Male narrator These two photographs were staged portraits, later printed as postcards.
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One is the indigenous warrior Chief Pincén. He had been brought to Buenos Aires as a prisoner of war and this portrait was his last ordeal before he was jailed. Curatorial Assistant, Fabian Leyva-Barragan.
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Fabian Leyva-Barragan In this photograph, he has a stern facial expression. You can see him holding this long lance and he has bolas, a type of throwing weapon made of weights on the ends of interconnected cords. And they are used to capture animals by entangling their legs.
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Male narrator Everything here was deliberately arranged. That lance Pincén holds is not his own. It was borrowed from the collection of a local museum. And he is not standing in the pampas, the vast plains that were his homeland, but in a studio.
In the other portrait, a woman of the Yagán or Ona tribe weaves a basket. These peoples lived at the extreme southern tip of Argentina. Despite the cold climate, they dressed sparingly. Though this scene may look naturalistic, it was also posed in a studio.
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Fabian Leyva-Barragan It is a constructed depiction of the figure. She had to stay still for several minutes to be fully captured in these two images.
Male narrator Both portraits give us access to a moment in Argentine history when indigenous people became the object of a kind of myth-making.
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Fabian Leyva-Barragan There was this interest of the “other,” that lived in nature, in the pampas.There was this curiosity that many Argentine photographers wanted to capture through their prints.
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