Ignacio Conese
Bio
Ignacio Conese. Cosquín, Argentina, 1985. Photographer and journalist.
Since 2015, he has worked independently with media outlets around the world, producing chronicles, investigations, reports, and photographic essays on social and environmental issues related to extractive activities in Argentina and the Southern Cone. He travels through inhospitable territories and frequently works with analog cameras and processes.
In 2016, he produced Nada Más, a series of single-shot analog portraits and brief accounts of people experiencing homelessness, exhibited at the Cabildo de Córdoba and Museo Palacio Dionisi, and later incorporated into the provincial collection. That same year, Disrupción, a multimedia project on the social and political situation in Caracas, was selected for the Scan Tarragona International Photography Festival. In 2017, he produced Soy La Granja, one hundred portraits of residents of La Granja, Córdoba, turned into large-scale prints installed throughout the town and a self-published photobook. In 2019, he presented Weit vom Meer, an intimate portrait of Córdoba's territory published by SUBTERRÁNEO. In 2025, he presented Vórtice, a series of analog photographs made between 2013 and 2023, at SUBTERRÁNEO GALLERY.
His work has been published by El País, Vice, Letras Libres, TRT World, Mongabay, among others.
Statement
The French have an expression, l'appel du vide, the call of the void, which describes that fleeting instant when the everyday is pierced by an intrusive thought, a self-destructive impulse, or a sudden inclination toward the abyss. That blurred boundary between life as we know it and the possibility of something beyond. A vortex that opens in an instant.
The Lakota, in North America, wove small mistakes into their blankets because they believed that perfection was limited to divine creation alone, and attempting it was an offense to that divinity. In times of digital perfection, that belief is a mantra for me, one that embraces imperfection, intuition, even at times before the gaze itself.
I do not seek the photograph that resolves: I pursue that instant when the everyday opens onto something we cannot control, and the image becomes honest because it can no longer conceal its own fragility.
Vórtice is the point at which that search turns inward. Analog photographs taken between 2013 and 2023, in black and white, often blindly. Color almost disappears, returning only in a couple of moments with an almost monochromatic red; the grain breaks apart, the image remains incomplete. If the void is an abyss, the vortex is the energy that inhabits it: an invisible pull of revealed darkness, a kind of destructive dance that suggests you enter.
In NEXT, Vórtice enters into dialogue with Entre los Espacios, by Juan Cruz Molas y Molas. Two ways of inhabiting the same question: what remains of photography when resolution, color, sharpness, and distance are taken away.
I am from here. There is no elsewhere. There never was.
2.5 x 4m / 98.4 x 157 in
