Is there something special about the rarified Andean air that influences the visions of three special photographers from Peru? They are Martin Chambi, Baldomero Alejos and Javier Silva-Meinel, and the correspondences between them are striking.
Chambi was from Cuzco and Alejos from Ayachuco, both over ten thousand feet in altitude. But then you have Javier Silva-Meinel who is from Lima at sea level so maybe this theory has to be tempered with the observation that the Hispanic-indian culture that permeates the air in Peru is as important as altitude.
Chambi was himself an Indian; Alejos consistently photographed the Indian culture of Ayachuco and Meinel, the modern photographer in this trio, has spent much time photographing the indians of the Amazon basin, not a surprising choice when you consider half the Peruvian population is of Indian descent. First, there were the Incas conquered by the conquistadores and their descendents the Quechuan Indians , and the Aymara, both of the Andean Highlands, and then the 40 or so tribes of the lowland Amazon region, the subject of much of Meinel’s work. And one mustn’t forget the Hispanic side of this culture: deeply Catholic, reserved and brooding: qualities of light that permeates each of the photographers’ work.
Martin Chambi Plaza de Armas, 1925
Martin Chambi: 1891-1973
self portrait 1922
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
Outside of Latin America, Martin Chambi is the best known of the three, specially since his exhibition at the Mueum of Modern art in New York in 1979.
A working commercial photographer, his studio in Cuzco was well-known in Peru and still exists today under the supervision of his grandchildren.
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, his quintessentially Peruvian, human, Vallejo-like pain into the truly universal. One day Chambi will be recognized as one of the most coherent and profound creators photography has given this century. Amanda Hopinkson, From the book, “Martin Chambi 55″
I have long been fascinated by that curious sub-genre, the Group Photograph and one of its masters is certainly Martin Chambi.
Fiesta of the Guardia Civil, Sacsayhuaman, Cuzco,1930.
I’m sorry these photos aren’t a little larger and I know there are even more dramatic examples of this man’s wizardry with groups. Satisfactory examples of all three of photographers are hard to find online so we go with what we can. He is almost unique in his use of deep space in his group photographs and like most of his images they are bathed in that Chambi light, dark and infused with a terrible beauty that characterizes many a Chambi photograph.
Wedding of Don Julio Gadea, Prefect of Cuzco, 1930
Look at this justly famous 1930 photograph, for example; it looks like the wedding party is emerging from the deepest depths of the earth. I imagine Don Julio and his young bride have long since returned to those depths but here they are, frozen in time, on the pages of books and hanging on the walls of museums.
This man, an indian giant, was photographed by Chambi many times. It is easy to believe that Diane Arbus at some point came across this picture. If not, it is one of those fortuitous examples of images bypassing their makers and speaking to one another directly:
Diane Arbus, Jewish Giant, 1968
Baldomero Alejos: 1902-1976
Alejos is the least known of the three Peruvians – again outside of Latin America and maybe inside as well – and I only became acquainted with his work through the publication of a printing-on-demand book from Blurb.com.
Baldomero Alejos was also a commercial photographer who worked in Ayacucho most of his life, a city once known as a centre of Indian culture, now unfortunately more famed as the home of the Shining Path, Peru’s Maoist guerilla group.
One speculates he must have been familiar with the work of his better known contemporary, Martin Chambi, and a look at his work in this book confirms that impression. It will be up to some future historian to figure out whether the influence was reciproal or one-sided.
Alejos’s group photographs have many of the Chambi trademarks: deep space and the dark light. But this beautiful image is an exception: here the light is bright and luminous. And what an interesting way to compose a group shot so that the environment becomes predominant, making the point that it’s the hospital, the institution, not the people, who is the real subject of this beautiful image.
This by the way, is the cover of the book, available from www.blurb.com. The text is in German and English so if you speak German you’re probably in good shape but the English is somewhat stilted, as if generated by an automatic translator.
This Alejos photograph of a Peruvian nun illustrates another thing both Chambi and Alejos had in common and that’s the use of natural light studios. The north light, combined with the light of a high altitude, gives both men’s photographs their reserved, somber character.
