Artist:

Irina Werning

Curator:

Vanessa Bell

"The series Las Pelilargas (the long haired) began back in 2006, driven by Irina Werning´s curiosity for the ancestral tradition of women who proudly wear their hair long and uncut, and how, like Sampson, hair can symbolise both strength and fragility, and profoundly shape our views on femininity, both in the Western World and in more ancestral and traditional cultures and communities. 

Werning´s projects tend to be the result of meticulous research, whose themes stem from one central idea. Yet this body of work came together organically, and only began to take shape more formally once Irina decided to publish and share the images she had amassed and kept under wraps for over a decade. 

She was initially commissioned to work on a project photographing rural schools in the province of Salta in the North of Argentina where she lived while she immersed herself in the culture. She soon noticed that the women from the Coya community all wore their hair long and uncut and she felt compelled to photograph them. On her return to Buenos Aires these images stayed with her. She returned soon after to seek out more girls to document. It proved challenging given the remote areas she was visiting and the pre smartphone era, so she ran contests, hung hand made signs in markets, handed out flyers. An artisanal legacy of the analogue era. 

She began photographing other women across Argentina and in the region, hoping to understand the tradition, and in doing so inadvertently created a vast and highly valuable anthropological archive. 

A trip to Otavalo in Ecuador to shoot longhaired men from the Kichwa community and one final visit to Iruya in 2024 to where it all started were the final elements of an extensive and extraordinary body of work that has spanned over nearly 20 years. This show is not only the culmination of that work but also brings to a close this captivating series" - Vanessa Bell.

Irina Werning

Irina holds a degree in Economics and a master’s degree in History and Photojournalism. She focuses on long-term personal projects. Among the awards she has received are the Ian Parry Scholarship (The Sunday Times Magazine and Getty) in 2006, the Emerging Photographer Fund from Burn Magazine (Magnum Foundation) in 2012, the Sony World Photography Award for Portraits in 2012, the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award in 2014, the World Press Photo Story for South America in 2022, the Sony World Photography Latin America Professional Award in 2022, and the UNICEF Photo of the Year in 2022. She was also a Pulitzer Grantee in 2020, 2021, and 2022, and named a National Geographic Explorer in 2022.

Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell was born in England and raised between Paris and Oxford in a bilingual household, the daughter of an English father and an Argentine mother. She relocated to Buenos Aires in 2010, a keen observer and chronicler of Argentine culture, contributing to international publications with a focus on architecture, design, art, and lifestyle. In addition to her writing, Bell offers curated tours of Buenos Aires that reveal the city’s lesser-known cultural landscapes. She also leads creative English workshops exploring themes to do with popular and contemporary art and culture.

Her involvement with the Art Basel Cities initiative in Buenos Aires saw her curating bespoke tours and authoring articles on the local art scene for the project’s digital platform. In recent years, she has expanded into curatorship, organizing exhibitions such as a showcase of Argentine photographer Maxi Magnano’s work and a fan art show inspired by the literary universe of Mariana Enríquez at Mite Gallery.