Daniel Muchiut
© Daniel Muchiut
About the beautiful and the sad
By Marcos Zimmermann for the magazine Ñ of the newspaper Clarín.
* Please note that the orginal text was in Spanish. Google tranlate was used to convert Spanish to English. Not perfect but the ideas are intact.
Without leaving his native Chivilcoy, except for photographing Wichis and Tobas, Daniel Muchiut has portrayed his village and painted the world.
Miguel Rodríguez, the extraordinary director of Argentine photography born in Oran, responsible for the most exquisite images that have been made in our cinema, said that the Greeks had built the most developed culture with the most primitive means and the most primitive culture with the most developed media. This phrase could describe many of the cultural experiences that exist today in the interior of our country that speak of their own things only by virtue of the truth contained in their messages. This is the case of Daniel Muchiut, a surprising photographer born in Chivilcoy.
Muchiut has been developing a prolific photographic work that has almost never needed to leave his town, nor to renew the austere photographic equipment he has used for all his work. There, Muchiut tirelessly exercises his passion to portray the less showy aspects of his town, to turn them into fundamental pieces when it comes to telling and understanding some features of our country. But in addition, the singular thing about his work is that when looking at any of the more than twenty photographic essays he has built for many more years, one realizes that, in reality, rather than telling his own place, his photographs speak of the world.
It is that the reasons for this universality of his work are, of course, mysterious. Perhaps it is that there is nothing in it folkloric, much less the exaltation of the pampeano. The truth is that his essays could be transported to other latitudes without losing validity, meaning or substance, but at the same time, when looking at each of his photographs, one is sure to be facing a deeply Argentine work. The key is, it seems to me, Muchiut's essential asceticism to face the reality that touches him and the direct way he always chose to express it. Perhaps it is his capacity to show with simplicity the deepest - something only the great artists are capable of - that which brings the work of Muchiut closer to the way the Greeks had to build their world, and which extolled Rodriguez's phrase.
Muchiut has a poor background selling his bicycle to buy his first camera. One of his grandparents came from Italy after the First War and the other moved to Chivilcoy from Trenel (a tiny town in La Pampa) being expelled by a great drought, to live barely under a precarious sheet of veneers for a long time. His father met his mother at a simple village dance.
Then his adolescence fluctuates between drawing and politics. This leads him to leave the secondary school, which he is now just finishing almost together with his children. Later, he begins to work as a photocromista in a press and soon after, he has his first opportunity to make photographs by order of the same press. At that time he made his first photographs of plants. "I was going around Chivilcoy and I liked to photograph them. He saw things in their forms: monsters and bodies of women. Muchiut, confirms an imagination in 1999 to make a long series of photographs of dying sunflowers in homage to the Kosovo war and inspired by "La Loneliness of crows" by Japanese Masahisa Fukase. One day, on a walk, he encounters a clay oven that makes bricks and starts photographing it for more than a year. The result: "Men of mud" (1989/1990/2001) his first complete essay, composed of some twenty photographs where the bodies of the workers are confused with the earth and the earth with their bodies in a kind of double mirror of mud that reflects the true face of marginality, but also alludes to the material with which, according to an ancient myth, the first man was built ... and Muchiut's first essay. "I belong to the same class as my photographers and this facilitates contact. I feel that, as Eugene Smith said, my photographs could give a certain voice to those who have no voice. " In this way, Daniel has constructed his essays as one who weaves the plot of pain.
Shortly after, he leaves for the north of Argentina, to realize the only images realized outside Chivilcoy that exist in his work. On the first trip, in 1992, he photographed some Aboriginal communities Wichis and Tobas from El Colchón and Techat, from the Chaco. In the second and third, in 1996, portrays the communities of Mission Tacaglé and San Martin II of Formosa. In both works, for Muchiut, his manner of artistic protest is synthesized by the controversial celebrations of the five hundred years of the discovery of America. One of these works ends with a series of ten portraits taken in the first plane, absolutely moving, where various members of the Pilagá community of San Martin II are transformed into others. The series begins with the face of a child and ends with a grandfather. They report a growth. And, although they are different people, they seem the same personage aging. As if in an act of photographic shamanism, Muchiut managed to fuse an entire ethnicity into a single blood.