I remember reading somewhere that Irving Penn , another master of north light, borrowed Chambi’s studio’s when he was in Peru and I wonder if he didn’t borrow a bit from his imagery as well.
Irving Penn, Cuzco, Peru
Baldomero Alejos
The depth of feeling in both Peruvians’ work is extraordinary. I wish I had more to add of Alejos’ imges but so little is available of his work, and despite Chambi’s two books that’s true of his oeuvre as well. Relatively few Chambi pictures have been published, a small part of his archives, and when you consider the Alejos archives consist of over 60,000 images – well, all you can say is, photo historians get to work!
Javier Silva-Meinel, b. 1949
Javier Silva-Meinel is becoming better known these days after several New York shows and a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work about Andean ritual practices. Much of his work has been in with Indian tribes in the Amazon Basin.
His work is distinctly different from his predecessors in that he’s not a documentarian, more a Magic Realist, with a stress on the symbolic and the mythic, firmly in line with the writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the photography of other Magic Realists such as the Mexican photographer, Flor Garduno. Yet resemblances with Chambi and Alejos are many: the use of north light, a deep religiosity, a passion for Indian culture.
I am lucky enough to own a print of this beautiful Indian woman with piranha fish pressed to her eyes. Lately, fish has been some thing of an obsession with Meinel and rightly so since it must reflect the impact fish have had among the culture of the Indian tribes who live along the Amazon.
Meinel is sixty years old next year and it is time for some museum curator to take a trip south of the border and give this wonderful photographer a North American museum show with a definitive catalog. And while he or she is at it, they should take a longer look at Peru’s other marvelous photographers, Martin Chambi and Baldomero Alejos.
http://www.archivoalejos.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/menu-top.png00Walter Jr. Alejoshttp://www.archivoalejos.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/menu-top.pngWalter Jr. Alejos2009-08-06 01:43:002009-08-06 01:43:00
Rediscovered faces of Ayacucho By Lindsey McCormack
March 21, 2006
BEVERLY, Mass.— From 1924 until his death in 1976, Baldomero Alejos was the premier photographer of Huamanga, a provincial capital in the remote Andean region of Ayacucho. His studio was a magnet for locals who wanted to record a life event — a romance, marriage, birth, or death — or to create a memento for posterity. The Alejos archives were inaccessible during the devastating conflict between the Shining Path and the Peruvian military until the mid-90’s, when Alejos’s son Walter and granddaughter Lucia began to catalogue and digitalize 60,000 jumbled negatives — another 40,000 were lost to rot.
The exhibit “Retouched: The Photographs of Baldomero Alejos” (through June 1, 2006 at the Casa de la Cultura/ The Center for Latino Arts, 85 W. Newton Street, Boston, Mass. Also at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, Mass) was organized by Lucia’s childhood friend and Harvard graduate student José Falconi. The show features 150 enthralling images discovered in the archive.
A delightful portrait opens the exhibition; two people nestle close to each other but seem to inhabit different eras. The woman wears traditional clothing and a direct, unadorned expression, as if for a daguerreotype; the man, with his modish sunglasses and unbuttoned sports jacket, strikes a pose straight out of a movie poster. His arm around her shoulder looks less like a tender embrace than the way a gangster might hold onto his moll. Through a perfectly conventional pose, a wonderful play on the artifice of photography is created, a sort of deadpan Peruvian Gothic.
Alejos lived during an unusually peaceful period in long-suffering Ayacucho. His photographs carry a certain antebellum poignancy. (Ironically, one of his last portraits was of the philosophy professor and future guerilla leader Abamiel Guzmán.) Yet these pictures are compelling because Alejos did not approach his job with the apathy of a commercial photographer. He was a perfectionist, elaborating on the playfulness or gravity which his subjects brought to the studio.
Alejos worked only with natural sunlight, skillfully capturing the wide spaces of Andean valleys as well as the subtle expressions of the human face. Given Alejos’s heavy antique box camera and homemade developing equipment, impulse shots were a technical impossibility. Still, the painstaking realism of these photos turns out to be deceptive.
