At the end of the weekly Sunday market in the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, you can see a whole organization of young teenagers, a kind of miniature, masculine, hierarchical society. They work to tidy up the stalls of the second-hand dealers, who probably also set them up early in the morning. For a few meager pesos, many of them are busy removing gates and boards, pushing carts… but not all of them. Some are more relaxed, leaning against a tree, wearing fashionable sneakers… they’re clearly the bosses in this hierarchy of Russian dolls. This teenager, apparently on the bottom rungs of the ladder, tore my heart out with his absent expression, already marked by the difficulty of his work. I liked to imagine him with a head full of dreams and drawings in notebooks hidden in the satchel we could see at his side. As long as he doesn’t resign himself, he really has his life ahead of him, and the little teddy bear on the outside of his jacket reminds us that he’s not quite out of childhood.
This photo was taken right after the one of the man with the bicycle. These are my first two photos after a long troubled period when I wasn’t very inspired. So, like the pancakes, the first ones aren’t quite right, but they have a special flavor to me. So I wanted to share them, also as a testimony to the characters you meet in the San Telmo market.