Cordoba Cathedral. Argentina. Circa 1935.

Unusual vintage copy of a color bromoil. Measurements: 29 x 22 cm / 11.41 x 8.66 in. Mounted on a period secondary support with the holographic signature "Willy Lang" in graphite pencil.

"Plein air" view of the Cathedral of Córdoba "Our Lady of the Assumption". This is a perfect example of Willy Lang's refined bromoleos technique, where his original photograph is transformed into a suggestive work with unique characteristics.

The bromoleum technique basically consists of bleaching a photographic copy of silver bromide and manually impregnating it with brush strokes with oil pigments, although the total process is actually much more complicated. Designated in his time as "noble impressions" by the pictorialist photographers, the procedure had many followers in the artistic world, although also strong detractors from the pure photographic field, who argued that photography is an art in itself and does not need help of painting.

In Argentina the figure of Professor Hiram G. Calógero (1885 - 1957) stands out as an undisputed cultist, who promoted this beautiful technique through competitions, exhibitions and special rooms, and even edited the book "Procedures of Art in Photography" (1942 ), the only one of its kind in Spanish. Along with Calógero we must include the figure of the German Guillermo "Willy" Lang, who arrived in Buenos Aires in 1919 accompanied by his wife, the Austrian Melita Lang, and some time later they opened a photographic studio in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Belgrano, a portrait studio located in the vicinity of Pampa and Cabildo where they operated with 18 x 24 cm negatives and contact prints. (1)

In 1935, we found him in command of his study in Córdoba. (2) Together with his wife Melita Lang, Willy worked on this pigmentary procedure and, between them, they generated an interesting collection of bromoil prints, many of which are kept in Argentine and international public and private collections, among the latter in the Public Library from New York.

By Abel Alexander

President of the Ibero-American Society for the History of Photography

Notes:

1. We are grateful for the information provided by the photographer Alicia Sanguinetti and by the photographic researcher Alejandra Niedermaier

2. On the web: informadoscordoba.com