Gismondi, Luis

Like many Europeans, he came to America because in his home country he had no job opportunities, and they even lacked sufficient food to survive. He, along with his older brothers Jacinto and Esteban, disembarked in Mollendo, Peru, around 1892, and established a commercial house there. His two brothers were photographers and were active in Cusco, Arequipa, and southern Peru as early as 1895. Luigi Doménico Gismondi began his pilgrimage as a photographer apparently from those same years, working in southern Peru, northern Chile, and western Bolivia. He was active in Bolivia from 1901 and in 1904 he settled in La Paz with his wife. In 1907, he established a formal studio in this city: Foto Estudio Gismondi, which was the center of his professional activity until his death in 1946. The work of Luigi Doménico Gismondi is important in two distinct but complementary and inseparable scenarios: the record of the territory and its inhabitants. He traveled practically throughout the Bolivian territory, although most of his work was centered in La Paz and its department, with cross-border work in northern Chile (the former Bolivian coastline) and southern and central Peru; as well as southern Bolivia, the Republic of Argentina, and Paraguay. Gismondi made an extensive photographic record of the country. His photographs of the mountains, the altiplano, the mesothermal and tropical valleys of the Yungas around La Paz, as well as of the city and its streets and monuments, are traditional in their conception and execution. Gismondi's merit lies in the fact that his work constitutes one of the first systematic sequences of recording the landscape of La Paz and its region, its urban details, as well as the monumental heritage built in the country, rural and urban.