Rocío Tenaglia remembers her first film camera as an object that made her feel older. She was twelve, travelling to Cerro Pan de Azúcar in Córdoba, Argentina, with a plastic camera in her hands. The responsibility of choosing a frame without immediately seeing the result felt like a small initiation.
What stayed with her was the sense that photography could turn a moment into a trace—something that could return later, carrying more than the event itself.
Learning to trust movement
Tenaglia studied Visual Arts and Communication, but much of her photography developed through self-teaching. That combination gives her work both an instinctive and a highly visual foundation. Composition is something she has absorbed deeply enough that she no longer needs to intellectualise every decision before pressing the shutter.
People sometimes describe her photographs as cinematic. For Tenaglia, that quality comes less from staging than from movement. She talks, listens and allows a scene to remain alive. The photograph is made inside that flow rather than outside it.
Family, distance and the idea of home
Home is complicated in Tenaglia’s photographs because it has never been entirely fixed. Her parents divorced, family members are spread across Argentina, and she has moved through different houses and cities. That history left her with what she describes as a nostalgic longing for stillness and union.
She photographs homes partly because of that instability. An apartment in Berlin, a family space in Argentina or the background around a portrait can become as important as the person inside it. The room holds evidence of a relationship and of a particular period of life.
Film as alchemy and intuition
Tenaglia does not experience film as a slower imitation of digital photography. It changes the rhythm of the encounter. There is no immediate confirmation and therefore less opportunity to correct the moment after it has already happened.
She calls the process alchemy and intuition. The most intuitive point is the shutter itself: recognising that something is happening and choosing not to overthink it.
The delay afterward allows the image to return detached from the immediate circumstances in which it was made. Sometimes that distance reveals a feeling she did not fully understand at the time.
Roots, containers and freedom
Among the photographs she selected, a diptych involving a tree and a plant nursery carries many of the ideas that recur in her work. Plants can be rooted and free, or contained and cared for. They can represent home while also suggesting confinement.
Tenaglia is drawn to plants because they contain what she calls a sacred mystery and a kind of silent knowledge. Unlike people, they do not respond to the camera by adjusting themselves. They simply exist.
That calm gives her something different from portraiture. A human subject brings reaction, exchange and self-consciousness; a plant allows her to look without being looked back at.
Travelling and knowing
When Tenaglia photographs a place she is visiting, difference attracts her attention. New visual information produces curiosity. In places she knows intimately, the relationship becomes more emotional: gratitude, affection and recognition replace novelty.
The two modes are not opposites. Both are ways of finding connection to place. One begins with surprise; the other with memory.
What a photograph can reveal later
Self-portraits have taught Tenaglia that an image can contain information she does not fully recognise while making it. The photograph becomes a later conversation with an earlier self.
That is also what she hopes a reader will take from her work: not one prescribed meaning, but a feeling. Love, care, grief, gratitude and longing are not distractions from seeing clearly. They are part of the tools through which we understand what we are looking at.
Photography does not stop a home, relationship or person from changing. But it can hold the emotional shape of that change long enough for us to return to it.
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind the film we develop.
