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Martin Chambi (Photographer)
Original Side Gallery exhibition text, 1979:
Cuzco was the ancient capital of the great Incan civilization. Today it is the second city of modern Peru. Its population still includes generations descended from the Incas.
Martin Chambi born in 1891, lived and worked in Cuzco from 1920 until his death in 1973. He practiced as a local and commercial portrait photographer. His studio was frequented by some of the most prominent members of Cuzco society. He photographed weddings, parties, dances, fiestas, but with such skill and perception that his work conveys ‘with unexpected intensity the structure and mood of a complex colonial society meeting the 20th century.’
Chambi was ‘a contemporary historian, at least by instinct, and not solely a record maker.’ He was as interested in the Inca past as he was in Peru's present and future. Photographs of the Indian life of the time occupy a large place in his output, ‘more by virtue of his alert consciousness of his environment than as a market response. He was among the earliest to have done real photographic justice to Macchu Picchu,’ (probably the most spectacular Incan archaeological site). ‘We also have pictures from his studio that are the first to describe the habits and regalia of outlying mountain communities. These turn out to be rare images, their subjects apparently not willing to be photographed except by one who spoke the Quechua language and was of their own race. A good deal more is therefore involved in this photographic campaign than ethnographic curiosity.’ (Quotations drawn from an essay by Max Kozloff)
Martin Chambi (from an essay by Edward Ranney, 1978):
Martin Chambi was a relatively isolated photographer who worked in Cuzco, Peru, from 1920 until his death in 1973. His life and accomplishments represent a unique combination of historical, cultural and aesthetic considerations that are of unusual significance in regard to the history of photography in Latin America. With the exception of Manuel Alvarez Bravo, whose personal, surrealist vision developed in the surge of artistic expression in Mexico during the 1920s and 30s, there are few names of other Latin American photographers which come to mind as representing major bodies of significant aesthetic or documentary work.
Recent research, however, has shown there to be a rich tradition of photography in Latin America, beginning only a few years after its invention, with particularly interesting work having been done during the nineteenth century in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Peru. Martin Chambi’s work is especially important in this regard because it represents both the culmination of the natural-light studio operation dating from the nineteenth century and the emergence of an outstanding contemporary photographer who assumed the role of documentarian for the native highland culture of which he was a part.
In contrast to the elaborately equipped nineteenth century photographers in Lima, who were for the most part either European or North American, Chambi was not only Peruvian, but of Indian-Mestizo background, having been born in the small, isolated peasant village of Coaza, in the province of Puno, north of Lake Titicaca. Given the rigid social stratification of Peru at the time, it is likely that Martin would have remained within the peasant world into which he was born had it not been that his father, Felix, himself a campesino, was contracted to work for the Santo Domingo Mining Company, an English firm exploring the gold deposits of the Carabaya area. By helping his father in his work, young Martin was exposed to a different set of cultural and economic influences, the most significant for him being the work of the company photographer, who apparently welcomed his companionship and encouraged his interest and abilities. It was most likely this early experience that caused young Martin to seek and find work as an apprentice to the Peruvian photographer Max T. Vargas, when at the age of seventeen, Chambi left his native village for Arequipa.
After nine years working with Vargas, Chambi developed as a photographer in his own right and moved to a small town in the highlands near the ancient capital of Peru, Cuzco, where he opened a portrait studio on Santa Theresa St. It was in Cuzco that he was to spend the rest of his life establishing a reputation as a portrait photographer while pursuing his other interest in the heritage of highland Indian culture, particularly the architecture of Cuzco and surrounding Inca sites, including the recently discovered Macchu Picchu, which he photographed only a few years after Hiram Bingham’s work there in 1911 and 1915. No less important to Martin were all aspects of contemporary Indian life. As he had grown up speaking Quechua, the language of the Incas which is still spoken in Cuzco today, Martin not only felt a strong affinity for the rural Indians but was warmly regarded by them and invited to photograph at their outlying communities and festivals.
Chambi was by all accounts extremely hardworking and vigorous. Another friend described him as being ‘always recognisable by his large camera swung over his shoulder, his wool hat with the ear flaps up, and the long strides of his step.’ In fact, at least one half of the five thousand or more plates he made documenting Cuzco and the surrounding region can be dated to the 1920s and 30s. These pictures indicate that in little over his first decade in Cuzco, Martin had already travelled extensively throughout the southern highlands, from Lake Titicaca to the low tropical valleys and headways of the Amazon.
Chambi also, of course, photographed all aspects of the city of Cuzco, and his reputation quite naturally became associated with the subject matter of the city, much as the great French photographer Eugene Atget is known for his work documenting Paris. But unlike Atget, Chambi was highly esteemed by his society during his own lifetime, and by 1925, had been awarded silver and gold medals in important local artistic competitions held in Cuzco, Puno and La Paz, Bolivia. The photographs Chambi exhibited most widely in these competitions corresponded to the role he saw himself filling as the visual emissary of historic Cuzco and Indian culture. But the photographs themselves often seem to have been chosen more for the dramatic or pictorial effects then in vogue than for the straight forward seeing that appeals to us today.