Miguel Grattier

INVITED PHOTOGRAPHER
2019

Miguel Grattier, Santa Fe, Argentina (1959), I am a self-taught photographer, I studied literature (unfinished), I worked as a journalist, editor and art critic in the newspaper “El Litoral” in the city of Santa Fe (1992) In 1993, the Municipality of Santa Fe began a project of my own responsibility and created the Municipal Photo Gallery, between 1994 and 1998 I was in charge of the Directorate of Culture from this city.

My relationship with photography and work began by chance in 1983, and from that moment it caught my attention with the intrigue of its mystery and seduced me for years to this day.

When I studied literature, I felt that photography was a hobby and that my destiny was literature, but over the years, literature decided that I was a reader and it was photography that was at their service and caprice. Well, now that I’m taking pictures, I’m happy, she showed me one of the beautiful ways that love finds us, right?

I have been married for 35 years, I work and I live in Santa Fe, Argentina, and I have three children.

A unas fotos de Miguel Grattier.
Por: Enrique Butti.

“Alguna vez imaginé una historia que viene al caso: a un tipo se le muere la mujer y no puede vivir sin ella. A lo largo de desesperadas noches de conjuros y de llamados al demonio inventa o conquista un rito que quizá sea su locura: enciende fósforos y en las llamas aparece ella.
Sólo en la llama fugaz de un fósforo, no en las de las velas o fogatas.
El rostro de ella se dibuja, tiembla, se apaga fósforo tras fósforo.
(A veces ella hace aparecer su mano, la levanta de la nada hasta la llama y se tapa la boca para echarle un beso aprovechando un golpe de viento que le quita el aliento).
Tratan de hablarse moviendo las bocas como si los separara un grueso vidrio. Sólo que en cada llama de fósforo ella es distinta, el diálogo es otro.
En cada llama ella es como la reencarnación de una misma persona en otra: el peinado, los gestos indican que de llama en llama pasa de siglo a siglo, de un mundo a otro.
Así, la iluminación de estas fotos me asustan y me alejan. ¿Quién dijo que una foto eterniza el presente?
Todo lo contrario, todo lo contrario….”

To some photos by Miguel Grattier.
Text by Enrique Butti.

“I once imagined a story that is now relevant to remember: a guy loses his wife and can’t live without her. During desperate nights of enchantments and invocations of the devil, he invents or conquers a rite which might be his madness: he lights matches and she appears in the flames.
Only in the fleeting flame of a match, not in those of candles or bonfires.
Her face delineates itself, trembles, fades away match after match.
(Sometimes she lets her hand show, raises it from nowhere into the flame and covers her mouth to send him a kiss taking advantage of a wind blow that takes her breath away).
They try to talk to each other moving their lips as if they were separated by a pane of thick glass. But in each flame she looks different, the dialogue is different.
In every flame she is like the reincarnation of the same person in another person: her hairstyle, her gestures indicate that, from one flame to the next, she goes from century to century, from one world to another.
Likewise, the illumination of these photos scares me and drives me away. Who said that a photo eternalizes the present?
Just the contrary, just the contrary… ”

(Enrique Butti, Santa Fe 1949. Writer and journalist from Santa Fe. He has written and published numerous novels and short stories, and translated poems by Lampedusa and Edgard Lee Master into Spanish. He lives and works in Santa Fe, Argentina).
English translation of Silvio Cornú and Andrés Ferrato.

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