This work by contemporary photographer Guillermo Srodek-Hart is a classic sample of the Argentinian artist’s most established body of work to date. This photograph, available in three sizes, is from the Stories series and appears in the artist’s monograph by the same name. Samples from this body of work exhibited at the gallery in 2014, though this image is being presented by jdc Fine Art for the first time in our 10 Year Anniversary Show, Time in two directions.

Srodek-Hart captures a way of life that is going extinct with a large format camera that faces a similar future. The old ways of living and working are being lost to “progress.” The grit and beauty of rural life, where generations attach to land or dedicate to trade are being abandoned and the methods are thus terminally fated. There is a somberness and a bravery to Srodek-Hart’s photographs. The makers working in these places endure while elsewhere the world has changed, “evolved” to the extent that few of us can build our own chair, bake our own bread, or grow our own food. To live off the land seems archaic but natural, and suddenly we realize- lost to most of us. Guillermo Srodek-Hart’s photographs strike as romantic, heroic even, as they speak to human ingenuity, persistence, and self-sufficiency. For the Artist, this project was a quest of discovery and documentation, but the result was more than preservation or archive. These photographs act as a living document- not only a frame on place but a portrait. Srodek-Hart captures more than disappearing places and bygone ways of life but part of a free human spirit lingering in them. Man’s mark echoes in the wear-patters of the floorboards and paint chipped walls, personality speaks through organized or disheveled workspaces. The artist’s description of this wood shop appears in the Stores book follows:

Miguel Colonna learned the trade when he was a kid. He didn’t like to study so he dropped out of school and began as an apprentice in a wood shop around the corner from where he lived. Paradoxically, when he grew up he ended up as a teacher in a trade school. For the first class meeting he would begin by saying, “Wood is always present in our lives. When we are born, we are put in a cradle made of wood, and when we die, we are put in a coffin made of wood. It’s a material that follows us through our entire lifetime.”