Martin Chambi

Martín Jerónimo Chambi Jiménez (Coasa, Department of Puno, November 5, 1891 - Cuzco, September 13, 1973) was a Peruvian photographer. He is considered a pioneer of portrait photography, recognized for his photos of biological and ethnic testimony, he has deeply portrayed the Peruvian population and its heritage.

It is risky to insist too much on the testimonial value of your photos. They have it, too, but they express it to him as much as to the medium in which he lived and testify (...) that when he put himself behind a camera he became a giant, a true inventive force, recreating life.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Martín Chambi always sought to know more about his trade, to learn from his elders in Arequipa (where he met the Vargas brothers at a very young age), in Cusco, Lima or abroad.

Biography

Martín Chambi Jiménez was born into a family of Quechua-speaking peasants at the end of the 19th century. His parents were Félix Chambi and Fernanda Jiménez. As an indigenous person, poverty and the death of the head of the family made the young Martín Chambi emigrate, at only fourteen years old, to look for work in the multinationals that exploit the gold mines of Carabaya in the jungle on the banks of the Inambari river.

Fortune makes it there that he made his first contact with photography, learning its rudiments from the English photographers who work for the Santo Domingo Mining Co. That fortuitous encounter with the new technique ignited in him the spark that decided him to find a livelihood as a photographer. For this he emigrated in 1908 to the city of Arequipa, where photography is highly developed and where notable photographers stand out, who had been marking their own style and managing an impeccable technique for some time.

The social and cultural context in which it was developed was optimal, as a growing wave of tourist and historical interest and archaeological investigations (the citadel of Machu Picchu was officially discovered in 1911), as well as the arrival to the south of the modern benefits of technology (motorcycles, automobiles, air flights, new roads), were undoubtedly the visual spurs of his restless observant spirit. Chambi was one of the protagonists of the so-called Cusqueña School of Photography. He exhibited in life at least ten times, both in Peru and outside of it.

I have read that in Chile it is thought that the Indians do not have culture, which are uncivilized, which are intellectually and artistically inferior in comparison to the whites and the Europeans. More eloquent than my opinion, in any case, are the graphical testimonies. It is my hope that an impartial and objective state will examine this evidence. I feel that I am a representative of my race; my people speak through my photographs

Martin Chambi, 1936

Many critics claim that he divided his work into two groups: one of a commercial nature, which included commissioned portraits, studio and outdoor portraits as well as large group portraits, and the other of a personal nature, which included his anthropological record, basically portraits of the Andean ethnic group and registration of local traditions, there would also be its numerous urban views of Cuzco and its views of archaeological remains. Although this part of the work is quantitatively smaller, it is distinguished by having been carried out with remarkable persistence and continuity.

Photographic work

Current view of the building where the old studio of Martin Chambi was found in Calle Marqués of the city of Cusco, Peru.

The famous shots in which he captures crucial moments of modern life in the ancient capital of Tahuantinsuyo (for example, the first aerial flight by Velasco Astete) would rather be somewhere between both modalities.

Peruvian researcher Jorge Heredia, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, asserts that the photographer's work has been revalued since the late 1970s with highly diverse results, perhaps as heterogeneous as the nature of the legacy itself, whose density, he adds, allows to highlight any point of support for any type of presentation.

He has been a white photographer who coveted his images, but also of Indians and mestizos.

Jorge Heredia

Heredia also affirms that the artist can be taken as a documentary photographer at face value and can also approach a certain formalism or be considered simply as a plain artistic product, just as pictorialism did in its time.

It is said that he had a clear practical sense as an image professional. This is indicated by specialists in the field such as filmmaker José Carlos Huayhuaca, author of the book Martín Chambi, photographer, who states that this was a man with his feet on the ground, although not to the point of doing things for monetary reasons, otherwise he would have stayed in Arequipa, where he had more possibilities than in Cuzco. One of the stages of his life rarely mentioned in detail has been his work as a photojournalist for the newspaper La Crónica and the magazine Variedades (1920-1927), Peruvian publications that illustrated many of its pages during the Oncenio of Augusto B. I followed with unpublished photographs of Chambi, all of them very suggestive, clear and perfectly conceived.

Events, curiosities, unique facts, news in short, was what the Puno lens, adopted by Cuzco, revealed in daily work, and not only for the capital of Lima, but also for the cosmopolitan city of Buenos Aires, where he collaborated in the newspaper La Nación.

And it is that his work transcends personal concerns and penetrates deeply into the collective soul of the people. In his case, photographic art does not become vertically indigenist parameters, as might be believed, although that stimulus of claim helped him to become aware of his cultural identity, but rather it truly enriches himself, as an artist who was in the effort to capture the uniqueness of each person, situation or landscape.

After enjoying the recognition of critics, the press and the public while alive, he suffered a decline in his health and perhaps also in his work. Despite this, in 1958, when celebrating his golden wedding anniversary as a professional, his figure was renewed and he even regained his presence in the media in interviews and reports. An important part of the Chambi archive, it was under the care of her daughter Julia de ella until her death on October 15, 2006, continued by her grandson Teo de ella, who promoted the work in different Latin American countries. and Europe.

Everything is kept in the boxes that my grandfather left, with his own fist and letter classification. They are about 30,000 plates; more 12 000 to 15,000 photographs in rolls, which is a recent discovery whose details will soon be published.

