The best known myth about the creation of Tawantinsuyo tells of a transcendental journey, whose participants set off from the region that would later be known as Collasuyo looking for a promised land that would be called Kosq´o (Cusco), where they settled. This was the route that was covered - not in myth but in history - by another native of this area his aim was to carry out a mission that would benefit Peru, but on an in different scale and the beginning of the 20th Century. Martin Chambi.

NATIVE MINERS AT COAZA
Born in 1891 in Coaza, a tiny village in the Puno province of Carabaya, to a rural quechua-speaking family that was not particularly poor but which, like the neighbors did not enjoy life's bounties in abundance, leading a traditional life and marginalized racially and culturally by the white Spanish speakers and those of mixed race who made up official society.

In the decade after the disastrous war with Chile, in which Peru was healing its wounds with the consequent need for seismic changes that would enable it to overcome a lengthy crisis. One of these measures. Already traditional in the history of Peru was to invite foreign capital, especially into the mining industry. Thus, the British established and ran the Santo Domingo Mining Company to mine gold not far from Coaza. Like other rural people, Martin Chambi's father, attracted by the money, did occasional work for the mine, as would Martin some time later, in order to contribute to the family's meager income.

A LUCKY CHANCE: PHOTOGRAPHY
Change began to make itself felt all over this zone and it is easy to imagine the locals, excited by this new source of work. Looking outwards a little to a modern world of unknown possibilities. The British had brought with them, among other curiosities, a camera and the gringo who used it went all over the place lugging his heavy equipment of steel and wood and making small images on paper of what the had seen with the aid of the sunlight. Martin, who had offered to help carry all the gear found this magic impossible to resist and wanted to learn about it any way he could, to the extent that his new friend offered to show him the rudiments of the art and, above all, the images that would result. Thus Martin got to know the landscape, the cozy houses of Coaza the familiar faces of his neighbors, the miners and one of the Englishmen, though in a rather unusual way; he also saw images of places he had never been to, people from cities that were very different to his own surroundings.

It was his epiphany. But it was also a disturbing opportunity to ask radical questions: first, because he saw how narrow was his universe, the material poverty that afflicted it, the clear differences between the dominant white people and the rest; and secondly because he saw, an experience that must have been transcendental for him, not for reasons of vanity but as a means of self-education (his near obsession with the self portrait, which stayed with him all his life and which resulted in some masterpieces, is probably a consequence of that). The great problem of personal identity and the uncertainties that are normally lived over a long time were condensed into one dramatic instant: when the gringo showed him the first photograph he had taken. Then Chambi must have realized, shockingly, who he was, or rather who he did not want to be: an indigenous child or adolescent, barely educated (three or four years in one of the poor primary schools typical of the Peruvian highlands of those days) whose destiny was one of the more or less disguised forms of servitude that awaited the children of rural dwellers in the Andes. In a second (this is who I am / I don't want to be like this), the idea of creating an alternative identify was born, the idea that occupied the greater par of his life and the catalyst for which, as privileged a means of expression as language, was photography. There is no other way to explain the intensity of his relationship with photography, or the peculiar ways in which he exercised his profession: the photographic art as the means of a revelation of something and a conversion to something else, perhaps better described as the symbol and the possibility of self-improvement.

THE LAST OF THE CHRONICLERS
Now, more than a century since Martin Chambi's birth, the importance of this work for Peruvian culture in not that it is simply a visual record of a society and a time, whose virtue in describing them has been used and abused by journalists, historians and social scientists; nor is it the aspects that the international photographic community has emphasized, indeed the great technical and aesthetic quality of his images and his ability as a pioneer in the use of photography as an artistic discipline capable of standing alongside others. Like them an end in itself. Its importance has to do, fundamentally with the fact that both the nature of the works and the destiny of their author embody (dramatize, indeed) a particularly emblematic means of (re)integration of our divided ego. Divided since the so-called conquest five centuries ago when Spanish society was imposed upon the indigenous people, living with them, the result of which was a new society mainly mixed race ashamed of its racial origins and autochthonous culture, denied them in practice even when the words of Peru's national anthem and constitution say otherwise.

It also has to do with the fact that, properly understood, Chambi and his work should be placed not only at the beginning of a mere aesthetic activity - photography - but at the end of a great tradition which runs through Peruvian culture and history, starting with Inca Garcilazo de la Vega and Guaman Poma de Ayala.

Thus, Garcilazo, wrote in 1609 in his marvelous and impeccable Spanish, his imperishable apology for the Inca Empire; Guaman Poma, in 1615 made a vigorous denouncement of the suffering the Conquistadors inflicted on his people, not only through a moving text in rough Spanish laced with Quechua but in astonishing drawing that are at once documental and symbolic which constitute, since their discovery in 1908 something like an authentic call from the pre-Hispanic Andes which had no written language and had to express itself in visual images.

Like Garcilazo, Chambi in the 20th century attempted a positive restructuring of the cultural dismemberment that was his starting point, in other words he tried a rationality that enabled him to accept and value his Inca Legacy as well as operating effectively in a westernized world; the difference was that Chambi was not a writer who from his European exile evoked nostalgia for an unrecoverable past, rather, like Guaman Poma he was a traveler who stood up for the Andean people making a visual record of what he found (you may imagine what Guaman Poma - in one respect the Chambi of the 17th Century would have done with a camera!) In contrast to Guaman Poma, he did not work for the purposes of polemic rather, like Garcilazo, he did so apologetically and to mythicize (not mystify); he celebrated and immortalized not what has gone, but what still exists. In effect Chambi denotes (and personifies) the perseverance and vitality of the indigenous Andean world; and he did so with a stimulating serenity and courage which managed to erase the pre-established poor image of a people inclined to sighing and complaining.

The systematic will with which, for example, he photographed manifestations of Quechua folklore and religion, from the purest to the most synchretic, can not be explained as mere the care of a professional photographer. It is rather the result of faithfulness to the pre-Hispanic art and the desire that it should survive; in other words, faithfulness to the living autochthonous traditions that, like underground springs, appear not to exist because they are hidden or because the surface has been changed into something but which, nevertheless, have survived the centuries and still irrigate the contemporary soil and allow original shoots to grow. One form of colonial resistance that he shared with Garcilazo and Guaman Poma and would have won the approval of Gandhi and Martin Luther King: creative resistance. Chambi is the last of the Indian chroniclers.