For Alejos, the art of photography lay in the ability to improve on reality just short of making the resulting image unbelievable. His son Walter, who was in Boston for the exhibit opening, explained that Alejos never returned a portrait without first taking a fine graphite pencil and smoothing away black circles and wrinkles, or adding a bit of hair as needed. “He could take fifteen or twenty years off a face,” Walter said, “but if you try to get rid of all the wrinkles it doesn’t look like a person anymore.”
Alejos was proud of his skill at retouching, and the people of Ayacucho were eager to pay for it. A portrait typically cost about twenty percent of a monthly salary; rural families might have to save for months, even years to afford a sitting. Thus to be photographed by Alejos was an honor. In one portrait of an indigent family, the father appears to be holding the photographer’s contract for services rendered: in this way he ensures that the prestige of an Alejos portrait is recorded within the portrait itself.
The contract in the father’s hand also highlights the theatrical quality in these portraits. According to Walter, Alejos was not afraid to send someone home from the studio to comb their hair or try on a different outfit. No wonder, then, that his subjects display considerable self-consciousness about being “onstage.” The musicians done up like gunslingers look ready to shoot their own Mexican cowboy movie; and the proud foursome of toreadors strike the same pose they might use to face down a bull (except, perhaps, the gentle- looking fellow on the right.)
The tendency for exotic self-presentation, especially in women, is also intriguing. Some, such as a society lady in a kimono, wrap themselves in Oriental mystique. Other women dress in the colorful costume of “La Huamanguina,” the folkloric Indian woman of the highlands. As the exhibit notes point out, many of the women dressing as “La Huamanguina” are physically indistinguishable from those who would actually wear the outfit every day, except that their broad smiles and confident bearing give them away as city-dwellers.
To take in the entirety of this wonderful exhibit, the viewer needs to visit two spaces: the David Rockefeller Center at Harvard University, and the Casa de la Cultura/ Latino Arts Center in the South End. The obvious drawback of this setup — many will not have time to travel between both spaces — is offset by the fact that each one functions as a free-standing exhibit. Furthermore, it is important that these photos be displayed in one of Boston’s longest-standing Latino communities. Alejos’s photographs tell a moving story of the creativity and endurance of a culture, and of the social injustices that years of civil war only managed to deepen.
00Walter Jr. Alejoshttp://www.archivoalejos.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/menu-top.pngWalter Jr. Alejos2009-05-21 12:16:002009-05-21 12:16:00Artículo en Art Scene
Complementando la muestra Baldomero Alejos y como parte del Primer Festival de Fotografía de Miraflores, el pasado martes 27 de noviembre se presentó el libro “Baldomero Alejos Bautista: Ayacucho 1924 – 1976”. Esta obra es un trabajo de recuperación de parte importante de nuestra memoria visual. La muestra puede apreciarla en el ICPNA de Miraflores.
Podríamos decir que antes de conocer esta obra valiosa sobre la labor de Alejos, no teníamos el registro visual histórico de Ayacucho, de la primera mitad del siglo pasado. Muchos vemos en esas imágenes de gente anónima los rostros de nuestros abuelos, que un día dejaron su tierra para buscar una vida más justa.
La publicación muestra relatos y experiencias de personas que fueron retratadas por el artista de la imagen. Baldomero Alejos nació el 27 de febrero de 1902 en Amaupata, anexo de Santiago de Chocorvos en el departamento de Huancavelica, fue hijo de agricultores, estos fallecieron cuando Baldomero Alejos tenia apenas 6 años de existencia. Es así que el pequeño queda bajo la tutoría de hermanos mayores. Desarticulada su familia, fue conducido por uno de sus familiares a Palpa-Ica, donde fue empleado en el oficio vitivinícola.
Alejos se pasó las horas de su vida pisando uvas, al cobijo de la hacendada familia Picasso Peralta y observando los patrones de comportamiento y forma de aquellos terratenientes. Terminó apenas la instrucción primaria.
Aquel observador niño de imágenes cerebrales, abandonó el campo para mimetizarse en el génesis urbano de Lima, a principios de la segunda década del siglo XX. Lima colonial, de balcones, caballeros, de nobles y cubiertas mujeres, albergó la inconsciente visión retratista de Alejos en años donde las artes fotográficas eran patrimonio de franceses y de imitadores de aquellos modelos.
