Andy Chernyavsky, lover of Argentine rock, stellar photographer, eye that sticks into the deepest like a dagger. Chronicler of her time, owner of the best record covers, Charly’s close friend, eternal girlfriend of “El Salmón” in popular rock mythology. She photographed everyone, went through a thousand recitals and survived a family marked by abandonment and the tragedy of her brother’s early death. She had, bet, won, lost and continues, now from the cinema with “exposed”the documentary by Eduardo Raspo that breaks down his life and his work.
An exciting portrait in this talk with NEWS.
News: In recent years, he has reviewed his career, first with the book “Acceso directo” and now with “Expuesta”, the documentary by Eduardo Raspo. How does a photographer decide to put her own life in images?
Andy Chernyavsky: Things come to me a bit as a challenge, it never occurred to me that I was going to make a movie or write a book. Eduardo worked hard to convince me because it was not easy for me, the title “Exposed” says it all. The documentary was spectacular because Eduardo has a very specific look at the stories he wants to tell, with very personal traits. But I would like not to be the one exposed, it’s hard for me because it’s very hard in the sense of my private life, my childhood and all the things that happened in my family, going back there hurts me. But it seems to me that it is the testimony of an era, of rock as a cultural movement against the dictatorship and of my own history as a photographer in a totally masculine world where I got ahead without resources of any kind.. Both the book and the movie were very cathartic.
News: Raspo also directed a movie called “Tattooed”. What is the fact that he tattooed his life and made him Andy Cherniavsky today?
Chernyavsky: Clearly rock in general and particularly Argentine rock. I think the only thing I would tattoo today is my daughter’s name, but she will kill me if I do (laughs). But rock was my family, a fighting movement, an ideological revolution, the pre music industry. Men and women were there discovering things all the time, out of love, we would find something new and we would run out to share it. What drives is always the challenge and in the 80s all that began to be tattooed on me. Today I don’t have idols, but at that moment what I felt was incredible. They told me: “You have to go cover this show on foot”, and I would go to Cemento, they would push me to death, they would steal my camera, everything happened to me and I kept going.
News: I’ve ever seen her hanging, taking photos of Charly while she was collapsing Works. I don’t know if there is a full dimension of what it meant to be a photographer in that world. How did she live it? Because a woman at that time put her body in a symbolic way but also in a literal way.
Chernyavsky: It was like that, totally. Being there was like being a war correspondent and standing in the front line of fire where the fainted passed by at festivals, waiting for everything you can imagine to throw at you… Until today Miguel Abuelo is remembered bleeding on stage because there were blows, spitting, bottled. It was really putting the body because there was no security, no fences, and we had to come back with the photo, almost grateful to have a credential. When I left rock live I did it because I couldn’t put my body on anymore, I kept taking photos and covers but I didn’t want to do more coverage, it was very difficult.
News: At that time when the only place reserved for women in rock was minimal, was your relationship with the great men of the industry rough?
Chernyavsky: We were very few, but we stopped and said: “Here we are”. Hilda Lizarazu, who also started out as a photographer, managed to make her way and become a soloist. In my case, I always kept track of being a rock photographer and that’s how I managed to receive myself, in quotes (she laughs). I was very lucky because she worked for Daniel Grinbank and she was such a friend of Charly García. Charly was the one who told León Gieco that I had to do the cover of his album “Pensar en nada”, he was a bit between cotton balls. They were people with very open heads, Charly always supported the mines in rock, from Las Bay Biscuits to Fabi Cantilo, produced Celeste Carballo’s records, bankrolled Hilda as a singer. And Grinbank gave me an incredible opportunity, I didn’t even fall, because he didn’t have so much faith in me, he asked me: “What is a mine doing going to ask Grinbank for a job?”, And he gave it to me. It has happened to me a long time later, and not in the field of rock, that a guy told me: “I don’t work with women” and I was paralyzed, but it didn’t happen to me there because rock came to demolish archaic structures. I see my daughter and so many girls standing so well in current feminism and as a counterpart I see myself with that modesty of being a woman and I say, how strong our whole journey. Setting foot like Sandra and Celeste did, or from another place María Elena Walsh, whom I used to see as a little girl in my old man’s theater, those women stood there and created their place. I feel like I was part of that, you had to have the strength to defend a job that was considered masculine. I look at life like a photograph. It still happens to me that the night before a session I don’t sleep, the day that doesn’t happen to me that’s already over.
News:Is there a moment in your working life that moved you that is not in the film?
Chernyavsky: The kids don’t have the remotest idea of what it’s like to send a letter, but I was very proud when the Argentine Post Office offered to buy me an image of Luca Prodan and another of Miguel Abuelo to make stamps, for me it was the best.
News: Now that he names Miguel Abuelo, Luca and would add Fede Moura, their deaths marked the end of an era in Argentine rock. You took photos of the three that are common, you took the last portrait of Fede. How did she find that in his gaze?
Chernyavsky: I agree and I think I have an answer for that, I made very closed portraits of them, close up type. And it’s not the most common way to photograph musicians, they are more often seen live. When I had them in the studio, I captured more intense looks from both Federico and Luca, Charly and Cerati. Perhaps there I found something of that style, although I don’t think I have one in particular, but perhaps that trait is what sets me apart, I don’t know. When the three of them died it really felt like the end of an era, I rethinked my work, I thought: “The 80s are over”. I couldn’t take it anymore, something had broken. I started doing fashion and advertising, I was editor of G7 Magazine… For me that was the end of the decade. But I always went back to the archive and to Charly García because I kept making a lot of records with him, “Filosofía barata y zapatos de goma”, the one he did with Mercedes Sosa, “Demasiado ego”, “Menguante”. There were other artists, of course, but Charly was a constant.
News: He met all the emblematic musicians, he was in a relationship for a decade with Andrés Calamaro, but Charly was his beacon?
Chernyavsky: Yes, Charlie was everything. I never thought she would meet him, she had heard the album “Vida” and she was amazed. When I started dating Dani, her brother, in adolescence, who was a classmate at school, but I didn’t know about the relationship because Daniel was García Moreno. It was he who asked me if I could give him a place in the apartment where he lived on Salguero street. I had a poster of his in a room, what a shame! (series). They are those half inexplicable synchronicities that occur in life. This is how the friendship with Charly began and over time we built what he called “a frontal relationship”.
News: Some time ago there was the exhibition “Los ángeles de Charly”, where historical photos of you were exhibited, taken by you, Hilada Lizarazu and Nora Lezano. I understand that they closed the exhibition so that it was Charly García. The Charly of now is and is not the one you knew, there must be a strangeness there. How does he remember that day?
Chernyavsky: At that moment Charly asked me if I remembered what we had experienced in the Salguero department and I think that was what blew my mind the most. Because you see Charly and you don’t think he’s going to ask you something like that (he gets excited). That tour with Charly was incredible because he looked at each photo in silence, it must be crazy to see yourself in 250 photos of madness, of stardom. It was so exciting! When he left we kissed goodbye, because what do I know, you never know when we’ll see each other again. Since then we’ve seen each other a couple more times. When he finished his visit, the three of us left, laughing and crying. Empty, as after giving birth.
