PERUVIAN DANDIES

Photography

THE MAGICIAN OF LIGHT

Olivier Woodes-Farquharson uncovers a treasured Peruvian photographer who documented a little-known Andean world of socialites springing into life in a hitherto deeply traditional city

You think you’ve seen so many like it: A sharp, black and white photo of a popinjay, likely from the 1920s. He sits relaxed, confident, alert and dashing. You automatically assume it was taken in Europe – Paris, Rome or somewhere on the eastern seaboard of the US. But look behind him. There is no wall in the northern hemisphere that looks anything like that. It is monumental, it is ancient, it is stunning. It is Inca. And the fop in question is high in the Andes – a very, very long way from anywhere.

It is largely thanks to the skill and passion of Peruvian photographer Martin Chambi that we are able to gain any insight into this little known world. Unknown outside South America until after his death in 1973, he is now regarded as the great photographic chronicler of pre-war Andean life. Others would come to the mountains and exoticise their subjects, tellingly not getting to know them. But as Argentine photographer Sara Facio points out, ‘Chambi was the first great photographer not to regard us through the eyes of the colonist’. A social chameleon but a scrupulously honest and truthful one, Chambi’s photographs didn’t

“Many keen amateurs will swear that the crispness of the light in South America is somehow on another, indefinable plane when compared to other continents, yet none have been able to ensnare it and let it weave its alchemy the way that Chambi did, whether capturing people or places on his camera”

just pioneer a new art form within his homeland, but also kick-started an entire social movement, in reclaiming Peru’s stunningly rich indigenous heritage.

Chambi was born on 5th November 1891 in the humble adobe hut where his parents lived. His immediate world was the southern Peruvian village of Coaza, high in the Altiplano – the desolate moonscape that squats between the desert of the coast and the mighty mountain range inland.

British industry was very present there at the time, keen to exploit the region’s vast tin mines. With so many mining companies present in the region, engineers were doubling up as photographic chroniclers, and the equipment at the time was notably hefty. Thus the 12-year-old Chambi, keen for tips as a porter, stumbled across his first camera and was instantly entranced. He took a self-portrait and told his parents that his future path was clear.

Chambi made his way to the city of Arequipa, colonial both in its architecture and its outlook. A pure blooded indigenous Andean, no matter how handsome, was sadly but predictably looked down upon. He sought out locally renowned photographer Max T Vargas, who immediately took a shine to the passionate teenager, quietly ‘forgetting’ to charge the boy rent and taking him on as an apprentice.

What Vargas was first to notice – and which enthusiasts of Chambi’s work have remarked upon ever since – was his extraordinary skill with light. He was enchanted by it, but he also had a natural talent that seemed to manipulate it in a way that others couldn’t. Many keen amateurs will swear that the crispness of the light in South America is somehow on another, indefinable plane when compared to other continents, yet none have been able to ensnare it and let it weave its alchemy the way that Chambi did, whether capturing people or places on his camera.

Chambi decamped to Cuzco in 1920. Translated from the local Quechua as ‘navel of the world’, this unique Andean city was the capital of the astonishing Inca Empire that thrived in the century prior to the arrival of the conquistadors in 1532. It continues to lure travellers to this day

Self Portrait with Inca Ruins (1943) image courtesy of Martin Chambi Archivo Fotografico

and possesses some of the most jaw-dropping stonemasonry in the world. It also had a higher fullblooded indigenous population than Arequipa.

The timing of his arrival could not have been more fortuitous, for this was when, finally, ‘Cuzco woke up’. The university was exploring more openminded studies, and a café culture burst into life, a glittering party set rising out of it. For the first time since the Conquistadors, there was an awareness of the richness of indigenous Andean culture that had been submerged for so long beneath colonial Spain. This cultural and spiritual growth went hand-in-hand with a greater self-regard for the clothing that this burgeoning set chose to wear. Dowdy, functional attire made way for style – or, more accurately, two very opposing styles: one a bleeding-edge, European dandy chic; the other a wholesale hijacking of the more traditional garb of the indigenous Andeans, unchanged for countless mountain-dwelling generations. Chambi photographed both. No other studios would have a fee-paying socialite in one minute, and a street beggar the next.

His landscapes are equally powerful. It is no surprise that Chambi took over 1000 photos of Machu Picchu. Still the most photographed site in the whole continent, we now know it to be a country residence of the great Inca emperor Pachacuti. Machu Picchu became a favourite site for the picnicking set and they usually wanted Chambi with them to document their frolics. One particular trip in the late 1920s was organised by a wealthy young Cuzquena, Señorita Ricarda Luna, accompanied by 30 of her upper-crust friends, a troupe of musicians, amateur botanists, doctors, café intellectuals, and sufficient chickens and pigs to slaughter and cook on the way.

By now, Chambi’s work was nationally known, exhibited in all Peru’s major cities at least once by 1934. He consolidated his reputation over the 30s and 40s, even as Cuzco’s spark of enlightenment went back into hibernation during World War II,

Juan de la Cruz Sihuana con Víctor Mendívil (1925) courtesy of Instituto Moreira Salles English Wedding Couple, Cuzco (1927) courtesy of www.moma.org

as trade dried up. And then came the day when everything changed.

At 1.45 pm on May 21st 1950, Cuzco was shattered by a huge earthquake, killing 1,625. The earthquake shifted the land, but there was a shift within the man too. Chambi spent less and less time in his studio and more on the streets to witness and document first-hand his adopted city being rebuilt. Although over 35,000 houses were destroyed, he still documented a new wonder: the crumbled modern rendering revealed underneath the splendour of the incredible, centuries-old and earthquake-proof Inca stonework, so much of which had been plastered over during colonial times.

Martin Chambi breathed his last on 13th September 1973. Fittingly, he passed away in the wonderful, idiosyncratic studio that had captured so many extraordinary moments of 20th century Andean life. With none of his interviews or notebooks surviving, his memory may have been quietly erased forever, except for the serendipitous efforts of US anthropologist Edward Renney, who stumbled across Chambi’s work during a 1970s trip to Peru. With the help of Chambi’s son Victor, he managed to organise an exhibition of some of Chambi Snr.’s photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1979. Further exhibitions were mounted in France, Spain and beyond. In Madrid he was trumpeted as ‘The Magician of Light’.

Chambi’s legacy had been secured. By harnessing his natural wisdom and warmth with such skill into his timeless photos, he was able to transcend the complex network of relationships that Cuzco’s heritage engenders, and preserve an extraordinary time in a seemingly alien place. Peruvian belle lettriste Mario Vargas Llosa continues to laud him as ‘a pioneer, a master, a genius’, but on those bizarre, foppish picnicking trips to Machu Picchu in the 1920s and 1930s, he was also, incongruously, that rare thing: a completely trusted friend. n