La película era considerada una afición de la burguesía, pero eso no quebrantó la iniciativa y el apetito del joven Baldomero por escudriñar la magia de la fusión entre la sombra y la luz. En aquella gris época, el entusiasta jovenzuelo se empleó como ayudante de un modesto estudio fotográfico, para después inaugurar su propio laboratorio de fotografía en La Victoria, luego se traslado al balneario barranquino donde ofreció sus conocimientos y servicios a familias pudientes de aquel distrito. Ya en Lima la competencia era feroz, en 1924 enterado de que Ayacucho carecía de retratistas, poco perezoso, adoptó esa zona del Perú como escenario.
Esa región serrana atravesaba procesos de cambio, se inauguraba la unión de la capital con la provincia a través de una carretera. Con la llegada de la “modernidad” se experimentaba una nueva forma de crear.
Baldomero Alejos inicio sus actividades en una sociedad en formación, en busca de representación, el común de las gentes experimentó “pinturas creadas por la luz”. Cuentan las líneas de su vida que sus clientes eran aristócratas de ese tiempo Arca Parró, Protzel, Añaños, Canales, Alarcón entre otros.
De mirada alturada, trajes suntuosos y cuadros conservadores: “la dama de pie y el caballero sentado”, era lo que se estilaba, Europa nos regaló esa forma, pero dentro de aquel “estilo”, Alejos trabajó con percepción, con imaginación y “pintó” armonías grises con un sólo momento. “El rescate de su tiempo trasportado a la vigencia de nuestros días”.
Utilizó sabiamente los negativos como lienzo de decoración “más cabello para quien le faltara, uniformidad facial para quien no la tenia y asesino de arrugas de vanidosas mujeres”. Esa fue la obra de Baldomero Alejos. Y no digo más para que Ud. lo descubra.
La exposición comprende 100 imágenes–retratos y 250 fotografías tamaño “carnet”. La selección ostenta ser inédita y refleja la expresión de la vida cotidiana, costumbres y realidades propias de pobladores nobles y plebeyos de aquella Ayacucho de principios de siglo. Se puede observar en la galería ICPNA (Av. Angamos Oeste 160, Miraflores).
Texto: Carlos Huamán Chávez carlos.huaman@interlaticorp.com
00Walter Jr. Alejoshttp://www.archivoalejos.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/menu-top.pngWalter Jr. Alejos2009-05-21 08:25:002009-05-21 08:25:00Peru.com : Exposición ICPNA
http://markpowerblog.com/2008/12/15/three-peruvians-chambi-alejos-meinel/
Is there something special about the rarified Andean air that influences the visions of three special photographers from Peru? They are Martin Chambi, Baldomero Alejos and Javier Silva-Meinel, and the correspondences between them are striking.
Chambi was from Cuzco and Alejos from Ayachuco, both over ten thousand feet in altitude. But then you have Javier Silva-Meinel who is from Lima at sea level so maybe this theory has to be tempered with the observation that the Hispanic-indian culture that permeates the air in Peru is as important as altitude.
Chambi was himself an Indian; Alejos consistently photographed the Indian culture of Ayachuco and Meinel, the modern photographer in this trio, has spent much time photographing the indians of the Amazon basin, not a surprising choice when you consider half the Peruvian population is of Indian descent. First, there were the Incas conquered by the conquistadores and their descendents the Quechuan Indians , and the Aymara, both of the Andean Highlands, and then the 40 or so tribes of the lowland Amazon region, the subject of much of Meinel’s work. And one mustn’t forget the Hispanic side of this culture: deeply Catholic, reserved and brooding: qualities of light that permeates each of the photographers’ work.
Martin Chambi: 1891-1973
self portrait 1922
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
Outside of Latin America, Martin Chambi is the best known of the three, specially since his exhibition at the Mueum of Modern art in New York in 1979.
A working commercial photographer, his studio in Cuzco was well-known in Peru and still exists today under the supervision of his grandchildren.
