La Creciente

La Creciente, a photobook by Argentinian photographer Alejandro CHASKIELBERG.

This is his representative work, created over three years spent in the Paraná River Delta. It is a collection of photographs that fantastically depict the daily lives of people living along the river using long exposure and moonlight.

CHASKIELBERG, who began his career as a photojournalist, attempted in this work not merely to document, but to "tell the story of the land from within." He lived with the islanders, crossing the river by small boat, and re-enacted scenes from their daily lives at night. Using the light of the full moon, flashlights, lanterns, and flashes, the photographs, taken with long exposures lasting 5 to 10 minutes, create a unique sense of time that drifts between reality and fantasy.

Furthermore, by freely controlling the focal plane with the tilt-shift function of a large format camera, he created spatial distortions and depths unfamiliar in ordinary photographs, emphasizing a dreamlike unreality. In addition to long exposures, the complex interplay of moonlight, ambient light, and flashlight beams creates screens with unique colorations, despite being nighttime scenes. This surreal sense of color is also a crucial element that characterizes this work.

Fishermen, loggers, children. While the people in the photographs are real inhabitants, their figures also resemble characters from myths or dreams. This expression, which is documentary photography yet simultaneously pregnant with fictionality, challenges the traditional concept of photography itself, which captures "moments."

The foreword is by Martin PARR. He described this work as "mature and new photography I have never seen before," highly praising it as a work that merges documentary and stylization at a high level.

[Title] La Creciente
[Publisher] Nazraeli Press
[Publication Date] 2011
[Pages] 64 pages
[Size] Approx. 313×289×13mm / 926g
[Format] Hardcover
[Language] English
[Title Reading] La Creciente
[Author/Editor, etc.] Alejandro CHASKIELBERG/Author, Martin PARR/Foreword
[Printing] -
[ISBN] 9781590053218
[Condition] Used [6] Good to Very Good (slight scuffs on corners of cover and spine, slight scuffs on endpaper)
[Accessories] None
[Featured In] -
[Related Exhibitions] -

Alejandro CHASKIELBERG (born 1977)

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1977. Photographer.

After working as a photojournalist, he established a unique photographic expression using long exposure and artificial light. He gained international attention for works that crossed the boundaries of documentary and staging, reality and fantasy.

In his representative work, La Creciente, he fantastically depicted the daily lives of people living in the Paraná River Delta in Argentina using moonlight and long exposure. In 2011, he was awarded World Photographer of the Year (Sony World Photography Awards).

His work is characterized by its social documentation combined with cinematic direction and a sense of color, and is highly regarded as a new possibility for contemporary documentary photography.

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