Rangefinder Magazine
May 2002

Profile: Eduardo Blidner by Bob Shell
“Tango Argentina”

I first became aware of Eduardo Blidner and his photography some years ago when an envelope from Argentina caught my eye in my day’s mail, and I learned of an avid photographer in Argentina who appreciated my work. Since that time I have kept up with Eduardo’s career in photography, and we have become friends. When Rangefinder asked me to write some photographer profiles for them, Eduardo was the first photographer I thought of.

I’m convinced that if Eduardo had not become a professional photographer he would have been a professional poet, since his words always have a poetic lilt and depth to them. His response, “Exposure in Rangefinder magazine would be great for me. Such exposure is food for the artist’s soul.” I have tried to tell as much of his story as possible in his own words.

Eduardo Blidner was born in Buenos Aires, the Capital of Argentina, in January of 1959. He recalls first becoming interested in photography at the age of 12, reading photography magazines while in school. The first camera he had was a Brownie Kodak with Dakon Lens. Later he was given the family camera a Voigtländer Vito III with an Ultron 50mm f/2 lens. As he grew more serious about photography he moved on to use a succession of cameras— Pentacon, Mamiya, Canon, Pentax—and he always had an obsession with Leica that became real 20 years ago when he got a Leica IIIc, which is still working fine today. Today his equipment for art photography is the Leica M6 and Leica lenses, as well as occasionally some older Leica models with original optics. Of the Leica he says, “It all is magic.” For his commercial photography he uses Canon T-90 in 35mm , Pentax 6x7 in medium format, and Cambo in 4x5.

His first formal study was with Grete Stern, probably the most prominent portraitist in Argentina. She worked in 6x6 and black and white with simple tools and was a master printer.

Of his time with her he says she was absolutely right but he was a young rebel and went his own way. Later he took art classes in the Instituto Nacional de Artes Visuales (Visual Arts National Institute), closed in 1976. He then went on to a University with the intention of making a career as an agronomic engineer. He says, “That engineer training was a great jump to help me become an investigator and reach the deeper side of this profession.” Today, when not working at his photography, he is an adviser and researcher for Santiago Distrifot in Buenos Aires, the largest import and distribution company in Argentina.

No one else in his family ever showed any interest in photography, he says, nothing beyond having family portraits shot in their home by professional photographers. In those early days Eduardo had no thought that he would become a professional photographer, just the knowledge that he wanted life to be an exploration. About this life exploration he says, “My philosophy is in direct relation with my life experience. The generation I’m part of is the one that placed its feet on an earth we could consider ours. Transitional by itself, this experience is the synthesis of those artists who explore one world with the heritage of another one. Every meaning is a surprise and every surprise brings another new meaning. The discovery of every message of the past is for that eternal moment, and that eternal photographic moment also.”

“Every moment in life is worth living and also capturing in pictures. It brings the concept of the precise moment for capturing images. Two different concepts and almost contradictory.

“The feeling my country transmits is a mixture of pain and passion in an indelible way. That contradiction also blends, and its style can be identified from far away—especially in images. It is like our lives are full of ancient natural ghosts, who originate in this earth, and the memory and mystery of visitors landed in a soil of fertile pagan strength. The surprise and memories emerge strongly from the urban-scape and invites adding a personal seal, hoping to make that moment indelible. Wonderfully for a photographer, the mystery is present at the light of the day, is a shadow that never vanishes.”

Eduardo Blidner is best known for his series “Tango Argentina,” a series of about 100 images, which he considers a finished work, but on which he has not closed the door to future images. From this group of 100, he typically selects from 35 to 60 images for his gallery exhibitions depending on the size of the gallery. His gallery exhibitions have been shown in Finland, the U.S., Italy, the UK, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Poland, No. Ireland, China, Czech Rep., and will be shown in the future in Romania, Russia, Latvia. Shows will be repeated in several places—the U.S., UK, Finland and Germany in 2002.

“Tango Argentina” began with his desire to document the urban landscape of Buenos Aires, and the popular arts that have developed there. He says that much of the city’s history and evolution have been shrouded in prohibition and censure, and as a result many ideas and much rich experience arising from this urban culture have disappeared. “It is the essence of that collective experience which inspires me to document popular art in Argentina. Here in the collective experience the forbidden has been hidden away and is almost beyond reach. I believe that my use of images is a search for that connection with the collective experience rather than a purely aesthetic or formal expression. I am interested not just in form but in history and geography of lives reflected so clearly in writings and anecdotes, and which were extinguished for such a long dark period by the censure of a society desirous to be seen as clean and sanitized.”