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, his quintessentially Peruvian, human, Vallejo-like pain into the truly universal. One day Chambi will be recognized as one of the most coherent and profound creators photography has given this century. Amanda Hopinkson, From the book, “Martin Chambi 55″
I have long been fascinated by that curious sub-genre, the Group Photograph and one of its masters is certainly Martin Chambi.
Fiesta of the Guardia Civil, Sacsayhuaman, Cuzco,1930.
I’m sorry these photos aren’t a little larger and I know there are even more dramatic examples of this man’s wizardry with groups. Satisfactory examples of all three of photographers are hard to find online so we go with what we can. He is almost unique in his use of deep space in his group photographs and like most of his images they are bathed in that Chambi light, dark and infused with a terrible beauty that characterizes many a Chambi photograph.
Look at this justly famous 1930 photograph, for example; it looks like the wedding party is emerging from the deepest depths of the earth. I imagine Don Julio and his young bride have long since returned to those depths but here they are, frozen in time, on the pages of books and hanging on the walls of museums.
This man, an indian giant, was photographed by Chambi many times. It is easy to believe that Diane Arbus at some point came across this picture. If not, it is one of those fortuitous examples of images bypassing their makers and speaking to one another directly:
Diane Arbus, Jewish Giant, 1968
Baldomero Alejos: 1902-1976
Alejos is the least known of the three Peruvians – again outside of Latin America and maybe inside as well – and I only became acquainted with his work through the publication of a printing-on-demand book from Blurb.com.
Baldomero Alejos was also a commercial photographer who worked in Ayacucho most of his life, a city once known as a centre of Indian culture, now unfortunately more famed as the home of the Shining Path, Peru’s Maoist guerilla group.
One speculates he must have been familiar with the work of his better known contemporary, Martin Chambi, and a look at his work in this book confirms that impression. It will be up to some future historian to figure out whether the influence was reciproal or one-sided.
Alejos’s group photographs have many of the Chambi trademarks: deep space and the dark light. But this beautiful image is an exception: here the light is bright and luminous. And what an interesting way to compose a group shot so that the environment becomes predominant, making the point that it’s the hospital, the institution, not the people, who is the real subject of this beautiful image.
This by the way, is the cover of the book, available from www.blurb.com. The text is in German and English so if you speak German you’re probably in good shape but the English is somewhat stilted, as if generated by an automatic translator.
This Alejos photograph of a Peruvian nun illustrates another thing both Chambi and Alejos had in common and that’s the use of natural light studios. The north light, combined with the light of a high altitude, gives both men’s photographs their reserved, somber character.
I remember reading somewhere that Irving Penn , another master of north light, borrowed Chambi’s studio’s when he was in Peru and I wonder if he didn’t borrow a bit from his imagery as well.
The depth of feeling in both Peruvians’ work is extraordinary. I wish I had more to add of Alejos’ imges but so little is available of his work, and despite Chambi’s two books that’s true of his oeuvre as well. Relatively few Chambi pictures have been published, a small part of his archives, and when you consider the Alejos archives consist of over 60,000 images – well, all you can say is, photo historians get to work!
Javier Silva-Meinel, b. 1949
Javier Silva-Meinel is becoming better known these days after several New York shows and a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work about Andean ritual practices. Much of his work has been in with Indian tribes in the Amazon Basin.
His work is distinctly different from his predecessors in that he’s not a documentarian, more a Magic Realist, with a stress on the symbolic and the mythic, firmly in line with the writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the photography of other Magic Realists such as the Mexican photographer, Flor Garduno. Yet resemblances with Chambi and Alejos are many: the use of north light, a deep religiosity, a passion for Indian culture.
I am lucky enough to own a print of this beautiful Indian woman with piranha fish pressed to her eyes. Lately, fish has been some thing of an obsession with Meinel and rightly so since it must reflect the impact fish have had among the culture of the Indian tribes who live along the Amazon.
Meinel is sixty years old next year and it is time for some museum curator to take a trip south of the border and give this wonderful photographer a North American museum show with a definitive catalog. And while he or she is at it, they should take a longer look at Peru’s other marvelous photographers, Martin Chambi and Baldomero Alejos.
