When Annemarie Heinrich photographed an actress named Eva Duarte in 1938, she didn’t know the young woman in front of her camera would soon become a saint-like figure for Argentine people.
Six years later, Evita, now the wife of Juan Domingo Perón, went back to Heinrich’s studio in Recoleta. The professional photographer who by then had produced unique and famous portraits of the country’s biggest film and radio stars pointed her camera and shot. The result would become Eva Perón’s most famous picture.
Born in Germany in 1912, Heinrich moved to Argentina in 1926 at 14. As her immigrant family struggled to get by, photography was a trade that didn’t require learning Spanish. So, Annemarie trained with other women photographers who had come from Europe escaping the war, such as Melitta Lang and Rita Branger, and started taking pictures for money.
“She would buy a camera in the morning, pawn it in the afternoon to pay for prints that night, sell them, and use the money she made to buy the camera back the next morning,” her great-granddaughter Mariana Sanguinetti says in “Annemarie”, her documentary on the photographer that is now playing at the Buenos Aires Museum of Latin American (MALBA).
In the 40s and 50s, a golden age of Argentina’s film and theater, Annemarie’s photo studio — conveniently located near the Colón Theater and the El Mundo radio station — became a must for local stars looking for professional portraits in the style of Hollywood photographers like George Hurrell.
Her client list covered pretty much every famous and non-famous talent of stage and screen, from Zully Moreno and Tita Merello to Hugo del Carril. She also shot what are now famous portraits of cultural icons like Mercedes Sosa or Jorge Luis Borges, as well as foreign talents like Pablo Neruda and Marcel Marceau.
Her talent transcended the cover of showbusiness magazines like Radiolandia, and also included an artistic body of work. Many of her experimental and expressionist works are now part of renowned collections, like the Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the US, the Musée de la Photographie à Charleroi in Belgium, or the Fine Arts Museum of Buenos Aires.
Still, the identifying feature of Heinrich’s work is her portraits, in pitch-perfect composition and eternal black and white — she only used color photography on assignment, or in her travels — .
In the words of artist Juan Travnik, a photographer and member of the National Academy of Fine Arts featured in “Annemarie”, Heinrich’s differential was not merely her “search for beauty” but also her “stubborned perseverance in finding technical perfection.” Something that, he says, stemmed naturally from Heinrich’s noble way to approach her subjects.
Remembering her sessions and visibly moved, actress Graciela Borges described it in simple words: “She made you feel like you were somebody.”
A familiar film
Premiered in the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival earlier this year, Sanguinetti’s up-close and intimate film is nurtured by relevant testimonies and the artist’s own fascinating archives, all with a deconstructed style that reveals both its subject and the very process of depicting her.
A family movie in more ways than one, “Annemarie” feels simultaneously as a bloodline mandate and an honest and warm inquiry. Sanguinetti draws from the memory of Annemarie’s closest relatives — her sister Úrsula and her children Alicia and Ricardo, who manage the Heinrich-Sanguinetti today — as well as renowned photographers like Sara Facio and Aldo Sessa, and top stars like Mirtha Legrand.
The quest to secure an interview with Legrand is a chapter of its own. Sanguinetti left in the picture the comedy-like attempts of getting through a cellphone call with the 99-year-old diva. Legrand’s relevance is proportional to her decades-long closeness with the Heinrich sisters. It was also a professional bond: Annemarie kept a special drawer in her archives specifically dedicated to the innumerable pictures she took of her dear friend.
An endless archive
A depiction of the workaholic, vivacious photographer, “Annemarie” begins with an inquiry into the artist’s archive, which a gallery owner describes as surprisingly “infinite”. Located today in the studio where she used to work and live, the Annemarie Heinrich Archive holds her endless body of work, which includes 130,000 negatives as well as all sorts of personal and professional documents, catalogues, notebooks and original equipment
“It’s a living archive,” Annemarie’s daughter Alicia told the Herald in a tour of the premises.
Still being cataloged and preserved for the past ten years by a team of archivists, the archive continues to be a source of research material and artistic exhibitions, like a recent series of shows in Berlin which are featured in the film and brought some of the archive material to the artist’s homeland for the first time.
Their latest project is the reprinting of “Ballet in Argentina”, Annemarie’s first and only self-published book, a visual project on the history of classical dance in Argentina that gathers 288 photos.
Originally published in 1962 and out of print for decades, the book was made using the original negatives found in the archives, and will include a text by Annemarie that has never before been published in Spanish, as well as documents, color photographs and negatives from the archive. The book will be presented on November 25 at the National Arts Fund.
The fate of the archive, Sanguinetti explained to journalists, remains an open question, as its funding is somewhat limited. The fact that Annemarie’s children were also photographers and continued to work in her studio was a privilege. Many other endangered archives in the country don’t share that luck.
“While Anne’s archive is very valuable, there are other valuable archives whose fate is also uncertain,” said Sanguinetti. “Hopefully, this film extends that question beyond Annemarie’s.”
La entrada Annemarie Heinrich: the eye behind Argentina’s star portraits se publicó primero en Buenos Aires Herald.