Like most Latin American photographers of his day, Chambi made his living shooting portraits for the local elite in Cuzco. But, as Ranney discovered, he also had a splendid wandering eye. The calendar is a sampling of his portfolio of majestic landscapes, Aymara and Quechua Indians, and the quotidian splendor of life on Cuzco’s streets. Chambi’s oeuvre is all the more remarkable given his limitations; he worked with a simple box camera, exclusively in black and white, used no artificial lighting and recorded the images on emulsified glass. Sad to say, the new calendar, like the six that preceded it, is available only to a select list of Burti clients. So savor the photos on this page.
