©Maximiliano Tineo

Recent European photography has undergone a sophisticated shift toward cinematic portraiture, moving away from the clinically perfect digital aesthetic of previous years infavor of a more deliberate, filmic narrative. This trend treats the single frame not as a standalone portrait, but as a still from a larger, unseen movie. By utilizing anamorphic-style wide crops, dramatic rim lighting, and a palette of “true-to-life; yet moody color grading— photographers are building suspense and emotional tension. This narrative imagery often prioritizes intentional imperfection; hard surfaces, grain, and unposed expressions are used as storytelling devices to evoke a sense of history and human touch; that feels increasingly vital in an era of AI-generated perfection. The visual focus has moved from capturing how a subject looks to establishing a visual voice that suggests a story happened just before the shutter clicked and will continue long after. Today, we feature the work of Maximilliano Tineo.

©Maximiliano Tineo

Maximiliano Tineo (1988, Rosario, Argentina) lives and works in Paris, France. His practice originated in photography and has progressively expanded into editorial projects, video and sound installations, archival research, and more recently sculpture. Working across mediums, he explores how images shape memory, belonging and historical consciousness. His early work was shaped by his experience as a migrant, addressing nostalgia, solitude and the fragile notion of home. In recent years, his research has shifted toward a more explicitly documentary approach, investigating the history of South America through colonial, neo-colonial and extractive processes that continue to shape the region’s identity. His projects take form as artist books and installations, notably Hearth, an award-winning reflection on uprootedness and belonging, and El Rey Blanco, which revisits a 16th-century legend to examine the enduring nature of resource exploitation in South America.

Instagram: @maxitineo

An interview with the artist follows.

©Maximiliano Tineo

EL REY BLANCO

While travelling in Bolivia a few years ago, I learned a great deal about the silver mining that proliferated throughout the Potosi region since the 16th century, and which continues unabated to this day.  I also heard Bolivians discussing the new plundering of the region with adjoining Chile and Argentina in the search and harvest of the mineral resource need of the moment, lithium.  Maximilliano Tineo’s project, “El Rey Blanco” (The White King) performs a photographic juxtaposition comparing the 16th century rush for silver resources by foreign interests with the current battle underway for the supply of scarce lithium found in the geographic triangle touching southern Bolivia, northern Chile and Argentina.  Lithium has critical industrial applications as it is an essential product used in powering the batteries that run your smart phones, cameras, cars and data centers for AI.  Tineo’s project takes one back and forth between the centuries of plunder with a sly take on El Rey Blanco,a mythical king and a fitting dual symbol for the silver and lithium that foment foreign exploitation.

Tineo’s project uses symbolism and historical references to support his thesis. A 16th century colonial legend of a monarch who reigned from atop a mountain made entirely of silver helped foster the “silver rush” that continues today.  But Tineo conflates the exploitation of silver with the current fervid mining of lithium by foreign interests. As Tineo notes in his project statement, “…that same race for resource exploitation is perpetuated in another triangular form: the Lithium Triangle, bounded by Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile, an area that concentrates more than 65% of the world’s reserves of lithium, commonly known as “new oil” and also “white gold.” With a documentary approach imbued with a strong dreamlike component, through photography, sculpture, and archival material, I propose a parallel between these two triangular shapes and question the continuity of extractive machinery and its human, economic, and environmental consequences, exploring how this narrative continues to shape memory and territory.”

©Maximiliano Tineo

MSH:  Can you share your background as a photographer and what inspired you to focus on documenting the impacts of lithium mining in the triangular region comprising Chile, Bolivia and Argentina?

My education as a photographer began in my hometown, Rosario, Argentina, shortly before migrating to France, where I have lived for more than a decade. For a long time, I used photography to explore feelings and issues related to the sense of uprootedness, belonging, and my status as a migrant. Although I have always been close to production and editorial publishing, today my work also embraces other forms of expression such as video, sound, and more recently, sculpture.

The issue of lithium came about somewhat by chance: in 2021, following a series of large intentional fires, which were intended to clear land for the subsequent establishment of farms for export, in a region of wetlands located along the course of the Paraná River in Argentina, which touches the shores of my hometown, I began to investigate the history of that waterway, which has historically been used as a way out of much of the interior of the country to the

Atlantic Ocean for the export of natural resources. In my research, I discovered that a few kilometers north of the fires lay the remains of the first

settlement founded by the Spanish in the 16th century in what is now known as Argentina. Why had they settled there? A tale of greed and opulence tinged with legend promised that by sailing those same waters, they would reach the domains of a powerful “white” king who reigned from a mountain of silver. This story would mark the beginning of a race to seize the continent’s riches. The mountain in the story would ultimately turn out to be none other than Cerro Potosí in

Bolivia, a triangular mound rising more than 4,500 meters in the Andes, known for being one of the most important silver deposits in human history, drained during more than 300 years of Spanish occupation. As for the white king, he was never found. At the same time that the wetlands were burning, newspapers in the region were constantly talking about the “lithium triangle,” an area between Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina where almost 70% of the world’s lithium is concentrated. The formal similarity between that triangular mountain of metal from 500 years ago and that other triangle of white metal located in the same region soon caught my attention.

