Alejandro Chaskielberg discovered and immediately fell under the spell of the El Hoyo labyrinth when on a camping trip in Patagonia with his young daughter Lara. The place cast a spell on everyone wandering through it, the young and the old, giving joyous pleasure to all. A romantic at heart, Chaskielberg became even more intrigued when he found out that Claudio Levi, it’s creator, had moved to this remote place in Patagonia, where he met Doris Romera, and fell in love with her. This was twenty years ago, and together they created the enchanted labyrinth.
Chaskielberg had grown up in Buenos Aires. For his nighttime project Paraná River Delta—for which he won the Sony World Photography Prize in 2011—he spent time with the people of the Delta photographing them by moonlight only. It had made him aware of nature’s fragility and how it shapes people’s lives.
Forest fires are frequent in Patagonia. Devastation and renewal, people and animals in nature, kinship and love, are themes of Chaskielberg’s Laberinto project. The primary challenge for him was finding a way to visually capture the magic of the labyrinth and it’s surroundings. He was a cinematographer before he became a photographer. Movies are his inspiration, especially the work of Peter Greenaway and Stanley Kubrick. He decided that he needed to be a director for this project create individual scenes of which he then took still images. More than being documents of the place, his pictures are otherworldly tableaus. In effect, he created pieces of land-art, which allowed him to reach beyond reality they became magical.
Elisabeth Biondi
Elisabeth Biondi is an independent author and curator and the former director of photography at the New Yorker. She lives and works in New York, USA.
