| Martin Chambi: Photographs, 1920-1950
     
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Paperback
115 pages
Smithsonian Institution Press
Published 2003
From Publishers Weekly
As the world has awakened to the enormous riches of historical and contemporary Latin American art, renewed interest has been sparked in the extraordinary work of Peruvian photographer Chambi (1891-1973). Of Indian descent, Chambi was born in a small village in the Andes. After moving to Arequipa and apprenticing for nine years in the studio of Max T. Vargas, Chambi traveled to Cuzco and opened his own studio. Between the early 1920s and the 1950s, Chambi documented Cuzco's substantial cultural heritage. As a photographer, he "laid bare all the social complexity of the Andes," says Vargas Llosa in his foreword, with images that "place us in the heart of highland feudalism, in the haciendas of the large landholders, with their servants and concubines" and "in the colonial processions of contrite and drunken throngs." Standouts among these beautiful photographs include an eerie May-December wedding portrait; a breathtaking mountain shot of Macchu Picchu; a Dickensian beggar child; and the lighthearted Mestizo Woman Drinking Chicha. With informative, insightful introductions by Ranney and Mondejar, this is a volume not to be missed.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This is the first comprehensive book published in the United States on Martin Chambi, a Peruvian campesino of Indian descent active as a studio and landscape photographer in Cuzco between 1920 and 1950. His photographic archive, passed to his heirs and rediscovered and printed by Edward Ranney in the 1970s, has been exhibited at major U.S. and English sites. Introductory essays discuss his contributions to photography and the artistic, cultural, and political context in which he worked. The... read more
Book Description
Stunning, magical images by a master Latin American photographer
"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 chicherías. . . . 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, from the Foreword
Martín Chambi is today regarded as one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century. Between 1920 and 1950 he assembled an unprecedented collection of photographs of the people and landscape of Cuzco, the ancient Inca capital that was in his day a cultural center in Peru. His studio was favored by the local elite, whose fiestas, weddings, and portraits he imbued with a unique outsider's sensibility. Above all, he devoted himself to photographing his own people-the highland Indians whose ancestors built Cuzco-with a keen postcolonial eye.
A campesino of Indian descent born in 1891, Martín Chambi (1891-1973) was a pioneer in twentieth-century photography. Mario Vargas Llosa is an internationally acclaimed novelist, playwright, journalist, and essayist. |
Martin Chambi, 1920-1950
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