In his 1986 book The View from Nowhere, philosopher Thomas Nagel compares an understanding of the world that filters out the viewer's subjective traits to a vision "from nowhere." By comparison, being somewhere and viewing the world from there thus becomes both a critique and defense of the detached and objective view of the world with which photography (like science) is often associated. Nagel's principal caveat to an "objective" view is that "not all reality is better understood from a less detached standpoint.

Argentine photographer Esteban Pastorino Diaz’s works suggest ways in which the world may be viewed from somewhere, a personal place with hopes, fears, biases, familiarities, expectations, and changing cultural parameters. Diaz’s path to somewhere is traveled by not only "taking" a picture, but also "making" it. Although pieces in a particular body of work share common traits, there is no recognizable "style" across his oeuvre. Instead, it would seem that the subject matter and the particular subjective load with which Diaz imbues his work determine the aesthetic of the image.

For one of his projects, Transit, Diaz built a panoramic camera that mounts on the driver's window of an automobile. With it he shot cityscapes of Buenos Aires the full length of a 120 roll of film. Depending on the direction of movement of objects relative to the camera, the slit-type shutter and film-moving machinery of the camera has the effect of shortening or elongating the images of the visual world. Consequently, vehicles resemble toys, people seem cartoonlike, and buildings look like scale models. It is important to note that in the Argentine cultural horizon, cartoon-making has been elevated to both serious art and practical philosophy. Are Diaz’s cityscapes serious or comical? Are they pictorially closer to factitious representation or to exact mapping? Nagel's line of thinking helps us grasp the complexity of these questions. By adhering to a cultural perspective, Diaz’s works-whether they are panoramic cityscapes, aerial shots, or architectural photographs-follow the traditions of those genres, but with a twist.

Moreover, Diaz’s entire oeuvre reveals-without being extreme-how constructed the factual information in photography (like all "factual" information) really is. Diaz’s vision of Buenos Aires in the series "Transit" incorporates the culture of playful fabrication of visual reality as well (in the vein of Jacques Tati's playful 1971 film Traffic , about the Parisian vehicular milieu). Diaz’s panoramic cityscapes are not only about the streets and buildings, they are also about the movement of people and automobiles along thoroughfares like the Avenida 9 de Julio. Still, although the city's grandeur may be the larger subject, it is clear that the artist is intent upon showing us how toylike, mechanical, and rather absurd a metropolis can be.

A second body of work, the "Salamone" series, focuses on Argentina's buildings designed by Italian-born architect Francisco Salamone in the 1930s. There is a dark aesthetic in Diaz's images of state-commissioned cemeteries, slaughterhouses, and city halls, accentuated by the effects of night lighting and the disquieting style of Salamone's architecture itself. The slaughterhouses are emblematic of the beef-based wealth of Argentina; their grisly interiors have been part of the iconographic tradition of Argentine political photography, from Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas's radical film The Hour of the Furnaces to Paula Luttringer's more recent sepia stills. By contrast, Diaz's emphasis on the buildings' impeccably beautiful fac;ades leads the viewer to assume that there is something of substance behind them (beauty tends to induce that illusion). If Getino, Solanas, and Luttringer had never taken us inside these abattoirs, Diaz's images of them would surely read differently. Diaz makes us see double: the settings that Solanas/Getino and Luttringer used for their own purposes (propaganda and art) and the settings of a historical process where architectural facades serve as a metaphor for the illusion of a prosperous nation-state.

In a third body of work, his "Aerial" series, Diaz also works to construct the means of depiction. It is a series of color aerial photographs taken by remote control from a kite. They differ from many other aerial photographs in that they are taken from a moderate altitude-one comparable, say, to that of a skyscraper's rooftop. The works have some visual and conceptual affinity to the work of the Russian Constructivist photographer Aleksandr Rodchenko, who used the vertical vantage point offered by tall buildings in his attempt to reveal a modern perspective. But unlike Rodchenko's epic optimism for modernity, there is a guarded irony and ambiguity in Diaz’s aerial views.

One may or may not see in these works the skepticism that results from living in a country in which war, terror, and bankruptcy are recent history.

In the United States, an airplane flying over skyscrapers immediately summons 9/11. In Argentina, it brings to mind the so-called "vuelos de la muerte" (death flights)-one of the preferred ways for disposing of political prisoners during the mid-1970s military dictatorship: people suspected to have leftist political affiliations were dropped to their death into the icy waters of the Atlantic or the Rio de La Plata. Notwithstanding such inescapable associations, Diaz’s aerial views-the docks, the tennis courts, and the small planes of the Aeroclub Verónica-elicit a sense of urban harmony and tranquility. The images have a short depth of field that gives the impression that these peaceable aerial cityscapes are mirages that may fade under closer scrutiny. It is as if the perfect alignment of buildings, vehicles, and streets were reflecting an analogous social order that does not exist in Argentina today. Social disintegration and political upheaval lurk behind a facade of middle-class serenity, just as slaughter lurks behind Salamone's impressive facades.

The strength of an "objective" view of the world-as unreachable as it may be-is that it spells out precisely what it is considering, and draws forceful conclusions from this approach.

In such a view, ambiguity and appearances are a hindrance, whereas in Diaz’s work they are a constant source of wonder and depth. As Nagel would have it: "How things seem to us depends both on the world and our constitution."