Lee el texto en español al final de este artículo.
By Alberto Cairo
www.thefunctionalart.com
www.elartefuncional.com
A text from Periodismo con futuro
Any exploration into the world of infographic journalism will, sooner or later, lead to Alejandro Malofiej. It might happen during a conversation with a more senior colleague, or on seeing one of the many books on the international infographics awards which bear his name, or perhaps your boss might suggest that you attend the professional summit which has been held every March for the past twenty years at the University of Navarra.
You might then ask, as I did some fifteen years ago, who really was Alejandro Malofiej. The most likely answer is brief and not very illuminating: he was an Argentinian cartographer at the time in which maps, statistics and diagrams were created with pen and ink, not emerging on a screen through the alchemy of algorithms and vectors. It is indeed a paradox that the majority of visual journalists today know so little about one of the most important patriarchs of the profession.
To this I plead mea culpa: he who is ignorant of the past is not prepared to face the future. So I went to Gonzalo Peltzer, media consultant, blogger at Papers Papers with Toni Piqué, and author of one of the pioneering books in Spanish on infographic journalism, Periodismo iconográfico (Rialp, 1991). I asked him for an interview. Alongside University of Navarra Professor Miguel Urabayen and Juan Antonio Giner, Peltzer is the most knowledgeable person on the enigmatic Argentinian journalist-illustrator. I set out to find a text from 1995. I reproduce it here in its complete original form together with another article that has been substantially edited. They form a portrait, a fond remembrance and also attest that journalism, if it wants to have any sort of future at all, should conceive itself as primarily a calling and a craft.
Alejandro was not Malofiej
By Gonzalo Peltzer
When Alejandro Malofiej worked at the newspaper La Opinión in Buenos Aires, he would arrive everyday as if he were a Russian field marshal: he would greet the sandwich vendor with “good afternoon, Baron von Sandwich”. The man would invariably join in the joke and answer back “good afternoon Alejandro Malofiej Stoliaroff”. He loved those sandwiches, but he liked even more the mention of his mother’s family name.
Alejandro pronounced his name the Russian way: Malofiei. His parents, Simón Malofiej and Alejandra Stoliaroff, both White Russians born in what is today Belarus, met in Buenos Aires. Simón was the gardener at the house of a leading family from the country’s cattle ranching aristocracy where Alejandra also worked for a time as governess. Mother and son were known as Sacha and Sacho, Hispanicizing by gender the typical Russian nickname for Alejandro.
They lived in a town outside of Buenos Aires called Boulogne-Sur-Mer, in honor of the French city Jose de San Martin chose for his self-imposed exile. There, in the house at 1875 Rivera Street, Alejandro continued to live after the death of his parents, until in March 1,986 when Rodolfo Szelest brought him to his apartment on the tenth floor at 2,432 Peña Street, in downtown Buenos Aires, when he could no longer take care of himself. In November of that year Rodolfo and Carlos Savransky decided to place him in the Martinez nursing home where he could be better cared for.
Alejandro died of bladder cancer on 31 July, 1987, at CEMIC, a Buenos Aires hospital where he had been a patient since March. He was 49 years, without a single relative or any money. A priest at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Buenos Aires in Parque Lezama offered his church for the wake on the night of his death. He was buried in the cemetery of the Chacarita after receiving a funeral in Russian. This priest – named Valentín – had visited him every week during the last months of his illness. He shared with Alejandro a love of Russian polyphonic choirs that they would listen to together.
His house, his books on strategy, geography and history, and his paintings – all abstract – were left to his closest friends. They were Carlos Savransky, Rodolfo Szelest and Nora Potchar who received the little house that had been owned by Alejandro’s parents in Villa Gesell, a spa resort on the Atlantic coast 300 kilometers from Buenos Aires. Along with Szelest they had known each other since Carlos Pellegrini elementary school. The rest of his friends he had known since his uncompleted university studies in Architecture and Philosophy. From 1966 to 1983, with some rare and brief intervals, it was not easy to meet frequently at the University of Buenos Aires without arousing suspicion. On top of this, Architecture and Philosophy were the two departments with the greatest reputation having subversive leanings. The group found a place that the time was a solid alibi: they would meet at the headquarters of the YMCA (Young Men Christian Association) on Reconquista Street, an institution that Carlos Savransky had frequented since childhood.
Alejandro would become terribly infatuated, yet he was also terribly shy. He said he was especially attracted to married women from good families. Each of his friends referred to different women as Alejandro’s greatest love, depending on the particular moment in his life. The truth is that they were nearly all platonic love affairs. If there was someone who could truly be called the love of his life, it was Mercedes. She was a student of Philosophy. A very attractive woman who was by then divorced, she had two daughters and came from the highest social class in the country. One day Mercedes disappeared forever at the hands of the military. Hers is one of the thousands of unresolved cases from the Argentina in those years. And so, at least in this story, Mercedes has no last name.