Artículo en Art Scene
Rediscovered faces of Ayacucho
By Lindsey McCormack
March 21, 2006
The exhibit “Retouched: The Photographs of Baldomero Alejos” (through June 1, 2006 at the Casa de la Cultura/ The Center for Latino Arts, 85 W. Newton Street, Boston, Mass. Also at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, Mass) was organized by Lucia’s childhood friend and Harvard graduate student José Falconi. The show features 150 enthralling images discovered in the archive.
A delightful portrait opens the exhibition; two people nestle close to each other but seem to inhabit different eras. The woman wears traditional clothing and a direct, unadorned expression, as if for a daguerreotype; the man, with his modish sunglasses and unbuttoned sports jacket, strikes a pose straight out of a movie poster. His arm around her shoulder looks less like a tender embrace than the way a gangster might hold onto his moll. Through a perfectly conventional pose, a wonderful play on the artifice of photography is created, a sort of deadpan Peruvian Gothic.
Alejos lived during an unusually peaceful period in long-suffering Ayacucho. His photographs carry a certain antebellum poignancy. (Ironically, one of his last portraits was of the philosophy professor and future guerilla leader Abamiel Guzmán.) Yet these pictures are compelling because Alejos did not approach his job with the apathy of a commercial photographer. He was a perfectionist, elaborating on the playfulness or gravity which his subjects brought to the studio.
Alejos worked only with natural sunlight, skillfully capturing the wide spaces of Andean valleys as well as the subtle expressions of the human face. Given Alejos’s heavy antique box camera and homemade developing equipment, impulse shots were a technical impossibility. Still, the painstaking realism of these photos turns out to be deceptive.
For Alejos, the art of photography lay in the ability to improve on reality just short of making the resulting image unbelievable. His son Walter, who was in Boston for the exhibit opening, explained that Alejos never returned a portrait without first taking a fine graphite pencil and smoothing away black circles and wrinkles, or adding a bit of hair as needed. “He could take fifteen or twenty years off a face,” Walter said, “but if you try to get rid of all the wrinkles it doesn’t look like a person anymore.”
Alejos was proud of his skill at retouching, and the people of Ayacucho were eager to pay for it. A portrait typically cost about twenty percent of a monthly salary; rural families might have to save for months, even years to afford a sitting. Thus to be photographed by Alejos was an honor. In one portrait of an indigent family, the father appears to be holding the photographer’s contract for services rendered: in this way he ensures that the prestige of an Alejos portrait is recorded within the portrait itself.
The contract in the father’s hand also highlights the theatrical quality in these portraits. According to Walter, Alejos was not afraid to send someone home from the studio to comb their hair or try on a different outfit. No wonder, then, that his subjects display considerable self-consciousness about being “onstage.” The musicians done up like gunslingers look ready to shoot their own Mexican cowboy movie; and the proud foursome of toreadors strike the same pose they might use to face down a bull (except, perhaps, the gentle- looking fellow on the right.)
The tendency for exotic self-presentation, especially in women, is also intriguing. Some, such as a society lady in a kimono, wrap themselves in Oriental mystique. Other women dress in the colorful costume of “La Huamanguina,” the folkloric Indian woman of the highlands. As the exhibit notes point out, many of the women dressing as “La Huamanguina” are physically indistinguishable from those who would actually wear the outfit every day, except that their broad smiles and confident bearing give them away as city-dwellers.
To take in the entirety of this wonderful exhibit, the viewer needs to visit two spaces: the David Rockefeller Center at Harvard University, and the Casa de la Cultura/ Latino Arts Center in the South End. The obvious drawback of this setup — many will not have time to travel between both spaces — is offset by the fact that each one functions as a free-standing exhibit. Furthermore, it is important that these photos be displayed in one of Boston’s longest-standing Latino communities. Alejos’s photographs tell a moving story of the creativity and endurance of a culture, and of the social injustices that years of civil war only managed to deepen.
Link: http://artscast.wordpress.com/2006/03/
Peru.com : Exposición ICPNA
Baldomero Alejos, testigo visual de Ayacucho
Complementando la muestra Baldomero Alejos y como parte del Primer Festival de Fotografía de Miraflores, el pasado martes 27 de noviembre se presentó el libro “Baldomero Alejos Bautista: Ayacucho 1924 – 1976”. Esta obra es un trabajo de recuperación de parte importante de nuestra memoria visual. La muestra puede apreciarla en el ICPNA de Miraflores.
