LA AVENIDA DE MAYO, DE OESTE A ESTE (THE AVENIDA DE MAYO, FROM WEST TO EAST)

The Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina is a 1,350-meter-long boulevard that stretches between the Congreso de la Nación Argentina (national parliament building) and the Plaza de Mayo (the main Buenos Aires city square and the site of the Argentine Presidential Palace). The 10-block avenue features some of the most famous and iconic buildings in the country, and in the past 100+ years has hosted a variety of public gatherings and events, including parades, funerals, protests, celebrations and more. Once a grand, opulent boulevard, the Avenida de Mayo has in recent years deteriorated to a mostly-empty stretch of decaying apartment buildings, boarded up businesses, cheap hotels, cracked concrete sidewalks and overgrown trees. The Avenida is plastered on all sides with politically-charged street art, cheap wheat-paste posters and endless graffiti. It is the crossroads of progress and decline, of prosperity and poverty, of the good and the bad and the beautiful and the ugly of post-pandemic Argentine society. And yet, like Argentina itself, the Avenida persists and survives, each block thriving with an urgent, nostalgic energy, refusing to give up and die. Simply put, to walk the 10-block stretch of the Avenida de Mayo is to understand the past, present and future of the Republic of Argentina. These 35 MM photographs are numbered 001 to 010 and are in geographical order of the viewer walking West to East down the Avenida, from the Plaza del Congreso to the Plaza de Mayo.