, we will first investigate the debates on photographic experimentalism, understood from various perspectives as a specific understanding of the medium, and then determine the links between these conceptions of photography and the cases of the Manifesto of the Experimental Photographic Group, the direct shots of the Beta Group presented in Lirolay and the photograms exhibited in Visual Experiences with Photographic Media in Odin’s Gallery. Finally, we will examine the place of the technique as a material substrate that made possible to set the photographic experiments in this context.