Jaime Bolotinsky

(Ucrania, 1894 - Buenos Aires, 1967)
He emigrated with his entire family to Argentina in 1914. Self-taught, Bolotinsky dabbled in photography at a very young age and worked as a cameraman in film. In the 1920s he opened Foto Nobel, his own photography studio opposite Plaza Italia, which quickly became a meeting point for the most important personalities of the Palermo neighborhood, from Mirtha Legrand to Mario Avelino Perón. With a marked interest in the sculptural possibilities of light, around 1933 he created Fotoplástica, a series of photographs in which he gave life to fictional characters through the juxtaposition of banal objects. With this series, he held his first solo exhibition at the Nordiska Kompaniet in October 1933 and also participated in the Annual Painting and Photography Salon of the Sociedad Rural (1936) and in the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina (1941). Fotoplástica had a wide impact on the graphic media of the time, something unusual that positions Bolotinsky as a pioneer in artistic photography in the country. At the same time, the technical skill and imaginative repertoire of his works make it a unique antecedent of the relationship between photography and surrealism in the region.