Artist tribute

Boleslaw Senderowicz (Lodz, Poland, 1922 - Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1994)

He settled in Buenos Aires in 1925, and from the age of 15 he trained as a self-taught photographer while his interest in painting developed, which he studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano. Since 1945 he founded and edited the literary magazine Gaceta del Libro and participated in Claridad and the Teatro del Pueblo, whose activities he photographed, portraying figures such as Josefa Goldar, Leónidas Barletta and Raúl de Lange. In those years he joined the Foto Club Buenos Aires, where he was a jury member for awards and exhibitions, as well as the Federación Argentina de Fotografía and the Fédération Internationale de l'Art Photographique.

In 1957 he was a fashion photographer for Claudia magazine of Editorial Abril, where he developed his own style that articulated the glamor of the genre with a fine sense of irony, suitable for the sophisticated and cultured reader that the magazine postulated. Simultaneously, he did advertising photography for agencies such as Gowland or Yuste, in ads and institutional productions of countless Argentine and foreign brands: from Hellmann's and La Serenísima to L'Oréal, Atanor, Coca-Cola or Ford, and also entities such as the Patronato de la Infancia or Aerolíneas Argentinas. In this context he worked with future stars such as Susana Giménez, Isabel Sarli or Claudia Lapacó, and already established figures such as Amelia Bence, Rodolfo Ranni or Juan Carlos Castagnino. Senderowicz's extensive production over four decades would become an essential component of the Argentine visual culture of the 20th century, and an unavoidable document of the tastes and consumption of mass society.

The professional hierarchization of photography was articulated with Senderowicz's interest in its aesthetic possibilities, which he explored through his participation in the group La Carpeta de los Diez, together with Annemarie Heinrich, Anatole Saderman and other referents. Within and outside this group –with which he exhibited at the Teatro Ópera in 1959– Boleslaw built a solid experimental production where masking, mounting negatives, retouching and other procedures typical of his commercial work became powerful resources of poetic distancing and playful exploration of the expressive possibilities of photography.

In 1990 he held his first individual retrospective at the Fotogalería del Teatro Municipal General San Martín. Recently, his work was exhibited in several editions of Buenos Aires Photo, in the exhibition Mundo propio. Fotografía moderna argentina 1927-1962, held at MALBA in 2019; in Figuritas. Apariciones Futboleras en el arte Argentino, Casa del Bicentenario, 2022; in the exhibition Del Cielo a casa, Museo MALBA, 2023, among others. The book Boleslaw Senderowicz. Fotógrafo (Ed. Vasari, 2019), compiled by Paula Senderowicz and Diego Guerra, gathers part of his production and recovers his career.

 As part of a new edition of the fair, BAphoto announces Boleslaw Senderowicz as the Tribute Artist 2023. Senderowicz was a pioneer photographer in the local fashion world who worked for years in Editorial Abril’s Claudia magazine. There, he was able to build his own style, characterized by the staging of sophisticated models in urban settings, unusual for this type of productions. Senderowicz was also part of the group La Carpeta de los Diez, along with Annemarie Heinrich, George Friedman and Juan Di Sandro, among other pioneers who were homaged by the fair in previous editions. In that sense, the tribute to Senderowicz traces a continuity in the curatorial policy of the fair, in addition to highlighting one of the most important photographic archives of the printed culture of the 20th century.