From USA to Latin America: H.G. Olds Photo Archive

Dear donors,

On this occasion we are pleased to share with you how our work in the first half of 2024 went and what were the objectives achieved, thanks also to the generous support we received. This is a brief summary of our activities:

Exhibitions: After nine months on display in our art gallery, 1101 Foto Espacio, we closed the doors on “The Foreigner,” this selection of portraits by American photographer Harry Grant Olds that was visited by hundreds of people. In addition to the usual guided tour, the closing was with a talk and the screening of the short documentary film “The Travels of H.G. Olds”, which can be seen in its entirety on our YouTube channel. Now we continue working on the next exhibition, whose protagonist is Silvio Zuccheri, one of the greatest exponents of Argentine photojournalism, who donated his archive of more than 300 thousand images over 60 years of work.

Trip to northern Argentina: After being selected by the U.S. Embassy in Argentina “Small Grants”, in April we made a trip to the province of Chaco to work with native communities. The project “American photographer H. G. Olds in Gran Chaco. Sharing his cultural heritage in the Qom community one century later". We were sharing workshops and a series of activities for more than 80 students in the Public School of Bilingual Intercultural Indigenous Community Management N°1 - Toba neighborhood, Resistencia-, and in the Public School of Bilingual Intercultural Indigenous Community Management N°3 “CEREC” -paraje El Colchón, El Impenetrable-. In this way we continue to give new meanings to the documentary collection of the North American photographer Harry Grant Olds and to our community role as an institution.

Workshops and educational initiatives: In the first months of 2024 we successfully carried out a new black and white analogical laboratory workshop, and for the second time we held another color analogical laboratory workshop, which was very well received by the students. In this way we continue to open the doors of our La Boca headquarters to amateurs, students and professionals of photography, so that they can deepen their knowledge. Now we are preparing to offer a new annual workshop for advanced students.

Preservation and access: In 2023 we will exceed one million photographic documents in our archive, with more than 200 fonds and collections from 1843 to the present. One of our latest additions is the collection of Paraguayan photographer Tiburcio González Rojas (Ypacaraí, 1934-2021), a transcendental material for the memory of Latin America. We are working on his life biography, on the integral analysis of the collection in order to classify and describe it, and on the conservation of all the documents, to culminate their individual storage in acid-free envelopes. In the future, 200 negatives will be available for free consultation through our AtoM platform.

From Fundación CIFHA we would like to thank all the institutions and organizations that trust us and support us, as well as the people who help and collaborate through donations so that we can continue to carry out week after week the tasks of preservation and dissemination of the collections and photographic holdings of our collection, and make possible their free and open access in our country and the world. In this way we encourage contemporary artistic practice and strengthen the recognition of Argentine photography in the rest of the continents.

We invite you to learn more about our project and the impact of your support by visiting our GlobalGiving page.

Thank you for your continued generosity.

Sincerely,

The CIFHA Foundation Team.