Guillermo Srodek-Hart

For the third time (after 2013 and 2015) we are presenting works by the Argentinean photographer Guillermo Srodek-Hart in our gallery.

For ten years, Guillermo Srodek-Hart roamed thousands of kilometres of remote country roads in Argentina, documenting with his camera handicraft businesses, small shops and bars in the pampas. The living environments photographed by Srodek-Hart are from another time and today, just like the corner shops in Europe, doomed to disappear. He photographed the workplaces of welders, butchers, shoemakers, grocers, bakers, rope makers, mechanics, pharmacists, bartenders and general stores.

He met craftsmen with skills that were more in demand in other eras, and he found shops that had long since been replaced elsewhere by chain shops. When he began to take photographs, he concentrated on interiors. Almost all motifs are deserted. The interiors are depicted by him in the tradition of the still life. They are places without glamour, but full of dedication to his own craft. For the people who work here, says Srodek-Hart, the shops are “their place in the world. They define their lives by what they do and where they do it.”

For many of these places, Srodek-Hart’s photograph is the last image of a disappearing world.

Guillermo Srodek-Hart was born in Buenos Aires in 1977. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Boston and the College of Art Boston, where he received his MFA in 2008. In 2005 he received the “Jorge Klemm Award” and in 2006 he received the “Petrobras Award”. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Argentina, Europe and the USA. In 2013 his “stories” were shown at the 55th Venice Biennale.