He was a manic-depressive and always had a certain air of melancholy and sadness. His life was not easy; it had not been before and he knew it probably would not be so in the future. At the age of 21 he contracted Hodgkin’s disease (lymphatic cancer) which was partially cured following a difficult treatment. In addition, he was filled with old sorrows which he never wished to discuss. Hugo Garcia, a colleague of Alejandro at La Opinión, said he often saw him with tears in his eyes, as if he was lost in his troubles. When he spoke he always focused on something, staring at some spot in the distance for support.
Hilda Mouro and Carlos Savransky were the friends closest to Alejandro in the last two years of his life. They were with him until his death and provided him with all that he needed.
Carlos spent a whole nights together with him. It was he who donated nearly all of the originals of Alejandro’s work to the University of Navarra, through Hilda Mouro and Raúl Burzaco. He also had most of his paintings. Missing from Alejandro’s house of was one of his most precious treasures: a book on the military campaigns of Napoleon (David G. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon, New York, 1966) presented to him by General Theophilus Goyret when he worked at the magazine Armas y Geoestrategia (Weapons and Geo-strategy). The maps of that book were a constant inspiration to Alejandro. It showed military movements in transparent overlays on geographical maps. Battles were shown as they evolved, hour by hour, with an amazing ease of comprehension and accuracy. Someone described Alejandro’s maps as cinematographic as the successive overlays of created the illusion of movement, like the frames of a motion picture.
He was a committed anarchist. He admired what he termed the Spanish Revolution in the way that others revere the French Revolution. “He was not a militant, he was contemplative,” said Savransky. He loved objects. He had an endearing relationship with revolutions, battles, weapons, maps, pipes, scarves and hats. Aesthetics, rather than ethics; he could perfectly combine being a disenfranchised Spanish style anarchist with the enviable appearance of an English dandy. He had an amazing collection of scarves that he always wore around his neck, even in the last days of his life, and he smoked a pipe with a rare flair and neatness uncommon in most smokers. Also, with people he certain dependence. His friends were like treasured possessions; so too was his mother and his constant reminiscences of her.
Alejandro had all the virtues and vices of a veteran newspaper man. But he did not write: he drew. He was not a frustrated militant. He was really a strategist with a deep knowledge of cartography. He was not exactly what we would today call an infographer. Not only because so few people used that coarse word then, but rather that he never drew anything for the newspapers that was not a map. If someone asked him to explain one of his maps, he would take hours to do so. Each map contained more information than could fit in all the pages of the newspapers in which they were published.
When his bosses would ask him to create a map to illustrate some event, him would quickly ask how much time he had to complete it. Be it hours or days, he would use all the time available up until the last minute. He would not stop until he had managed to include every necessary piece of information. One of his main resources was his immense library. He would talk again and again with the editors. He read all the news available regarding the piece he was working on searching for stories to explain the facts. He went to the bookstores of Buenos Aires to search for data, maps, uniforms, weapons. He would photocopy 10, 20, 300 silhouettes, patterns, contours (this was before the introduction of computers). He would draw again and again on tracing paper. He would paste and do touch ups until he achieved an original map as attractive as those of his book on Napoleon. If someone came up to take a look at his work, he would go crazy. The worst thing to do would be to ask when he would be finished. “I will never finish if people interrupt me every few minutes to ask me when will I finish,” he would answer angrily.
Although he did not travel a great deal, he knew about countries, nations, races, religions and cultures. He knew the weather at any time of the year at every place on earth. He knew that various military tactics depended on the rain, wind, daylight or darkness. He knew about tides and the phases of the moon, about monsoons, Ramadan, Greek Orthodox Easter and the celebration of Hanukkah. Anything could have an impact on the movements of the Viet Cong through the mountains of Cambodia, on a formation of tanks in the Iran-Iraq war, or operations of a British task force in the Falklands War. He would search for solutions pacing to and fro like a general at his command post. He would look at the map again and again, then resume pacing about as if he were upset, focusing on a problem that had to be solved, helped by deep puffs on his Balkan flavored pipe tobacco.