Podríamos decir que antes de conocer esta obra valiosa sobre la labor de Alejos, no teníamos el registro visual histórico de Ayacucho, de la primera mitad del siglo pasado. Muchos vemos en esas imágenes de gente anónima los rostros de nuestros abuelos, que un día dejaron su tierra para buscar una vida más justa.
La publicación muestra relatos y experiencias de personas que fueron retratadas por el artista de la imagen. Baldomero Alejos nació el 27 de febrero de 1902 en Amaupata, anexo de Santiago de Chocorvos en el departamento de Huancavelica, fue hijo de agricultores, estos fallecieron cuando Baldomero Alejos tenia apenas 6 años de existencia. Es así que el pequeño queda bajo la tutoría de hermanos mayores. Desarticulada su familia, fue conducido por uno de sus familiares a Palpa-Ica, donde fue empleado en el oficio vitivinícola.
Alejos se pasó las horas de su vida pisando uvas, al cobijo de la hacendada familia Picasso Peralta y observando los patrones de comportamiento y forma de aquellos terratenientes. Terminó apenas la instrucción primaria.
Aquel observador niño de imágenes cerebrales, abandonó el campo para mimetizarse en el génesis urbano de Lima, a principios de la segunda década del siglo XX. Lima colonial, de balcones, caballeros, de nobles y cubiertas mujeres, albergó la inconsciente visión retratista de Alejos en años donde las artes fotográficas eran patrimonio de franceses y de imitadores de aquellos modelos.
La película era considerada una afición de la burguesía, pero eso no quebrantó la iniciativa y el apetito del joven Baldomero por escudriñar la magia de la fusión entre la sombra y la luz. En aquella gris época, el entusiasta jovenzuelo se empleó como ayudante de un modesto estudio fotográfico, para después inaugurar su propio laboratorio de fotografía en La Victoria, luego se traslado al balneario barranquino donde ofreció sus conocimientos y servicios a familias pudientes de aquel distrito.
Ya en Lima la competencia era feroz, en 1924 enterado de que Ayacucho carecía de retratistas, poco perezoso, adoptó esa zona del Perú como escenario.
Esa región serrana atravesaba procesos de cambio, se inauguraba la unión de la capital con la provincia a través de una carretera. Con la llegada de la “modernidad” se experimentaba una nueva forma de crear.
Baldomero Alejos inicio sus actividades en una sociedad en formación, en busca de representación, el común de las gentes experimentó “pinturas creadas por la luz”. Cuentan las líneas de su vida que sus clientes eran aristócratas de ese tiempo Arca Parró, Protzel, Añaños, Canales, Alarcón entre otros.
De mirada alturada, trajes suntuosos y cuadros conservadores: “la dama de pie y el caballero sentado”, era lo que se estilaba, Europa nos regaló esa forma, pero dentro de aquel “estilo”, Alejos trabajó con percepción, con imaginación y “pintó” armonías grises con un sólo momento. “El rescate de su tiempo trasportado a la vigencia de nuestros días”.
Utilizó sabiamente los negativos como lienzo de decoración “más cabello para quien le faltara, uniformidad facial para quien no la tenia y asesino de arrugas de vanidosas mujeres”. Esa fue la obra de Baldomero Alejos. Y no digo más para que Ud. lo descubra.
La exposición comprende 100 imágenes–retratos y 250 fotografías tamaño “carnet”. La selección ostenta ser inédita y refleja la expresión de la vida cotidiana, costumbres y realidades propias de pobladores nobles y plebeyos de aquella Ayacucho de principios de siglo. Se puede observar en la galería ICPNA (Av. Angamos Oeste 160, Miraflores).
Texto: Carlos Huamán Chávez
carlos.huaman@interlaticorp.com
Fotos: Cortesía ICPNA
Enlace: http://www.peru.com/entretenimiento/autonoticias/detallenoticia2198.asp