“Derby & Groma” by Kara Blake

Nowness presents a fascinating story about two forgotten cabaret performers whose popularity in 1920's Buenos Aires, Argentina is nothing now but abandoned photographs rescued by a curious pedestrian.

Watch as the journey of question begin as to what happened to these two once celebrated performers.

A flipbook-style montage of 1920s and 30s-era photographs pieces together the tale of Derby & Groma, the unsung show couple who stormed Argentina’s cabaret scene. “When I first saw this collection, it immediately set my imagination in motion, and I tried to figure out the story behind them,” says director Kara Blake, who encountered the artifacts on Fotos Encontradas (found photos), a website established by Pablo Cruz Aguirre to collect together his vast archive of thousands of images retrieved from the streets of Buenos Aires. Scrutinizing each photograph for leads, plotting timelines from letters and tickets, and scouring the city’s registries, Blake and Aguirre’s search eventually reached a dead end. But instead it began to pose a wider question on the importance of preserving these tangible examples of social history. “Our visual climate is now a lot more disposable,” says Blake. “Digital photography makes the medium so accessible that I wonder if the value of photographs has been diminished by the sheer quantity.” Her remedy? That we should approach our digital archives as we would a photo album: “by holding on to these pictures, circulating them, and talking about them.”