Daniel Mordzinski (Buenos Aires, 62 years old) is passing through Gijón these days between a paradox and a fulfilled dream.
This photographer of writers, who is a reader before anything else, is one of the protagonists of the 35th edition of Black Week, a festival that has been, like the different venues of the Hay Festival or Central America, its traditional “playground” .
But lo and behold, on this occasion he is portrayed.
And not just in any way, but through a selection of his own work, more than 40 years searching in images for the soul of the protagonists of the literary universe, an exercise that takes shape in the exhibition
Gijón-sea of letters
, organized by the Municipal Foundation of Culture of Gijón.
450 photographs distributed over 600 meters: Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, Marta Sanz, Ángel González, Ida Vitale or Jorge Luis Borges, the one with whom it all started in 1978.
"Guessed my own
Aleph
.
Borges showed me that infinity is drawn in words, and those first portraits, made between labyrinths and mirrors, showed me the way”, he recalls by email a few days before walking through the exhibition with him.
Moving this Thursday between those images, many already iconic, Mordzinski looks to the past and feels the "vertigo of the survivor".
“We change, the photos don't”, he reflects before strolling through that literary universe marked by his friendship with Cortázar.
Exiled in Paris in 1978, his search for freedom and artistic truth met the Argentine writer along the way.
“It was the footsteps of Julio Cortázar that took me to Paris.
The Great Cronopio taught me a certain way of being and inhabiting literature and his playful way of telling stories inspired my photographs and my life.
Hopscotch
was, and still is, much more than a book.
That is why, when he thought about the narrative of this exhibition, the starting point was two hopscotches where, from the land to the sea, I go through four decades of literary portraits”, he explains excitedly while acting as host.
Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli, pictured in El Molinón during Black Week.
Gijon.
2008.PHOTO:Daniel Mordzinski
There is nothing random about the sample.
The material, the chronology, the layout, the color of the walls, every detail has a meaning for Mordzinski who, after the pandemic, decided to enjoy everything more.
The Argentine photographer assures that he has no method, but there are some keys to explain the process that leads to each
fotinski
, as he calls his snapshots, according to a verbal finding by the writer and translator Enrique de Hériz.
His ceremony begins before he arrives at the appointment, when he immerses himself in the work of the writer he is going to portray.
“In a way, I am a reader who culminates his reading by doing the best he knows how: photographing the authors he admires,” he confesses.
After the preparation, the
show arrives
, "the jump into the void".
This is how he describes it: “Instead of photographing the writer in his library, with his books or in his writing places, I bet on putting him on stage, replacing the natural pose with a mega pose, and proposing situations that have to do with them and with the world of what they write.
Humor and play have always been my allies.
In my work there is no time (no space, no atmosphere, no diving suit to help me);
I always have to improvise and listen to the other.
I have no recipes or magic formulas, nor a wand;
sometimes it goes wrong, other times it goes well.”
Each photo has a story, it is a story in itself.
The meeting with Corín Tellado in a Gijón hairdresser, Marcelo Luján buried on the beach, Camila Sosa in the shadows of the hotel in Cartagena de Indias a few months ago... A story that hybridizes with photography and is seasoned with commentaries on books that sneak in here and there.
Mordzinski loves Gijón, a city that forms part of his personal and professional biography.
“Gijón has been a magnet for me and the talisman of many meetings.
It is a Ferris wheel and a tent, cider and Sporting, it is
Praise of the Horizon,
but above all, it is Gijón, a sea of letters.
Black Week, the Ibero-American Book Fair, and my brother Luis Sepúlveda”, he says.
The exhibition ends in a room with black walls and photos of
Lucho
, living and literary history of the city.
The silence that invades the conversation at that moment, before the box with memories that he has made to honor his friend, is eloquent.
“Of all the gifts that life has given me, perhaps it is, together with my children, my brotherhood with Luis Sepúlveda that I am most grateful.
The dimension of him as a writer is only surpassed by his moral stature.”
The Chilean, who died in April 2020 at the age of 70, is not the only one honored by Mordzinski's words and photos: Domingo Villar, Fernando Marías, Almudena Grandes... all deceased in recent months, all with their piece of leased posterity in this exhibition, immortalized by the psychoanalytic lens of the Argentine.
Luis Sepúlveda, photographed in Gijón in 2009. Daniel Mordzinski
In 2013 Mordzinski lost 5,000 negatives because they were thrown away by mistake at
Le Monde
where he kept them.
The scars of that tragedy run through the sample, invisible.
There are photos, history of the Black Week, for example, that only exist in the memory of him.
“You never recover from that.
I dreamed of photos that I took that are not there, ”she comments with some regret.
"When I give away a photo, I am putting it safe," she adds to explain how he recovered part of the file.
Restless and hyperactive, he is now preparing a book about the Silvio Rodríguez tour, whom he has accompanied for months;
and another,
Hotel Chile
, exchanging texts, photos and glances with Sepúlveda.
"Perhaps photographing writers is for me, a hidden desire for immortality that leads me to think that I will live as long as there is only one writer left to portray," he says.
A way to continue reading to speak in images, happy in the paradox.