Sara Facio showing portraits of the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and next to one of the Argentine Julio Cortazar in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Photo: EFE – David Fernández
This June 18, in Buenos Aires, the Argentine photographer, editor and cultural manager, Sara Facio, died, remembered for photographing established authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Alejandra Pizarnik, among others. The news of her death was confirmed by the María Elena Walsh Foundation, an organization that she founded and that she presided over until the last day of her life.
“From the Foundation we say goodbye to our very beloved founder and honorary president Sara Facio. We will remain faithful to her convictions, honoring the path that she marked,” they published from the social networks of the foundation that she created to honor and keep alive the work of someone who was her life partner.
Leonardo Cifelli, Secretary of Culture of Argentina, also spoke out and remembered the 92-year-old visual chronicler, who became an emblem of the culture of the South American country. “Thank you Sara for your art, it was a pleasure to have met you, you will be missed…” he wrote on his X account.
Facio’s work increases the photographic and heritage collection of Argentina. Part of the photographs that he captured with his lens are awaited at the National Museum of Fine Arts, where during 2022, when he turned 90, 39 works were exhibited on the first floor, in which his black and white portraits stand out. characters such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, María Elena Walsh, Ernesto Sábato, Astor Piazzolla, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, Mario Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz, Doris Lessing and Federico Leloir, to name a few.
Throughout his life, Facio built a personal library in which he denoted his connection with letters, history and, of course, images. He made books that had texts written by Julio Cortazar among their pages, such as Humanitarianin which he published a series of photos of psychiatric institutes.
In 2022, with a freshly served tea and surrounded by portraits and photography books, she commented, in her studio in Buenos Aires, that at 90 years old, that interview was going to be “the last report I do,” because she was “very tired and with many emotions.”
The portrait of the life of Sara Facio
Facio, born on April 18, 1932 in San Isidro, in the province of Buenos Aires, was interested in photography. That curiosity and concern took her to Paris in 1955, where she lived for a year, and between 1960 and 1985 she was a partner of Alicia D’Amico and worked in advertising, graphic and written reports for most of the newspapers and magazines in Buenos Aires. , Europe and the USA
”Until that moment, the few books that there were about photography showed only its architectural part (…) and what we wanted was to bring out the people, their feelings, how the night of the 60s was lived, which was what we believed and I believe to this day that it gives the city its own characteristic,” said the portraitist in 2022.
”Eighty percent of my works in the media were my personal ideas, such as when it occurred to us that everyone knew the face of Sartre, but we did not know that of Vargas Llosa, Rulfo or Octavio Paz,” Facio said. .
In 1979 he founded, together with colleagues, the Argentine Photography Council, to disseminate Argentine photography and in 1973 he had created, together with María Cristina Orive, the photographic publishing house La Azotea. Between 1985 and 1998 he created and directed the Photo Gallery of the San Martín Theater in Buenos Aires, where world masters and beginners who are references today exhibited.
She has exhibited individually in museums and galleries throughout America, Europe and Asia and has received awards and distinctions as a photographer and as an editor in Argentina and abroad.
