El rostro de los niños en los retratos de Martín Chambi y Baldomero Alejos

The purposose of this essay is to contribute to the cultural study of the human face from the photographic representation of children’s faces in the southern Peruvian Andes in the mid-twentieth century. What we want to link is the portraits of Martín Chambi with the portraits of Baldomero Alejos, two Peruvian photographer masters whose black and white images offer us a range of children’s facial expressions from frowns to smiles. Between one extreme and the other, we find neutrality (no frown, no smile) that does not necessarily means an absence of emotions. Based on studies focused on human expressions and its social conditioning, as well as studies of otherness from the socio-semiotic perspective, we want to establish correlations between the level of expression and the level of content in the reading and interpretation of the photographed human face.