L’esprit des hommes de la Terre de Feu, Selk’nam, Yamana, Kawesqar

He died nearly half a century ago and yet his work remains very present. This is simply because it is definitive. Martin Gusinde (1886-1969) was a German missionary, a teacher at the high-school of Santiago de Chile, who spent all of his vacations taking adventurous trips to Patagonia. He would not fish nor hunt, but rather immortalized, through photography, the Indians of the Tierra del Fuego. These ethnic groups, mistreated by the colonizers, hunted down, brutally converted and contaminated by devastating illnesses, have now disappeared. The most beautiful images we have of them are those taken by this austere member of the order of the Divine Word, who knew above all how to document the impressive body paintings –abstract motives of lines and points on bodies that are completely naked. We can well imagine what over rigorous superiors could have done with these unique images.

• L’esprit des hommes de la Terre de Feu, Selk’nam, Yamana, Kawesqar, by Martin Gusinde, éditions Xavier Barral, 2015, 300 p., €60.