Aldo Sessa

As a young boy, Aldo Sessa (b. 1939) studied painting and drawing at the De Ridder Atelier and worked at his father’s printing press in Argentina. As Sessa’s artistic career progressed, his oeuvre grew to include graphic design, graphic arts, cinematography, and photography, with his photography eventually taking center-stage. Sessa’s work has since appeared in over 200 exhibitions and is included in private collections and museums world-wide.

In 1976 he held his first solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, followed by two additional shows in 1977 and 1978 at the same institution. In 1989 Sessa was honored with the first retrospective exhibition of a living Argentine artist at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires. Gaining recognition and highlighting photography as a fine art form, Sessa was soon after Named Honorary Member of the Argentine Federation of Photography in Buenos Aires and Named a Member of the National Academy of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1991. Beyond his participation in exhibitions at renowned museums and galleries around the world, he has also published more than 40 books of his work on themes such as Buenos Aires, gaucho culture, tango, and New York City. 

With subjects ranging from notable portraits to Argentine gauchos, to the streets of New York City, Sessa approaches all of his image making with a passion to illuminate the subject from his unique perspective and convey his fascination with light and shadow. Always carrying a camera, Aldo Sessa finds much of his inspiration in Buenos Aires and New York City, allowing his strong connection to each city to lead him to uncover extraordinary observations. 

“Photography is the closest thing there is to magic. To think that you just go click, and now its sitting on the film’s emulsion, or the digital camera, nowadays it’s the same thing, it is now trapped inside of it and something is floating there, something unexpected, something no one saw, but you were able to visualize and gave perspective to it and took it to a certain scale where something that was only one inch, is now two yards and no one knows what it is.” -Aldo Sessa

Sessa’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; Museum of Modern Art, Bogotá, Colombia; Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires, Argentina; National Academy of Fine Arts Collection, Buenos Aires, Argentina; National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago, Chile; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and the International Center of Photography, New York, NY.