Martin Chambi (1891-1973): indigenous photographer

Marcelo Guimaraes Lima

photograph by Martin Chambi, 1929

At 14, Martin Chambi worked in the gold mines exploited by the British in his native Peru. He learned the rudiments of photography from the same foreign bosses. He became a professional photographer working on commissions, specially portraits, and on his own, photographing the land and his people. As Alfredo Srur observed in a recent note (Radar Libros - here), the commissioned works served to fund his passion for registering his time and culture.

In the works of Chambi, photography will be both the medium and the index, tool and testimony of the modern developments affecting the Peruvian nation and its peoples in the early decades of the 20th century.

Chambi' s works capture and re-display moments of coexistence between the past and a present in transition, that is, a time internally divided between what it was and will soon no longer be, and what will come. Split between being and becoming, the present is no longer identic to itself: a time of non-identity. And yet, life goes on as an homogeneous duration. The paradox of lived time, like photographic time itself, is that in many ways it is a time that does not pass. The place of photography is located between the already gone and the always (t)here.

Martin Chambi, self portrait with motorcycle, 1934

One of the remarkable elements of Chambi's photography (we may be allowed to say perhaps without too much exaggeration) is indeed the power of amalgamating in one and the same look, gaze or regard, the modern and the “ancestral”, technology and the "soul", that is, photography, the image-machine, and the spirit or the “aura” of a people, a place and a culture. A culture, that is, a specific form of life, a unique form of humanity made visible by the photographer. The “aura”, an emanation of light that frames a visible pattern, a momentary and original configuration, both instantaneous and timeless.

Chambi the photographer is himself the bearer of modernity, of a new vision to his culture, and of it. The photographer is like an intruder or trespasser in his own land. And yet the look, gaze or regard in his works is reciprocal, a kind of dialogue between the artist and his subjects, a commerce of places between the observer and the observed. The photographer is here at the same time an external observer and an internal one. The aesthetics of genre and of the picturesque becomes a medium of reversal, the foreign gaze may serve as a tool for self reflection. Chambi's subjects gaze at the photographer with a similar “mechanical” gaze, as focused and intense, and at the same time as “distracted”, indifferent or suspended, as the vision of the camera.

The indigenous photographer does not simply “deconstructs” photography, romanticism and genre: he uses them to his own ends. His is an implacable logic of the instrument or medium as such. Photography may indeed register the times and the culture with enough objectivity because it is in itself a collective enterprise, a collective medium implying in every shot a multiplicity of points of view, including the photographer's, his subjects and viewers. The multiple gaze of photography can express the infinite forms and modulations of human experience. All unique and yet equivalent, that is, eminently translatable in the image. Time itself translates its many dimensions in the forms of photography.

Chambi's oeuvre is a large collection of postcards documenting the people and the landscape of Peru. In this vast collection, the photographer transits effortlessly from public display to private visions. In the postcard as a form, the image is a mediating point between another's gaze, and vision as subjective recollection. The photographic image reveals human vision as a relation of exchange between two absents. It gives itself to a third absent: the post card addresses itself to the future.

link: Martin Chambi website