Curated by Francisco Medail
Special Project | Alexander - Alexander, pays tribute to historian and researcher Abel Alexander, a key figure in the study of Argentine photography. Through a selection of works from his private collection, the project offers an insight into his forty years of work devoted to the research, preservation, and dissemination of nineteenth-century Argentine photography.
-
Adolfo Alexander, Autorretrato, ca. 1879. Carte-de-visite. Albúmina. Colección Abel Alexander
-
Alejandro Witcomb, Novia de negro, ca. 1890. Portrait Cabinet. Colección Abel Alexander
-
Witcomb & Freitas, Silvia Tamasse y Dr Miguel Portillo ca. 1885. Portrait Cabinet. Albumina. Coleccion Abel Alexander
Abel Alexander (Buenos Aires, 1943) is a researcher, collector, and curator of photographic collections. He is a fifth-generation descendant of the German daguerreotypist and photographer Adolfo Alexander. In 1985, he was a founding member of the Dr. Julio F. Riobó Center for Research on Early Photography in Argentina (CIFAA). In 1992, together with Miguel Ángel Cuarterolo and Juan Gómez, he launched the renowned Congresses on the History of Photography. Between 2006 and 2018, he served as historical-photographic advisor to the Benito Panunzi Photo Library at the Mariano Moreno National Library, and for the past two decades, he has worked as a journalist specializing in early photography for the newspaper Clarín.
He is the author of the book Estos débiles papeles son más fuertes que los ladrillos (2021), as well as numerous catalogs, articles, and essays on historical photography in Argentina, including La fotografía en la historia argentina (2006), El caserón de Rosas (2013), and Escenas de la vida cotidiana (2017). Together with Luis Priamo, he has co-edited photography books on Samuel Rimathé, Christiano Junior, H.G. Olds, Samuel, and Arturo Boote. He is currently president of the Ibero-American Society for the History of Photography.
Photo: Ricardo Sanguinetti
Francisco Medail (Entre Ríos, 1991) is an artist and curator whose work revolves around photography. He holds a degree in Cultural Management from UNDAV and is a master’s candidate in the History of Argentine and Latin American Art at UNSAM. He has presented solo exhibitions including Salón de noche (Parque de la Memoria, 2025), Statement (Rolf Art, 2024), Fotografías 1930–1943 (Rolf Art, 2017), and Parte (Studio488, 2015), among others. His work is part of public collections such as the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Argentina, Fundación Larivière, Museo Caraffa, and the Getty Research Institute. He has published the image books Salón de noche (2025) and Fotografías 1930–1943 (2021), as well as the research books Imagen Impresa (2026) and El hechizo roto (2023). Since 2019, he has directed Pretéritos Imperfectos, a collection dedicated to essays, histories, and theories on photography. He served as Artistic Director of BAphoto from 2015 to 2020, is photography curator at the Centro Cultural Kirchner, and teaches in the BA in Contemporary Artistic Practices at UNSAM.