The painful beauties of Adriana Lestido

Text by Josefina Licitra, photos by Adriana Lestido Translated by Ted O’Callahan

I

“It all happens through simplifying,” she says. “That simplifying is my work.”

Adriana Lestido is facing a large window in a ninth-floor apartment. Through the glass she can see a sliver of the San Cristóbal neighborhood. The ceilings, the terraces, the window sills: the whole city is touched by a pale light that reaches, like a weary hand, toward Adriana’s face.
“Sometimes I compare it to a writer confronted with a blank page. But for me the page is never blank. It is always full of things, and I must purify it. It is almost like the task of a sculptor. After the purifying, all that remains to be seen is the essential.”
Her eyes: shadowy lines still veiled at the arrival of the day. Her face is dark even now, at eleven in the morning, in San Cristóbal, the sun falling quietly on the shoulders of the buildings.
“At this point in my life, I feel the need to take on a big project. I’m not concerned with anything else. The only thing that I believe in is necessity.”
“What necessity?”
“The necessity to simplify myself.”

II

There were many long years before Adriana became one of the most influential documentary photographers of recent decades. Before she became the first Argentine photographer to receive the prestigious Guggenheim fellowship (1995). Before she won grants and prizes from organizations like Hasselblad and Mother Jones. Before all of that, there was one first photo. It wasn’t one of Adriana’s own but a picture by Dorothea Lange. One of the many that Lange made while recording America’s Great Depression: a woman with her children, sunk in the hopelessness of those terrible days.
Adriana saw that image and knew, in her body before the rest of her caught on, that she was going to be a photographer. By the end of the ’70s, she was taking pictures of children in the plazas. And in 1982, she took a job as a photojournalist for the newspaper La Voz, where she worked until 1984, when she joined the Diarios y Noticias (DyN) Agency.

In the midst of all that, there was a morning.
A morning in 1982, when Adriana had been assigned to cover a protest where thousands were demanding answers from the military dictatorship about the ‘disappeared.’ Adriana — who had joined La Voz just a week earlier — was twenty-seven years old. She carried her one camera. That was enough to see: a mother and daughter, white handkerchiefs on their heads, crying out their pain and fury over a man — husband and father — from whom they waited for some sign of life. A sign that would never come. The scene rewrote, in its way, the Dorothea Lange photo: the emptiness, anguish, and solitude felt by the women captured their time and place.
Adriana took the photo.
And with that she had begun.

© Adriana Lestido, 1982

III

Infants and Children’s Hospital (1986/88); Adolescent Mothers (1988/90); Imprisoned Women (1991/93); Mothers and Daughters (1995/98); Love (1992/2005): these series and essays, taken over the course of three decades, were reedited in 2008 to comprise What Is Seen (1979-2007), a retrospective exhibition that Adriana worked on for two years. Each of those photos, tied to one another by sutures, formed —  and they continue to be made —  the postcards of a broken universe; of a solitude like a game of Russian dolls in which inside each emptiness is another emptiness. And where, at the bottom of it all, is beauty.
“The truth is beautiful, however terrible it might be. I look for the true thing because, sadly, that’s where the beauty will be. Although I also look for the light. I enter the darkness to move beyond it. That’s the reason to enter hell, right? To move past it.”
Editing these photos was an archaeological exercise; an exquisite work, done to discover, with just the aid of a brush, the bones of the thing. From the piles of images, the discarding, the months of confinement, the finds, the meditation, the readings, from memory and from the unspeakable, Adriana finally arrived at herself.
They moved past it all — Adriana and her bones.
“I always look for the same thing,” she says. “I always go to the same place: to the center. In some ways, I believe that all the work that came before was what I had to do to get inside. To empty myself, to get free of myself. Just now, with the two series Love and Villa Gesell, I am finishing with that stage.”
This period that she is finally finishing with was made up of photos of women. But more than that, each of the people portrayed was suffused with suffering. A trip to the edge of ashes, to a place where the soul of things shines — sad and singular.

© Pablo Corral Vega

Adriana says yes, that is some of what the work is about. But torment is also tied to tenderness.
“Yes, yes, I suffer a little,” she smiles. “It is not that I take photographs of suffering, but I connect with the pain of others and translate it. Mine is almost the work of a medium, of channeling, and because of that, I need to be light. That’s why I spoke of needing to be simplified. Somehow I connect from the emptiness. And from there I see. But the seeing is not an intellectual process. It is more unconscious. I do not photograph what I see, because if I have already seen it… why would I want to see it in on paper? In fact, what I want to see is what my eye hasn’t seen. What I perceived but didn’t quite see.”
Adriana worked on Mothers and Daughters, the essay that appears in Nuestra Mirada, for three years. During that time she followed four women and their daughters closely — Eugenia and Violeta, Alma and Maura, Mary and Stella, Marta and Naná — and she managed to enter the sacred place of an inviolable relationship.
Adriana became them. Through the lens, Adriana saw them as they see themselves.