The tango is the national dance of Argentina, as most know. It is more than a dance, though. As Eduardo sees it, “Tango was and still is about the relationship between a man and a woman. Is it possible to hide the life-giving nature of an art which springs from so central an aspect of our lives? When we are able to create a conduit which brings together art and the unconscious, then the art will have a lasting quality.”

I noted that in many of his strongest photographs there is the tension of the triad, one woman, two men. “In many Tango songs, the triangle passion is present, in a subtle way we know about that tension, that desire, the passion and the pain we spoke about, present always in this art is visceral. From there to create the photographic image, it’s only a question of time: the relationship (between art and unconscious) becoming even richer. For this reason I’m interested in Tango, it has in the dance and songs a hidden language and erotic complicity. In the triangle those eras of excitement and ferment are not lost, simply clothed under some layers of secret language.”

The model who appears as Madame White in many of Eduardo’s images is one of his great collaborators, Andrea Cabrera Alonso. Her persona in these images is, “the representation of lust and desire in a past times way, a melancholic remembering of an image born in a Port City like Buenos Aires, a place that produced a singular song and singular images. South American erotic and flavored, a vanished woman raised on an old world later forbidden. In so many songs the central theme is dedicated to a woman that represents pleasure, implicit or explicit; later we’ll find that in other songs we will find the other classic image. Virginal and mother-looking-like, suffering, sacrificed, and never touched.

Madame White is the lusty woman who arrives at a place to meet with her lover and he never came, for that reason she dances alone. In other songs we’ll find them meeting.

His models are professional dancers, choreographers and actors. They were his customers first and later they all became friends. Andrea Cabrera Alonso is one of Argentina’s best dance artists, now in France working on her masters degree. She has posed for Eduardo for more than 15 years.

Sequence of a Blidner Photo Shoots
“With dancers and actors we meet and speak about a basic idea I’ve got. Later they tell me their point of view about dance poses. Later I scout the location after I’ve found the place I like. I first always make some photos with the place empty. When we are all together there, I’ll first work on improvisation and later I’ll do what I have planned. Why? Because everybody does things the opposite way! That’s right, but when we arrive at a place we all are artists. What emerges first and with great impulse is a collective creation that will not come again, never. It’s eruptive. After you’ve made it, the feeling is different.

“Later I feel in peace with myself and the others to make the images we have already brainstormed about.”
While Eduardo Blidner is best known for his black-and-white fine art images, he has also done a lot of color photography for his professional work, advertising and commercial productions. He says color is a great tool for documenting, like for models, fashion, cosmetics, hair dressers, industrial production, corporate, products for catalogues.

For his personal work he has chosen to use black and white because of its more essential quality. He says, “And by means of this essential we can reach that which is most hidden.

“The aesthetic form I have chosen enables me to access a cultural environment which is of great personal importance. Black and white has an abstract effect, that contributes very much to my re-creation of the past. If a culture has not retained the essential values which reflect a vision of life, art can savage those values by drawing on the hidden traces which have survived. This then is the work of contemporary art.”

For the future, Eduardo says he would love to create a book with his collection of images and text. This book would comprise sign and symbols he has found in an aesthetic of instinctive responses which exist before he consciously looks. My desire to see these secrets is subsequent to the initial impulse to search. Perhaps, he says, it existed in his unconscious and emerged first in images and then in words. He likens it to Fractal Geometry—a series of equations that help us to see the essential structure of things; where conventional formulas fail; a fractal seed contains the information of an entire history condensed in itself.

Eduardo Blidner is represented in the U.S. by Icebox Gallery of Minneapolis, MN.

He is very grateful to Howard Christopherson, the manager, who had trust in him and helped with his project for marketing his prints in the United States. You can see more of Eduardo Blidner’s work at www.iceboxminnesota.com, in the Gallery section, Past Shows, Year 2000, Tango Argentino Spirit of Buenos Aires.

An exhibit of Blidner’s work opens at Chicago’s Echo Gallery on May 18. For more information visit: www.EchoGallery.org.

Bob Shell is an internationally recognized technical expert on photography who has authored 18 books and thousands of magazine articles. He is technical photographic consultant to the National Geographic Society and Eastman Kodak Company; photo guru for www.BestStuff.com; and a contributor to photographic magazines in the U.S., Germany, UK, Italy and Russia. He conducts workshops and seminars worldwide. You can reach him via e-mail at bob@bobshell.com or visit www.bobshell.com.