Home > Martin Chambi, the Peruvian Ace Shot

| Martin Chambi, the Peruvian Ace Shot |

Martín Chambi Jiménez (Puno, Peru November 5, 1891 – Cuzco, September 13, 1973) was photographer, originally from southern Peru, the only major indigenous Latin American photographer of his time. 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 was a pioneer of 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.

Martín Chambi was born into a Quechua speaking peasant family in one of the poorest regions of Peru, at the end of the nineteenth century. When his father went to work in a Carabaya Province gold mine on a small tributary of the River Inambari, Martin went along. There he had his first contact with photography, learning the rudiments from the photographer of the Santo Domingo Mine near Coaza. This chance encounter planted the spark that made him seek to support himself as a professional photographer. With that idea in mind, he headed in 1908 to the city of Arequipa, where photography was more developed and where there were established photographers who had taken the time to develop individual photographic styles and impeccable technique. Chambi initially served as an apprentice in the studio of Max T. Vargas, but after nine years set up his own studio in Sicuani in 1917, publishing his first postcards in November of that year. In 1923 he moved to Cuzco and opened a studio there, photographing both society figures and his indigenous compatriots.

Martín Chambi’s images laid bare the social complexity of the Andes. Those images place us in the heart of highland feudalism, in the haciendas of the large landholders, with their servants and concubines, in the colonial processions of contrite and drunken throngs. Chambi’s photographs capture it all: the weddings, fiestas, and first communions of the well to do; the drunkenness and poverty of the poor along with the public events shared by both. That is why, surely without intending it, Chambi became in effect the symbolic photographer of his race, transforming the telluric voice of Andean man, his millenary melancholy, his eternal neglect, and his quintessentially Peruvian, human, Vallejo-like pain into the truly universal.

Chambi quickly came to the forefront in the documentation of his own indigenous culture. He undoubtedly received significant support and encouragement in this work from members of Cuzco’s Indigenista movement. In turn, his work and presence, as an artist of direct Indian descent, photographing their meetings and listening to their discussions, surely reaffirmed their intellectual programs and lent a sense of visual authenticity to the movement.

Between 1920 and 1950 Chambi amassed a comprehensive collection of archaeological sites, native peoples, and views of Cuzco that was widely published as well as presented throughout South America. Many of the most fascinating pictures in his archive were apparently unknown during his lifetime - some because they fell outside the interests of Indigenismo, others because of the limited artistic conventions then in vogue, and many because of their commercial origin. Significant ongoing research and publication on this unusual period still need to be realized in order to clarify Chambi’s artistic contribution in the world of photography. For more than twenty years, Martín Chambi balanced his successful studio business with extensive travels outside of Cuzco to photograph archaeological sites, landscapes, and indigenous communities.

“Chambi’s magic pulses through his photographs, the unmistakable magic that distinguishes him from all the photographers with whom critics have wanted to compare him, from August Sander and Nadar to Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Irving Penn, to Abraham Guillen himself.” Mario Vargas Llosa