High Tide - review

When Martin Parr came upon the dazzlingly colourful and strangely magical photographs of Argentinian photographer Alejandro Chaskielberg, he grabbed them for his curation of the Brighton Photo Biennial last year. From there, they won the overall prize at the Sony World Photography Awards this year.

Chaskielberg's portraits of inhabitants of the remote Paraná river delta in Argentina were taken during a three-year stay (2007-10) in a region he knew from childhood holidays. Back there, he relived, explored and documented the isolated lives and lush landscapes surrounding émigrés from city life and those who always lived there - children sitting on a fallen log, an old hunter sitting thoughtfully by an open fire, a young, dreamlike girl dwarfed by giant thistles against a sky seemingly filled with Northern lights and titled Paiva's Radiance.

Photographing them, always at night under full moons, appears to have been a magical experience. The resulting effect is exotic and mysterious, created with a large 5 x 4 camera and occasional flash lights. He carefully posed the subjects for up to 10 minutes after fixing the lighting and that enabled them to relax and ignore the lens.

The images possess the feel of saturated Technicolor suggestive of advertisements (which can be pushed too far) or super-Realist paintings (which are luscious). They transform the people and their everyday lives into cinematic fiction contrasting and contradicting their reality; they seem to occupy fairytales. Chaskielberg describes his work as using photography to occupy a border between document and fiction, "pushing the limits of documentary, and to imbue the islanders with a strange timelessness."

Until Oct 1 (michaelhoppengallery.com 020 7352 3649).

High Tide
Michael Hoppen Gallery, SW3