©Maximiliano Tineo

MSH: Given your references to the plunder of silver in the 16th century in the same region (and your project’s title), what themes or messages do you aim to convey through your photography related to environmental degradation as well as the social and economic impacts of lithium mining?

The idea behind the project is not only to focus on the current exploitation of lithium, but also to use it to denounce the fact that, once again and as a link in an endless chain, the continent, its abundant resources, and its inhabitants are being exploited, damaged, and depleted for the benefit of large interests that are destroying landscapes, cultures, and ways of understanding the world in the name of the deceptive, destructive, and poisonous idea of progress.

©Maximiliano Tineo

MSH: In your view, how is lithium mining affecting the environment in these countries? What economic implications have you observed for local communities as a result of the lithium boom?

There is no single way to inhabit and conceive of the world. Certainly, emptying it of everything is not a viable option. Lithium is found in two ways: one is in rock, in spodumene crystals, as in deposits in Australia and Canada, for example; and the other is in liquid solutions called “brines,” groundwater reserves saturated with minerals. The latter is the case in South America, where these liquid

reserves are found at high altitudes, under large salt lakes and in extremely arid areas where water is rare. There we find freshwater aquifers at the foot of the mountains and brine aquifers in the center of the salt flats, both connected and in balance. The continuous extraction of large quantities of brine from saline aquifers alters the natural balance of groundwater. As a result, areas that were previously filled with brine become depleted, causing fresh water from nearby aquifers to move in to fill those spaces, becoming salinized in the process and putting not only the salt flats at risk, but also the many forms of life that inhabit them. For centuries, local communities have lived and coexisted with the salt flats, respecting life cycles. If water becomes scarce, so does life.

©Maximiliano Tineo

MSH: Does the historical legacy of resource exploitation in South America influence current attitudes toward lithium mining? 

In 1971, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano wrote in the introduction to his book Open Veins of Latin America: “The international division of labor consists of some countries specializing in winning and others in losing. The region of the world we now call Latin America was precocious: it specialized in losing from the distant times when Europeans of the Renaissance crossed the sea and sank their teeth into its throat. Five centuries have passed, and Latin America has

perfected its functions.” I believe that today lithium is just another chapter in the long series of extractive episodes perpetuated in the region, as were silver, gold, copper, saltpeter, sugar, latex, as is oil in Venezuela, and as will be drinking water in Patagonia.

©Maximiliano Tineo

MSH: How do you incorporate symbolic depictions and archival materials in your work? Can you provide examples?

In this project, symbolism is present not only through direct photography of details and gestures that highlight a metaphor: a machete stuck in the ground, a hand holding a golden sphere, a river where the morning light makes its waters look like pure silver, but also through staging and mise-en-scène (a mountain made of coins, someone picking up the white king from the chessboard of the salt flat, a map of South America covered in leeches) and through the creation of object-sculptures (a stone with a silver vein that has the same shape as the river in the legend, a set of six pure silver coins showing the lithium deposits forming a triangle). In the book we are editing with the publishing house DUNES, I have used a selection of 16th- century engravings by the Walloon artist Theodor de Bry (who was already denouncing the atrocities being committed by the Spanish occupation of South America at that time). These engravings appear in the book on transparent paper and are always inserted in front of landscape images : we cannot look at or read South American history without taking into account its colonial and neo-colonial past and present.

©Maximiliano Tineo

MSH: What challenges have you faced while documenting this topic? Has your perspective on resource extraction changed as a result of this project?

Respect is very important. I believe that when dealing with certain issues, one must be very aware of what one is doing and how one is doing it, and what is ultimately being shown, without falling into clichés or exoticizing representations.

It has definitely made me much more aware and critical. I think it is necessary to continue along these lines of work and research in order to open up and contribute to discussions, raise awareness, and perhaps one day inspire change.

©Maximiliano Tineo

MSH: What is next on your photographic journey?

My next project is once again linked to South America. I am beginning to research a milestone in Argentine history that took place in the second half of the 19th century: the misnamed “conquest of the desert,” in which the Argentine government took control of the territory that is now Patagonia, carrying out one of the greatest genocides and ethnocides of that century against the Mapuche, Aonikenk, and Selk’nam peoples, among others. This act has long been considered an epic feat and a source of national pride that opened the doors to a “white and civilized” Argentina.

©Maximiliano Tineo

©Maximiliano Tineo

©Maximiliano Tineo

©Maximiliano Tineo

©Maximiliano Tineo