Art that made me cry: Martin Chambi’s Two Giants
In January of 2019 I was living in Buenos Aires as part of a year-long study abroad program for my degree in Latin American Studies. After returning to the U.S. for the Christmas holiday, I elected to make a two-week stop in Peru before returning to Argentina. For many people, the allure of Peru rests on images of lush Andean landscapes and ancient Incan ruins like Macchu Picchu. Travelers from all over the world flood into the country every year for this particular reason. And though I surely intended to patronize these touristic attractions, my primary objective for visiting Peru was much more narrow: I was on a pilgrimage to see the works of my favorite photographer, Martin Chambi.
My thesis advisor had introduced me to Chambi’s work when I was in my freshman year of college. Looking for indigenous Latin American photographers to write an essay on, she lent me a book of Chambi’s work, and an obsession was born.
After growing up in Puno, one of Peru’s poorest cities, Chambi eventually opened his own studio in Cusco in 1917. There, he became an artistic fixture amongst Spanish-Peruvian aristocrats, who hired him to photograph their weddings and baptisms. And though the photos he took for these events were certainly stunning, it is his photos of rural Quechua communities outside of Cusco that have come to define his legacy.
Himself the son of Quechua miners, Chambi possessed the unique ability to capture the lives of Andean natives with the same nobility as high-society families. Through his portraits, Chambi deliberately sought to preserve a period in history that has rarely been documented through the native gaze: the industrialization of the Americas. What is most radical about this work is that it takes communities that are often portrayed as “historical” relics of the pre-Hispanic era, and brings them into the still very present world of the 20th Century, showing what Native American life looked like in the 1910s and 1920s as new technologies like photography and automobiles were introduced. After exhibiting his photos in Chile in 1936, Chambi wrote “It is believed that Indigenous peoples have no culture…that they are barbarians. That is why I am undertaking this task” of documenting native life in the post-colonial world.
Perhaps no Chambi photo portrays this mission more than what is colloquially known in English as the “Two Giants.” One of his most famous photographs, “Two Giants” portrays a Spanish-Peruvian aristocrat, a member of one of Cusco’s most powerful and wealthy families, standing beside a Quechua man who appears to suffer from gigantism. The image, shot in Chambi’s Cusco studio, relies on heavy contrast in the physicality of its subjects to create a physical representation of the inequalities between European and Indigenous Americans. The Spanish-Peruvian man is physically dwarfed by his counterpart, but his tuxedo and sharply groomed hair make it clear that his fortune and privilege trump that of the giant. The giant, wearing tattered clothes and shoes made of twine, towers over the aristocrat and wraps his arm around him, staring directly into the camera while the aristocrat looks up at him. Together, they symbolize the colonization of the Americas and the lasting inequality that it has produced throughout the Western Hemisphere, but especially in segregated Andean communities like Cusco.
100 years later, I would arrive in the same city with one very specific mission: to see the world’s largest public collection of Chambi’s work in the flesh. Despite being exhibited in foreign institutions as prestigious as the MoMA in New York or the Photographers’ Gallery in London, it is shockingly hard to find Chambi’s works on display, especially in his native Peru. This is because what little funding the Peruvian government has to funnel towards the culture sector is usually aimed at historic tourist attractions like Macchu Picchu which easily turn a profit. The tragic consequence is that some of Peru’s most renowned contemporary artists, like Chambi, do not receive the financial attention needed to establish independent museums and archives of their work. For this reason, Peru’s greatest photographer was relegated to a two-room gallery on the second floor of a corporate bank. And though it wasn’t much, I knew I had to travel 4,000 miles to see it.
When I got there, I was at once dismayed by the building’s ordinaryness. The bank was, like most banks, fluorescently lit and drab, with little interest from patrons looking only for an ATM. How could the work of my favorite photographer, one of the greatest in the world, be reduced to this? It is an understatement to say that I was disappointed by the presentation.
But once I got to the top of the stairs and entered the gallery, I felt lucky that no one else was there. As soon as I entered, I saw over a dozen silver-gelatin prints of Chambi photos that I had never seen before, not recorded anywhere on the internet. I also saw many of the photos I had grown to cherish when I was 19, finally able to get close to high-resolution prints and see all the tiny details hidden inside. In his massive group photos from dinner parties and family reunions (one of his specialties), I could discern the expressions of every subject. In his countryside portraits, I could see every stone on the ground. The grain of the film and the residue from the processing chemicals on each print let me know that they had been made from Chambi’s original negatives. It was this realization that made me think of him handling the frames in his own hands, a mental image that had already been making me emotional when I finally saw it, my favorite photo in the world: the “Two Giants.” I instantly started crying. A friend snapped a photo. And I of course sent it to my thesis advisor.
