“La Estrella, 2000” (Tr—The Star.) By Adriana Groisman. © Scanned from Aperture Magazine for Blogfinger.net. Re-post from 2015 Blogfinger.net
By Paul Goldfinger, Photography Editor @Blogfinger
In the summer of 2003, the famous photography magazine Aperture contained a presentation of tango photographs by Adriana Groisman, a Buenos Aires-born artist who has become known for her tango work since she began this project in 1998.
The article contained an essay about tango which is a dance form known for its passion, eroticism, and intensity, but also for the music that goes along with it. I loved the tango score for the film the Last Tango in Paris with Marlon Brando, with the music composed by Argentinian saxophonist and jazz musician Gato Barbieri.
Some of you may also recall the tango scene with Al Pacino in The Scent of a Woman.
The Aperture piece contained a number of Groisman’s powerful black and white images that captured the emotional energies of tango. The image above struck me as the epitome of eroticism possible with dance. Tango seems to be the one dance form that is primarily about sex.
In the article, strangely enough for a photographic magazine, there was very little information about the artist or the images including the one above. There was no technical information whatsoever. But Aperture is usually mostly about the art of photography. Even when they show work by photojournalists like the Brazilian Sebastiao Salgadao, they only show those whose works easily fall into the fine art category as well.
Adriana Groisman now lives in New York, but we have no recent information about her. From 1998 until 2004, her list of exhibits on this theme of tango is quite extensive. In 2011 her book Tango—-Never Before Midnight was published.
Below is a video of the tango scene in “The Scent of a Woman.” It is wonderful, and I have watched it countless times. The music is by the father of tango song Carlos Gardel.