Fundación Foto Colectania dedicates an exhibition to the Latin American photographer Martín Chambi

From April 1st to June 12th, the Foto Colectania Foundation, in collaboration with the Banco Sabadell Foundation, presents the exhibition Martín Chambi and his contemporaries. The Andes photographed, curated by Andrés Garay and Stefano Klima. The exhibition brings together more than 100 vintage photographs from the Jan Mulder Collection, the largest legacy of original vintage photographs by Martin Chambi.

Martín Chambi represents a turning point in Latin American photography in the first half of the 20th century. He dedicated his entire life to photography and his work has been widely recognized, both in his time and in ours. Of indigenous origin, Chambi (Coaza, 1891- Cusco, 1973), photographed for years the Peruvian Andes, vindicating the pre-Hispanic past through images of Inca ruins and the portrait of the life of the Andean communities at the beginning of the century. XX.

In this way, Chambi incorporates a new perspective into the local photography of the time, proposing a unifying look at Peru and shedding light on indigenous discourses that were beginning to gain strength in this territory.

In 1924 he photographed Machu Picchu, being the second to do so after Hiram Bingham, who had done so in 1913 for National Geographic magazine. From this experience, his work enters a new stage where the control of light, shape, space and texture, combined with a very particular way of framing, make it an emblem of photography. contemporary and documentary in Peru and Latin America.

In this exhibition, photographs by Martín Chambi dialogue with works by photographers Irving Penn, Eugene Harris, Werner Bischof, Robert Frank, Pierre Verger, Max T. Vargas, Luigi Gismondi and Manuel Mancilla, among others, who visited the areas. of the southern Peruvian Andes during the same period as Chambi. The confrontation of all these views expands the construction of the collective imagination on the millennial Andean culture of this period, while showing the important legacy that marked the photographic production of its predecessors.