fotos encontradas

oohh
I love this photo, the moment, his face. I spotted it on the bottom of a very dirty gutter.

If you are looking for miracles and magic, Latin America is a good place to start. Finding Pablo and his project was pure joy to me. This is what he says in an email: I am not a photographer... Oh well, I do take photos - but merely out of trashcans.

So let´s go to Buenos Aires and meet this man and his mission. In some way Pablo makes me think of Amélie Poulain. Why is he doing this? My guess is that it has something to do with love – love of a city and its people.

Don´t forget to visit Pablo´s site (in Spanish and English)
invited by ulf fågelhammar

Found photos

'But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol -a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it.' G. K. Chesterton .

I started with this project by the end of the nineties. I already had some collections and loose photos but I did not know what to do with them -apart from showing them over and over to friends. I was quite idle at work and Internet was new for me, so I spent whole days on the web. Then I happened to google the words "found photos" and found inspiration in the many sites devoted to found photos. But then I found (!) the big difference between those beautiful photos and mine:
most of them were not found but rather bought for pennies in garage sales and flea markets, while mine were 100% trash. I had the scanner, the Internet connection and lots of time, so I thought it would be fun to show everybody my findings on the web.

polaroid
A good example of an ugly photo that somebody tried to erase from the surface of earth.

All of the photos and items that are shown at my site have been found by me in the streets of Buenos Aires. Most of them were inside Sunday's trashbags, many others on the sidewalks. A very small portion of them seem to have been lost by their owners.

This is a strictly personal project, and that's why there are no other photos here than the ones that I have found himself. I do not buy photos, but I accept the ones that they give me and keep them in
separate boxes. Some people ask me why don't I restore my damaged found photos through software: I tell them that I found these photos in the very street, and that is their true nature, so if I should restore them, it would be to deny or hide their origin -not to say it would be quite a job to do. A guy once dared to restore some of them just to show me the results. The results were truly funny and I found it quite hard to explain him that I like my found photos just as they are.

-Pablo Cruz Aguirre

dupla

The place seems a sordid nightclub. There's something Tex Averish in his face, no?

peron y evita I don't know if this is one of many copies that were handed as propaganda or the stains are blood or merely water that worked on the chemical stuff of the paper.

groma One out of the four boxes of photos that I have is devoted to this man, Samuel Gromatzky. Someday I will finish ordering this collection and I will put it in the site.

trio
I think this photo could only be taken in Buenos Aires.

linda
I think this woman lives on the house next to mine.