Alberto Goldenstein (Buenos Aires, 1951), photographer, teacher and curator, is one of the most relevant figures of contemporary Argentine photography. He emerged as an artist with his sensitive, pictorial and spontaneous gaze in the context of the scene that emerged in Buenos Aires around the Rojas Cultural Center in the 1990s. “His work recovers and at the same time reformulates the modern view of cities, that of the solitary photographer, strolling, who in his drifts is amazed by urban forms and captures them with an apparent distance”-wrote Victoria Noorthoorn, director of the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires.

Curator Carla Barbero points out that another key to reading his work is its de-hierarchization. “His photos express a democratizing ideal of vision, heirs of the American tradition, which has been nodal in his formation as an artist, since he studied in the city of Boston during the early 1980s. But that utopia of not admitting hierarchies is not because he intends to equalize in order to unify or dull the brightness of each thing, but quite the opposite: it is a gesture that amplifies the brightness of the singular without worrying about the canons of beauty that, at different times, have governed taste”.

His use of color, his compositional games, his impossible framings showed a new way of understanding the photographic image in Argentina, a new possibility of seeing and enjoying its relationships and connections with the other arts. With its visual urgency and poetic emergence, the irruption of Goldenstein’s work paved the way for a new photography in Argentina. Always against the grain, his images are silent signals that mark another possible path in the midst of the contemporary visual noise.

In 2017 the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires held a large retrsopective exhibition of his work. It is in the collection of this museum as well as in the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA), the National Museum of Fine Arts, and other relevant collections.