Magazines - Tribal Art Summer 2009

By Forrest D. Colburn

Introduction
Martín Chambi is widely celebrated for his intimate photographs of his native Peru, all the more so since he himself was Aymara, an ethnic group of the Andes and Altiplano regions of South America. Born in 1891 in Puno, close to the Bolivian border, he worked at an early age as an apprentice in a photographer’s studio in Arequipa. Sometime around 1920, he settled in Cuzco—once the capital of the Inca Empire—and opened his own photography shop. He quickly achieved prominence, both for commercial portraits and for chronicling Cuzco, its environs, and the Quechua people. Chambi also documented the many Inca sites around Cuzco, including the famed ruins of Machu Picchu.
Chambi’s legacy can be contested. He openly spoke of himself as a visual ambassador for Cuzco and unabashedly promoted its wonders for tourists. His “pictorialist” landscapes were part of his promotional agenda, as were his photographs of native life. Chambi’s ethnographic works follow the European tradition of cataloguing a culture by recording “types” of individuals and their activities, and then selling them as such, including in the format of postcards. He did the same for the Hispanic architecture and mestizo culture of Cuzco. In Chambi’s support, it has been argued that his photographs have a historical accuracy, gravity, and vérité.