Francisco Medail and Juan Cruz Pedroni. Editorial institute of artistic studies. Buenos Aires. 2024. In 4° (23 x 16.8 cm), 88 pages. Publisher's binding with wide flaps. Edited with the support of Patronage / Buenos Aires.
The history of photography is littered with discoveries that reveal works made by notable camera professionals, works that until then were unknown to the general public, and even to art historians and critics, and collectors.
A new fortuitous episode gave rise to the book that has come into our hands with the creations of Jaime Bolotinsky (1894 - 1967), creator of a style that he called "photoplastic." Edited by Francisco Medail and with texts authored by him and Juan Cruz Pedroni, this is the first title of the Institute of Artistic Studies seal, another nod to the journey of modern photography in Argentina.
Bolotinsky, a native of Ukraine, exhibited for the first time in Buenos Aires in 1933 in the halls of Nordiska Kompaniet, and he did so with a very good impact among critics, occupying pages in the magazines Ímpetu, Desfile, in the newspaper La Prensa, and in Graphic News and The Weekly Novel, in addition to the article dedicated to him by the director of the South American Photographic Mail, Alejandro C. Del Conte, where he expressed his amazement at that gift "of combining so much with nothing." Among other judgments, in Parade they indicated that «The strange art of Jaime Bolotinsky consists of giving soul to a piece of fabric, a cut of paper, a handful of wool. With the most heterogeneous elements he creates men, he creates landscapes, he creates animals.
Immersed in different currents and in a very special artistic time, Bolotinsky provokes in Medail and Pedroni a search for those sources, and in their texts they bring us reflections linked to surrealism, the immigration of artists from Eastern Europe, and among other topics, the development of cinematography and also marketing.
Jaime Bolotinsky was the owner of Foto Nobel, a classic neighborhood business located on 4000 Santa Fe Avenue, in the heart of Palermo, where "you could breathe a climate of photography twenty-four hours a day," remember his children Berta and Bernardo, she is 90 Aprils, and four years younger than him. They both collaborated with his father, an artist who today comes to light again in this chronological game of lights and shadows, which is essentially photography, his passion.
For lovers of this artistic discipline and for scholars and connoisseurs of the arts in general, a book that surprises and is enjoyable.