However he never knew how valuable his work was. He lived from hand to mouth. He would travel over 40 kilometers which took nearly an hour on a rickety train with a rather erratic schedule, Boulogne to Retiro, near the center of Buenos Aires. From there he still had to spend between 15 minutes to half an hour on a bus, depending on where he was working. The headquarters of La Opinión, taken over later by Tiempo Argentino, was on the other side of town, near the Victorino de la Plaza Bridge, where Velez Sarsfield Avenue crosses the Riachuelo River toward Avellaneda. He never drew a paycheck beyond what he needed to make ends meet and always the same amount. He never worked for more than the average salary of the newspaper he was at. Business was not his thing and certainly he could never have run a small kiosk or taxi.
Alejandro always asked about the size in which the maps he drew would be published. Once while working for the La Opinión newspaper, run by Jacobo Timerman, he was asked to work on a report regarding an Argentinian businessman had expressed his intentions to buy the Falkland Islands Company, the colonial company that owns more than 90% of the Falkland Islands. Alejandro drew an extraordinary map of the islands which showed the natural resources as well as the holdings of the company. It did not fit in the allocated space and was published at half the originally intended size. The next day Alejandro heatedly argued and shouted with Mario Diament, the managing editor until the editor-in-chief called him into his office. As he walked toward Timerman’s office, he went saying his farewells to his colleagues as if he were heading to the gallows, imagining that this would be his final day working at the paper. He emerged beaming; Timerman had complemented him. “If all journalists fought this hard for their articles, the newspaper would improve by at least 50%,” he had said and he repeated this to the entire staff.
One day in 1982 Miguel Urabayen appeared at the offices of the newspaper Tiempo Argentino. He had been invited by Pablo Sirven, one of his former students at the University of Navarra, who had contacted him during a visit to Buenos Aires. Upon arrival, Miguel began to leaf through the day’s newspaper. Pablo can still recall Miguel’s reaction on finding a map that took up almost a full Berliner format page of the newspaper. He opened his eyes wide and put his hand to his forehead as he asked in awe “who did this?” Alejandro was in a corner of the room, at his easel, with his pens and tracing sheets. Miguel came over and greeted him as if he were a hero, despite Miguel’s discovery of a minor error in the map: the battleship New Jersey was represented by the silhouette of a cruiser. After a brief, friendly discussion, Alejandro realized that there were indeed people in the world as passionate about maps as he was. When Miguel left the newspaper, they were already the best of friends. They continued their friendship despite the distances separating them.
From that moment on his colleagues noticed a certain gleam in Alejandro’s eyes. His work had been recognized. That what he so passionately created was considered truly interesting. His was not merely the work of yet another draftsman working at a paper where, like in nearly every other daily, everyone stays with what works best for them. Where grand informative works are thrown together with garbage, all sold at the same price the next day’s edition. His work was no longer ordinary and he began making maps more impressive than ever before. Miguel Urabayen deserves our special gratitude for helping Alejandro’s work transcend the borders of a country so far away. Alejandro’s relationship with Miguel was a great support to him. One day when he was feeling depressed and ill he phoned Miguel from the newspaper just to chat. They talked for a long time. It was one o’clock in the morning in Buenos Aires, a normal working time for a journalist of that era, but Spain is four hours ahead…
I knew the works of Alejandro Malofiej as yet another colleague, and reader, too, with a special interest in good journalism. I remember that in 1985 Juan Antonio Giner told me that these maps were outstanding. A few days later I had the chance to personally meet with Juan Antonio between classes at the School of Journalism of the newspaper Clarín. Apparently, Alejandro knew of my relationship with these teachers and the University. Ten years after his death, when looking for information about his life, I discovered that during his last months he had been trying to speak with me about the possibility of traveling to Pamplona to give a seminar. During those years I worked at a newspaper in the interior of Argentina, and it was not easy to go to Buenos Aires.
This story about Alejandro is not new. In 1995, I said a few, brief words at the closing dinner of the third Malofiej Awards which were later published in the book on the 1994/1995 Awards. What I said was incomplete and I knew it then but did not say so; I barely hinted at it. The Awards were very new and it seemed a good idea to let people know that Alejandro was not Malofiej. His father was not Simón, the Russian gardener at the house of an important family in Buenos Aires, but rather the aristocratic landowner, owner of this house where his mother had worked as a governess. His mother confessed this to him one awful day when he was a teenager. It was done. Alejandro lost his happiness and his good health and never recovered them.
Gonzalo Peltzer (Twitter: @ gpeltzer) is a media consultant. He has been an editor at several media companies in Argentina, Paraguay and Ecuador and professor at the University of Navarra. He is author of the books Periodismo iconográfico (1991) and Periodismo con pasión (1996).
Alberto Cairo (Twitter: @ albertocairo) is a professor of Visual Journalism at the University of Miami (INSERTAR ENLACE) and author of the books El arte funcional: infografía y visualización de información (2011) and Infografía 2.0: visualización interactiva de información en prensa (2008).