Pioneer Photography in Bolivia

boliviano 1898 (1996), edited by Lorenzo Calzavarini.

Chambi, Martín (1891-1973). Active from the early 1900s through 1950, renowned Peruvian photographer Chambi spent almost his entire career in the city of Cusco and the surrounding mountain communities. In 1925, however, on a rare excursion outside Peru, he photographed in La Paz while attending the Exposición Internacional del Centenario de Bolivia, where he won a gold medal. (Moreover, his friend and mentor, Max T. Vargas, had a studio there.) The Gismondi family possesses three Chambi prints depicting the city's streets and the Plaza Murillo festively illuminated. For more about Chambi's life and career, including a bibliography, see Peruvian historian Jorge Heredia's Chambi webpage, Breve Revisión Histórica de los Avatares de ls Obra del Fotógrafo Peruano Martín Chambi, and the Chambi links on Yolanda Retter's webpage, Peruvian Photography 1850-1950.

Chani, Miguel (1860-1951). Peruvian photographer Chani was a founder of the Cusco School of photography and influenced Martín Chambi, among others. His studios, Fotografía Universal, were in Cusco, Puno, and Arequipa. He photographed archaeological sites in the southern Andes, including Tiwanaku. Chani's 1910 photograph of a stone doorway in Tiwanaku village appears in Adelma Benavente's Peruvian Photography: Images from the Southern Andes, 1900-1945 (1996).

Charnay, Claude-Joseph Désiré (1828-1915). A French photographer active in the United States, Europe, Mexico, and South America, Charnay is best known for his work among Mayan ruins in the Yucatan in 1856 and 1857. Michele and Michel Auer have Charnay in Argentina and Chile from 1866 to 1870; William S. Johnson reports that he was in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina on assignment for the French magazine Tour de Monde in 1875; and Vicente Gesualdo states that he visited northern Argentina and Bolivia--Tiwanaku, La Paz, and Cochabamba--in 1876.

Charnay died in Paris in 1915. His Bolivian photographs have not been found.

Cherrie, George K. (b. 1865). An Iowa native, Cherrie participated in forty expeditions, most of them to Central and South America, including Theodore Roosevelt's South American Expedition of 1913-1914 to Brazil's River of Doubt. During his long career as a natural scientist he was associated with, among others, the British Museum, the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum in Chicago. In 1915, he went to Bolivia with the Alfred Collins-Garnet Day expedition. Two illustrations of scenes along the Río Espíritu Santo in the Chaparé region of the eastern Andes, perhaps based on photographs made by Cherrie, appear in his memoir Dark Trails (1930).

Chester, C.L. Chester made stereographic views in Bolivia for the American company Underwood & Underwood. A set of 12 Bolivian stereoviews, presumably made by Chester, was listed in Underwood's ca. 1913 catalog.

Christiano Jr. (1830?-1902). Christiano Jr. was the trade name of the Portuguese-born Brazilian photographer, José Christiano de Freitas Henriques Junior. He opened studios in Rio de Janeiro ca. 1863 and in Buenos Aires in 1868, and traveled extensively in the Argentine interior, including to Mendoza and Salta, from where he possibly visited Bolivia. He sold his Buenos Aires studio to Alejandro S. Witcomb in 1878, and died in Asunción, Paraguay, in 1902.

Several museums in Rio de Janeiro have examples of his work, and the Archivo Gráfico in Buenos Aires holds twenty-five thousand Christiano negatives. The Archivo Provincial de Salta