16/06/2026
In 2004 I travelled to Buenos Aires to immerse myself in the work of Jorge Luis Borges and to create a photographic project inspired by his writing.
It was a beautiful, unfortunate, and ultimately revealing experience.
Beautiful because I spent four months in the cafés of Buenos Aires, surrounded by books and notebooks, immersed in a bohemian atmosphere that reminded me of Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century. What struck me most was how many people seemed absorbed in reading or writing. I have never encountered that same culture of books in any other city.
Unfortunate because I had to discard nearly seventy percent of the ILFORD Pan F film I had brought with me. The film turned out to be defective. It was the same year Ilford entered receivership. By pushing the development of the remaining rolls far beyond their limits, I managed to salvage about twenty photographs. For years, they remained forgotten in a drawer.
Looking at them again today, in the fortieth anniversary year of Borges's death, I am surprised by how well they have endured. I still love them. In those images I can already see the first traces of the photographic language I would develop in the years that followed. It was street photography, though neither the photographs nor their author knew it yet.
Sometimes I think about all the pictures I made during that journey that I never managed to develop. And I find myself remembering a poem by Borges: The Unending Gift.
Perhaps those lost photographs still exist in some way. Not on photographic paper, but in memory and imagination. Like the painting in Borges's poem, they are no longer bound to a final form. They continue to change, to grow, to generate new meanings.
And perhaps that is why they have never really left me.