Theo Allain Chambi, grandson of the artist and Director of the Photo Archive Martín Chambi

Only after his death, which occurred in 1973, has his work once again been studied, appreciated and admired throughout the world, through international exhibitions, such as the one held in the mid-1990s in the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid (Spain), or the most recent, in November 2001, in Paris (France) in the sober environments of the Instituto Cervantes, among others.

Context

Chambi was born in a southern Andean village within a peasant community of indigenous Quechua traditions. In Chambi there was the fortunate concurrence of various historical circumstances, the main ones being -without going into detail- the late arrival of the industrial revolution in the Andes, with all the aftermath of encounters between modernity and tradition; the relative local economic boom, motivated mainly by the increase in commerce, improvements in communication and services, and the consequent growing tourist interest in Cuzco; and the emergence of pro-indigenous social and political programs that emerged from urban centers with its important correlate of artistic-literary movements that permeated cultural activities.

While Chambi took advantage of the situation he found himself with determination, sagacity and talent, this one is totally unrepeatable. What's more, Chambi was an isolated case. The possibility that he had to carry out his work as he did it was as exceptional as his social ascent. Which does not mean at all that Chambi was the only photographer in Cuzco at that time, moreover, it seems that the social, economic and cultural effervescence of those days provided the necessary climate in Cuzco for a wave of photographers to develop works peculiar; but so far he is the only one to climb the social ladder in this way and also, somewhat unfairly, the only one whose work has been widely recognized. Photography in Cuzco in the first decades of the XX century was one more sign of the thriving modernity that permeated society, together with with the railway, the motorcycle, the automobile and the airplane, whose arrival has been faithfully documented by Chambi.

Photography in this new environment was, in turn, a trace and a mark, it was a means of recording and a means of giving shape to immigration, of oneself, of others, and also of the environment in which it operated. In fact, there was a significant encounter between the forms of traditional immigration, not only those prevailing in the bourgeois milieu that supported Chambi, but also the forms of the less favored groups, the mestizos and the indigenous people. And all these imaginations in turn were met with the advantages, limitations and demands of modernity. Due to its particular characteristics, the photographic phenomenon itself was a scenario that tremendously influenced the forms of immigration and left an impression on these encounters, all the shocks, trips and bruises. Almost all Chambi does is skillfully respond to both the stimulus of the prevailing culture and that of his origins; it feeds on culture to feed culture back.

Timeline

Cartel located in the building where the studio of Martin Chambi was.

• 1891 - Martín Chambi is born in Coaza, North of Lake Titicaca (Peru), in a family of Quechuatal indigenous peasants.
• 1905 - Death of his father. Travel on the banks of the Inambari to work on the gold mines. One of the theories managed is that the English photographers of the mining company Santo Domingo Mining Co They teach him the first notions of photography.
• 1908 - Enter to work as an apprentice in Max T. Vargas' photographic studio in Arequipa, to whom he considered his master in the art of photography.
• 1917 - Chambi opens his first study in Sicuani, Cuzco.
• 1920 - Chambi is established in the city of Cuzco. The author is still in his quaint stage learned in Arequipa. Soon his study was posited as the most important since it encompassed different realities: rich-poor, white-Indian and mestizos, tradition-renovation and modernity, field-city, past-present, art photography-documentary photography, form-content, freedom-commercial, rational-logic circular ^{[chuckles]required]}
• 1927 - Start of the mature stage in the photograph of Chambi.
• 1950 - Cuzco Earthquake. End of the School in Spain. Paulatin abandonment of Chambi's photographic activity.
• 1958 - Honorary exhibition on the occasion of Chambi's 50 years as a photographer.
• 1964 - Exhibition dedicated to Chambi in MexicoFirst Convention of the International Federation of Photo Art)
• 1973 - Muere Martín Chambi in the Cuzco, in his old studio on Marquis Street.
• 1977 - First works of cataloguing and restoring the photographic archive Chambi, funded by the Earthwatch Foundation (Belmont, MA). Start of the international recognition of his work.
• 1979 - Chambi retrospective exhibition at the MOMA in New York.
• 1981 - Latin American photography exhibition in Zurich, Switzerland.
• 1990 - Exhibition dedicated to Chambi in the Circle of Fine Arts of Madrid.
• 2006 - Exhibition dedicated to Chambi at the Fundación Telefónica de Madrid.
• 2012 - Exhibition: "Peru. Martín Chambi-Castro Prieto". Diputación de Cádiz.

Fonts

• Departmental Atlas of Peru, several authors, Editions Peisa S.A., Lima, Peru, 2003 ISBN 9972-40-257-6
• Peru in modern times, Julio R. Villanueva Sotomayor, Editions and Impresiones Quebecor World Perú S.A., Lima, Peru, 2002.
• History of the Republic of Peru, Jorge Basadre Grohmann, Diario "El Comercio", Lima, Peru, 2005. ISBN 9972-205-62-2.
• New Atlas of Peru and the WorldJuan Augusto Benavides Estrada, Editorial Escuela Nueva S.A., Lima, Peru, 1991.
• History of photography, Marie-Loup Sougez, Editions Chair S.A, Madrid, 1996
• Martín Chambi, Lorenzo Mangialardi, magazine "Photomundo", Buenos Aires, 1984
• Martín Chambi, tf. editors, Madrid, 2005 ISBN 84-96209-48-2