A Road Trip Through Northern Argentina in 35mm Photos
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For documentary and travel photographer Michael Turek, a trip without a shot-list is rare. Wherever he travels, whether for work or pleasure, he arrives knowing which photos he wants to come home with.
That wasn't the case on a 2021 road trip through northern Argentina. “It was kind of unusual for me because it was pure travel, with very little agenda,” says Turek. “There was no shot-list. I wasn't shooting for a magazine. It was just my own opportunity to see a place.” Well, and to photograph a destination for the sheer joy of it—so he packed a Leica R8 and a Leica M-A Type 127, both shooting on 35mm film. (Turek only uses film.)
Over seven days, Turek and his partner Rosanna, with the help of local guide Santiago and Plan South America, took a winding road trip from Salta, Argentina, past the painted mountains of Purmamarca, across the moon-like salt flats of Salar Grande, and, finally, through the undulating hills of the Desierto del Diablo to a massive cone formation known as the Cono de Arita.
“There's a challenge in photographing a place that huge—how do you fit that into a little square frame?" says Turek of the journey. But the greater hurdle proved to be properly documenting the landscapes Turek was confronted with over hundreds of miles packed with mind-boggling natural beauty. “You go to these places that are, to the eye, astounding, and you may never be able to do it justice. [This is] a challenging place to photograph because of its objective beauty, but the practice of photography is trying to do just that."
Below, in his own words, Turek traces the road trip through the photos he came home with—one attempt to capture the allure of the destination at a time.
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Michael Turek"This is one of the big postcard locations in the area, called Hornocal, which both attracted me and then of course immediately repulsed me for the same reason. It's stunning to see, but it's always a challenge when you come into sight of something that exists as a stereotype. It's like seeing the Eiffel Tower. How do you take a new, unique photo of a place that you've already seen photographed 1,000 times?
We weren't there at the right time. There was a big parking lot and a lot of people there, so I was in some ways trying to be honest about that, with including the people in this shot."
Michael Turek"This is the trail from the parking lot at Hornocal, and you can see tourists heading down to a further vantage point.
The light leak here was a happy mistake. There was a minute where the roll of film was done—or, I thought it was done—and I opened the back of the camera and light spilled in. It's a bit of a trick. You can see from the length of the shadows that this was almost midday, which is not the most compelling time of day for photography. The light is not as beautiful as it could be, but the light leak makes the photo a bit more lyrical."
Michael Turek"We drove a little further north along the main road that runs north to south, called route nine. This was just outside Tilcara, where we went up into the mountains to check out a very sleepy hotel.
It was the first time on the trip that we had come across this incredible, huge cacti. Again, it was middle of the day: We had a beautiful landscape but terrible light. I purposefully overexposed the film by about nine stops—and this is one of the magical things that can happen on film versus digital. You can just really pound the light and come away with an image that's a little unsharpened, but I think describes the day. It's very hot, it's very bright. If you take your sunglasses off, this is what the setting looks at first. This is, I think, an adequate explanation of the way it feels in a place like this."
Michael Turek“This was about an hour and 15 minutes north of Pumamarca, at Maimará. There was a church and a cemetery and we just pulled the car over and stepped out for a moment. That's our guide Santiago on the left, and my partner Rosanna on the right. I was just playing with shapes and isolating elements, trying to make something graphic out of the scene in front of me.”
Michael Turek“We kept driving north and, yet again, the landscape continues to change. This is Uquía, which has this incredible water erosion (at least, that's part of what you're seeing) and an amazing climate. There are few places in the world where you get this combination of sandstone that has not quite settled into rock. It looks like you could fracture it. This was painful because we were just passing and I wanted to stay here for a week and watch the light change, to watch it play on those formations.”
Michael Turek“We made our way over to Salinas Grande, which are salt flats right on the border between the Jujuy and Salta provinces. Again, this was the first time we had come across this type of landscape on our trip. You see photos like this from Bolivia, of course, and in the American West, but it's crazy to actually see it yourself. We were getting there at the end of the day and the light was getting good; there was this resonant vibration. Being in these landscapes, there's a type of magic. I remember getting out of the car, and I even took a picture of my boots stepping down because it was such a childlike feeling of excitement.”
Michael Turek“Because there's nothing really happening on the salt flats, except the flat horizon, it's deeply challenging to photograph. There's such a huge feeling of vastness. You turn your head one way then another, and this is what it looks like in every direction. Time was also running out because the sun was going down, so everything was changing, fast. It was a high pressure situation photographically, but it's an adrenaline rush. Before we left, the moon popped out.”
Michael Turek"Moving into the Jujuy Province, we were gaining some significant elevation—we went up something like 16,000 feet, and this was at the peak of the whole road. There are these pools and it's a really playful landscape. You just want to go paddle in the water, but it doesn't get deep. You could actually walk through the entire thing, and you want to—it's tempting to look around, see if there are any creatures in there.
There's another light leak there, and I can't say I intended for it. It gets back to why I choose to do film photography. It provides you creative expression without having to decide. If I took this photo on a digital camera, I can't say I would have thought to myself, You know what his needs? A bit of flair on the top of the frame and it ought to be pink."
Michael Turek“Coming down from that highest point, it was a dusty drive. What looks like smoke is the dust of another car passing. The roads were mostly hard-packed gravel on our journey. This was on our way to the Desierto del Diablo, which was really the whole point of this day: We were trying to get to this cone formation out there that I wanted to photograph.”
Michael Turek"This is actually the back of the cone formation, Cono de Arita, and there were a lot of alpacas around.
There was this weird push-pull I experienced here, because I was so drawn to the cone, and I wanted to get right up next to it, but actually the best view of it is way back at a distance. The desert around it was incredible, though. It's crazy on the ground, seeing what happens when you have all this mud after it rains—the mud dries quickly but doesn't pack down, so when you walk on the ground here, your feet sink down but not in."
Michael Turek"The entire Desierto del Diablo, the area around the cone, is a very inviting landscape, and it's also sort of on a human scale.
I've found that if you go to the Rockies or the Alps, these massive landscapes that look incredible, they can be so grand it feels like you're looking at a TV screen. All you can do is look at what's in front of you, but you can't touch it because doing so requires that you're a technical climber or a mountaineer, and you have to have a hard hat on, a carabiner, a harness. I'm not someone who can do that; most people aren't. In landscapes like this desert, it's inviting that you can just get out and scramble up these roly-poly hills."
Michael Turek“The truth is, this whole area is quite small. You just pass through and the landscape changes quite quickly—I want to say the desert is about five miles across, so it comes at you all of the sudden and then you're gone. But I could spend hours in it; I wanted to come back at night, too, to see how it changed. We spent a lot of time in the car, trying to cover this much ground in the time we did, and I need to go back.”
Michael Turek“We slept in Tolar Grande one night, which was the closest we could stay to the Cono de Arita. Twenty minutes outside of Tolar Grande, there's this spring called Ojos de Mar with water that comes up from underground. I wrote in my diary, ‘This is the most interesting landscape of the entire trip.’”
Michael Turek“I didn't have any moments on the trip where I wanted to put the camera down. Because the camera forces you to use your eyes differently; it increases your awareness. Having the camera there all the time increases your intentionality, it makes the pleasure of the experience all that much greater because you're really seeing what's in front of you.”
