From USA to Latin America: H.G. Olds Photo Archive

These were our last three months: November, December, January
By Alfredo Srur

Dear donors,

On this occasion we are pleased to share with you our work in the last three months and what were the objectives achieved, thanks also to the generous support we received. This is a brief summary of our activities:

In December we presented the book Confidential, Silvio Zuccheri. Works 1964 - 2020 with Graciela Montaldo, PhD in Literature, who talked with the photographer Silvio Zuccheri.

Montaldo was a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, Simon Bolivar University in Caracas, and a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Columbia University in New York. She wrote articles and essays for international books and magazines. Her books include: De pronto, el campo. Literatura argentina y tradición rural (1993); La sensibilidad amenazada. Fin de Siglo y Modernismo (1994); Teoría crítica, teoría cultural (1998); Ficciones culturales y fábulas de identidad en América Latina (1999); Intelectuales y artistas en la sociedad civil argentina en el fin de siglo (1999); Viajes de un cosmopolita extremo (2013) and Museo del consumo. Archives of mass culture in Argentina (2016).

Confidencial, Silvio Zuccheri consists of 128 pages and the print run is 400 copies. It has 67 photographs, the edition and foreword by Alfredo Srur, director of Cifha and an account of Zuccheri's personal and professional life reconstructed by the researcher, Mariana Rosales.

We presented Espejos de plata / Silver Mirrors at the Photo Gallery of the Teatro San Martín with Paola Cortés Rocca (essayist and cultural critic), Gabriel Margiotta (anthropologist) and Alfredo Srur, (director of the CIFHA Foundation).

This book is the result of a contemporary search applied to the recovered archive of one of the great masters of photography in South America at the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to narrating the personal life of Harry Grant Olds and his professional career in the United States, Chile and Argentina, this work includes new approaches based on the intervention of his archive.

For this book, the CIFHA Foundation worked on the recovery of the American photographer's collection, which contains a thousand large-format glass and nitrate negatives, more than three hundred vintage photographs, vintage postcards and his early ferrotypes and manuscripts.

This is the first limited edition of 25 copies produced in a non-industrial way with a handmade hardcover binding of 300 x 355 mm, 484 pages. Each copy has an analog photographic print made from the glass plate “369. Particular room in the garbage burning” created by Olds in 1901.

Workshops and educational initiatives: we successfully carried out another color analogical laboratory workshop, which was very well received by the students. In this way we continue to open the doors of our La Boca headquarters to amateurs, students and professionals of photography, so that they can deepen their knowledge.

From Fundación CIFHA we would like to thank all the institutions and organizations that trust us and support us, as well as the people who help and collaborate through donations so that we can continue to carry out week after week the tasks of preservation and dissemination of the collections and photographic holdings of our collection, and make possible their free and open access in our country and the world. In this way we encourage contemporary artistic practice and strengthen the recognition of Argentine photography in the rest of the continents.

We invite you to learn more about our project and the impact of your support by visiting our GlobalGiving page.

Thank you for your continued generosity.

Sincerely,

The CIFHA Foundation Team.

Links:

• https://www.cifha.org.ar/web/

These were our last three months of 2024
By Alfredo Srur

Dear donors,

On this occasion we are pleased to share with you how our work in the last three months and what were the objectives achieved, thanks also to the generous support we received. This is a brief summary of our activities:

The first solo exhibition of Silvio Zuccheri, one of the great exponents of Argentine photojournalism, opens in October. It will be held at 1101 Foto Espacio, the exhibition hall of Fundación CIFHA -Centro de Investigación Fotográfico Histórico Argentino-, in La Boca. On this occasion, “Reportero Gráfico” (Graphic Reporter), the first exhibition of photographer Silvio Zuccheri, will be presented, with a selection of his works from 1964 to 1999. It will be open to the public with free admission.

Silvio “Mickey” Zuccheri was a key photographer of the 1980s in Argentina, between the agony of the dictatorship and the return to democracy, who donated to the CIFHA Foundation his archive of more than 300,000 images from his 60-year career.

We printed 20 collectible copies of the most complete Harry Grant Olds anthology: after an exhaustive research and production work, we printed the first twenty editions of “Espejos de Plata / Silver Mirrors”, a deluxe anthology that narrates the life of Harry Grant Olds: his professional career in the United States, Chile and Argentina, which made him one of the most outstanding photographers in our history.

With a prologue by curator Ariel Authier and essays by researchers Alejandra Uslenghi (professor at Northwestern University) and Gabriel Margiotta (anthropologist and Conicet fellow), this is a collection book that synthesizes eleven years of work with the Harry Grant Olds Fund (1870 - 1943), an archive that also constituted the foundation stone of Fundación CIFHA, in 2013. There are almost 500 pages and more than 300 photographs that cover the life of the man born in Sandusky, Ohio, in 1868.

Workshops and educational initiatives: we successfully carried out a new black and white analogical laboratory workshop, and for the second time we held another color analogical laboratory workshop, which was very well received by the students. In this way we continue to open the doors of our La Boca headquarters to amateurs, students and professionals of photography, so that they can deepen their knowledge.

On July 5, we were honored to receive at Fundación CIFHA the visits of the U.S. Ambassador to Argentina, Marc Stanley, and the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Gary Tinterow. We toured the exhibition “The Foreigner” by Harry Grant Olds, in 1101 Foto Espacio, the rest of our facilities, and shared with the ambassador the photographs that his compatriot took in our country more than 120 years ago.

From Fundación CIFHA we would like to thank all the institutions and organizations that trust us and support us, as well as the people who help and collaborate through donations so that we can continue to carry out week after week the tasks of preservation and dissemination of the collections and photographic holdings of our collection, and make possible their free and open access in our country and the world. In this way we encourage contemporary artistic practice and strengthen the recognition of Argentine photography in the rest of the continents.

We invite you to learn more about our project and the impact of your support by visiting our GlobalGiving page.

Thank you for your continued generosity.

Sincerely,

The CIFHA Foundation Team.