The Heinrich Sanguinetti Archive contains 100.000 photographs depicting Argentina in the 1930-1950s. The 5,000 images taken by Annemarie Heinrich depict the pre-industrial intervention on landscape, religious and cultural celebrations of indigenous and “mestizo” communities.
Annemarie Heinrich was a German naturalised Argentinian photographer who collected images of Argentinian society in the first half of the 20th century. Largely unpublished, the images in the Heinrich Sanguinetti Archive reveal initial contacts and gazes over territories, species, communities, and cultural practices of vast regions of Argentina and Latin America. The collection holds great value for those researchers interested in studying the tensions that were involved in the process of modernisation in Latin America, and offers a rich panorama of the changing realities of the 20th century.
Photographic collections in Argentina are tied to the fate of their heirs and owners. For this reason, Alicia and Riccardo Sanguinetti – owners of the archive – asked the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF) for assistance. The archive is located in a place that needs better conservation conditions in terms of space, light, temperature and humidity control.
A continuation of a previous project in 2014, the project digitised over 6,000 images, negatives and films. Graduate and undergraduate students of the university were trained in conservation and cataloguing tasks. The project had great resonance in the region, with conferences, exhibitions and a documentary. The digitised images are available in the university’s digital archive.
