Martin Chambi (1891-1973)
Martín Jerónimo Chambi Jiménez Perú,1891 Peruvian photographer, originally from Puno, in southern Peru. He was one of the first major Indigenous Latin American photographers. Recognized for the profound historic and ethnic documentary value of his photographs, he was a prolific portrait photographer in the towns and countryside of the Peruvian Andes. As well as being the leading portrait photographer in Cuzco, Chambi made many landscape photographs, which he sold mainly in the form of postcards, a format he pioneered in Peru. In 1979, New York’s Museum of Modern Art held a Chambi retrospective, which later traveled to various locations and inspired other international expositions of his work.
Without a doubt, Martín Chambi’s images laid bare all the social complexity of the Andes. Those images place us in the heart of highland feudalism, in the haciendas of the large land-holders, with their servants and concubines, in the colonial processions of contrite and drunken throngs, and in the smoky chicherias. . . . Of Martín Chambi it is enough to say that in those thirty-some years of photographing, there was no corner of the Cuzco universe he did not appropriate or immortalize.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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