Author Description

This book proposes an original counterpoint, as an art of combining two different melodies, between texts and images. The brief transcribed texts belong, in its majority, to chroniclers of the Indies who narrated, between history and fiction, the conquest of the River Plate, and to foreign travelers who discovered this distant southern regions in the XVII, XVIII and XIX centuries. This way, we learn that López de Cómara en 1552 or Ulrich Schmidl in 1567 narrated that in the River Plate and of Solísʺ there were pig-fish and men-fish, or that in 1535 during the founding of Buenos Aires, when Pedro de Mendozaœs expedition was being sieged by Indian and suffering from famine, an Spanish man ate his own brotherœs dead corpse. Or that, centuries later, and English man made a reference to high society womenœs custom in 1825 of taking their baths in the river in front of the cityʺ accompanied by their slaves. Or Woodbine Parish impression, who in 1852 believed that this big estuary some centuries from nowʺ could be blocked or filled up to create a big delta. For every text, historical or fabulous chronicle, rigorous or imagined testimony, Marcos Zimmermannœs suggestive and poetic black and white photographs illustrate, imagine, contradict or interpret them, in a harmonious concordance of opposite views. The author does not try to tell the story of the River Plate; in his images it is always present that sweet seaʺ, sometimes diminished, ignored or invaded but, as Zimmermann says: always a river of silver dreamsʺ. In this new edition there are photographs from both epochs (1994 and 2021) left to the reader to discover.