Later comes "The factory" (1993/1994) a work on the ghosts of an industry abandoned in Chivilcoy, made by "not buy me new pants and yes photographic paper," he confesses. They were the times of Menem and, together with the factory closures from which many people were left without work, Muchiut creates a symbolic and very special essay: "Vida de perros" (1994/1995). And, if it seemed that after Elliot Erwitt there could be nothing new in photography about these animals, Muchiut proves otherwise. Because, unlike the dogs of Erwitt, those of Muchiut are working dogs. Thus, a pack of hare hunters, belonging to the same farewell people of the factory that had previously photographed, constitute this exquisite essay on love, necessity and violence, that transforms loins, tails or multiplied heads of these animals In almost abstract and metaphorical compositions about the hunger that marked that time in the interior of Argentina. I discovered that dogs talked as much or more than people about violence and hopelessness.
"The children of the earth" (1996), "El geriátrico" (1995/1996), "Cenizas" (1997) and "La mirada del adiós" (1998) and several other works are rooted in a productive irrepressible of those years. Later, his essay "The Life of Oscar", made between 2000 and 2001, takes a man who came out of jail where he had been sent by mistake, to live in an abandoned car, on the outskirts of Chivilcoy. The work is a portrait of extreme poverty. In it, the bags of waste mix with the man until blurring their limits. "I've often wondered how I could talk so much from a place as small as Chivilcoy," asks Muchiut suddenly. "Surely it is the need", he reflects immediately.
When he believed that almost everything was said "Simply Maria" (1998/2001) and "El matador y María" (2001/2002) his first work in color. In the first, he portrays Maria fighting for her son and in the second, a worker from a slaughterhouse and a prostitute. "This is a story that deserved to be told," Muchiut replies, referring to the grieving woman. Although, almost jointly, I had the need to do work on blood after the events that ended dramatically with the fall of De la Rua" he explains. This work is, in my opinion, the strongest that Daniel Muchiut did. A slaughterhouse in which beasts and men portrayed without concessions. Bodies of mutilated animals and blood, blood and more blood. Touching, extremely violent and, at the same time, extraordinarily sensitive. Muchiut's last two works become more introspective. In the first, Dr. Roberto Vacarezza, a clinic that had been closed years ago in Alberti, a town near Chivilcoy, was introduced into the medical institute, and whose furniture, objects and belongings had been frozen in time, in the same place In which they were the day that the place had closed. There he talks about the past, about the memory and elaborates a reflection of the time that feels that happens, that flows, that leaves.
In "La casa", exhibited in the Photo Gallery of the San Martín Theater, Muchiut becomes conceptual, which retakes in "Relative", a work that rescues the family memory through some old photos and letters found in a box and photographs under water, almost like making a comparison with a shipwreck of something that does not know to determine, but that calls it from a recessed and indeterminate place.
When finally asked how he sees the future of Argentine photography, Muchiut responds with caution. "I do not want to make mistakes in my reading. I am far from Buenos Aires and it would be easy to err. But I think time is playing in favor of the authors I admired and believed. It would have to wait, anyway, to see what is true and what is not. The colorful mirrors offered by the market sooner or later play against the author. The truth, in a moment arises. What does not have sustenance, however, decanta alone ... "I leave for Buenos Aires. The night begins and the same field that I saw happening to the going seems to me now full of things. More populated with real beings and suffering. Perhaps it is the effect that the photographs of Muchiut have left. A photographer whose subject matter arises from the very interior of Argentina.
You need to walk around the world to tell what is happening around the world. An austere observer in the media but just in the look, who manages to express raw reality through sensitive photographs.
Images that transform this poor photographer into a very rich artist.
© Daniel Muchiut
© Marcos Zimmermann
Unless noted all images on this page © Daniel Muchiut