Was zu sehen ist / Lo Que Se Ve
Adriana Lestido
Born in 1955, Argentinian photographer Adriana Lestido became known for her socially and politically committed work. Her photograph "Mother and daughter in the Plaza de Mayo", taken during a demonstration in the last year of the military dictatorship (1982), went around the world. The artist works exclusively in analogue. The majority of her photographs were taken in Argentina. She succeeds in telling very personal stories that simultaneously contain an essence of humanity, so that they directly touch viewers everywhere. These are stories from real life, but they go far beyond the purely documentary.
Women are often the protagonists of her pictures: "Young Mothers", "Mothers and Daughters" and "Imprisoned Women" are three of her series in which she gets incredibly close to her models, even if the camera is sometimes far away. These are tough pictures, you could even say unvarnished. But regardless of whether Lestido is portraying people in crisis situations on the margins of society or whether she is composing series from landscapes and still lifes: Design and aesthetics are just as important to the artist as the message of the image; her visual language is always poetic too. For Adriana Lestido, photography is a means of expressing and understanding the mystery of human relationships. The vulnerability of human beings is always at the centre of her work.
