“To be able to see the book of my life,” by Gaby Herbstein
By DCist contributor Alan Henney
As FotoWeek DC expands its international reach this month, area embassies are opening up their ornate doors as exhibit venues. The ninth annual celebration of photography features more than 150 events and exhibits throughout the city, and this year, the Embassy of Argentina alone hosts three exhibits.
In conjunction with the Inter-American Development Bank, the Embassy of Argentina opened up one of the first shows in this year’s festival on Monday night. States of Consciousness presents new work by Gaby Herbstein, a Latin American photographer with a career spanning more than 20 years.
This is the first time that the IDB Staff Association Art Gallery is participating in FotoWeekDC. IDB program coordinator Monica Medina-Porro said the exhibit, “invites us to engage our lives in a world in a different way by becoming more conscious of every opportunity that comes into our life; to become more human with ourselves, with others, with our planet, so that we are fully engaged and have a full relationship with everything that encompasses life.”
This is Herbstein’s first exhibit in Washington, and she prefers not to interpret her work, “because I might like your interpretation better than mine!” Still, she shared her thought process for a photo titled, “To be able to see the book of my life” (which you can see at the top of this post). “When you see the big picture, you understand that you have everything.”
The embassies and other institutions have collaborated closely for FotoWeekDC “Photography is a great medium because in one second with the lens and with the eye of the artist, you can capture something wonderful that remains there for eternity,” says Alfredo Ratinoff, the exhibit’s co-curator along with Vicky Salías. “Photography can change and make reality. We can stop the reality, fragment it, change it, put it together, add to it, and turn it into a work of art.”
From Lord of the Mangrove by Felipe Jácome
The Embassy of Argentina unveils two more FotoWeekDC exhibits in the coming week. Natalia Terry’s Expressions, which celebrates dance and movement, opens November 14. “It should be visited and viewed in slow pace because it is very intense,” adds Ratinoff, “But at the same time [it] has a tremendous message, the message of disintegration of the body, and the beauty of the human body.”
A Hidden City:Through the Lens of Young Argentinean Photographers also opens on the 14th. The show is the first opportunity for these young photographers to exhibit works in the United States. “It is like making a dream come true” for the children, Ratinoff says. “I want people to come over and see something that I always believed kids can do: Be the dreamers of their dreams and with a very strong reality and strong sense of reality,” he says.
Other embassy exhibits during FotoWeekDC include:
From the Arctic Circle to the rainforests of Borneo, Spirit of the Wild at the Embassy of Sweden shows the work of natural history photographer Mattias Klum.
North is Freedom: the Legacy of the Underground Railroad at the Embassy of Canada presents Yuri Dojc’s portraits of freedom seekers’ descendants.
Lord of the Mangrove at the Embassy of Ecuador is Felipe Jácome’s project documenting people in the northwestern corner of Ecuador who make a living by gathering the black shells of huge mangrove trees.
The FotoWeekDC 2016 Opening Party is Friday at 7:30 p.m. Buy tickets here, and check the FotoWeekDC website for daily events.
