Drawbridge. Corrientes, Argentina. Circa 1895.

Albumen print, measures: 17 x 22.5 cm / 6.69 x 8.85 in, Mounted on a special secondary support (30.5 x 38.5 cm / 12 x 15.15 in) with an artistic frame in gold squares, and on its lower margin, the authorship legends: “R. Gersbach ”(left) and“ Corrientes ”(right).

The great German photographer Roberto Gersbach (Sackingen, 1863 - Empedrado, 1936) arrived in the city of Corrientes around the 1880s and soon became known through advertisements in local newspapers. As a painter and photographer he excelled in both disciplines, becoming an excellent portrait painter of the Corrientes society of his time.

He worked in that capital for a long time and, even, worked as a teacher of Fine Arts; he also turned to publishing postcards with his own urban and rural photographic views, which were printed under the trade name "Cosmopolita". Together with Hippolito Fritot and Alberto Ingimbert we include him among the most important photographers who acted in Corrientes between the end of the century and the beginning of the century.

Considered the first artist with a European academic training to live in that province, he applied his pictorial knowledge to ennoble his portraits and even the photographic views. The historian Federico Palma in his precursor work "Photography in Corrientes. Its Advent and Evolution" (1959) points out the importance of his "Cosmopolitan Photography".

As an example of his landscape camera we show this nostalgic rural landscape with a rustic drawbridge and, whose special silhouette, reminds us of the work of the great Vincet van Gogh "Le Pont de Langlois" painted in the spring of 1888 in the small village of Arles (France). S.O.IV-OIM