Gauchos: Portraits from the Estancias Outside Buenos Aires

A day on the flat land west of Buenos Aires photographing gauchos — silver rastra belts, boinas, a sunflower field at the end of the road, and a game of cards in the shade that has clearly been going on for years.

The pampa does not give a photographer much to work with. It is flat, it is enormous, and the horizon is a single ruled line in every direction. There is no landscape to hide behind. Which means that on an estancia outside Buenos Aires, everything has to come from the people — their hats, their belts, the way they stand against a fence.

Fortunately, gauchos are among the best-dressed working men alive, and they know it.

The rastra tells you everything

The second frame in this set is just a pair of hands on a belt, and it may be the most informative picture of the day. The rastra — a wide leather belt closed with a worked silver plate, often hung with coins — is the one piece of a gaucho's outfit that is genuinely his. Some are inherited. Some are made to mark a specific year. The rest of the clothing is practical; the rastra is a biography you can wear.

So I shot it the way I would shoot a watch for a client: close, low light on the metal, hands framing it, everything else soft. Then I stepped back and did the same man full-length, and the belt still reads. That is the test of a good detail — the wide shot should feel richer because you have already seen the small thing.

The sunflower field

Late in the afternoon we came past a field of sunflowers taller than a man, and I asked one of the older gauchos to walk in and stop. He did it without a word, turned around, put the sun directly behind his hat, and waited. Some subjects have to be coached into stillness. Others have spent sixty years outdoors and understand the light better than you do.

“Some subjects you coach into stillness. Others have spent sixty years outdoors and read the light before you do.”

Cards in the shade

Between the portraits there was a card game in the open barn — four men, a wooden table, berets and hats, the doorway behind them blowing out to pure white. I did not set it up and I did not ask anyone to look at me. It ran for as long as I was there and I suspect it had been running for years.

That frame is doing something the portraits cannot. Portraits give you a person; a scene like this gives you the relationships between them, which is what a documentary set actually needs to hold together. It is the same balance I look for in my carnival work in Barranquilla — some frames for the face, some for the room.

Argentina keeps pulling me back

I have worked in this country repeatedly since — the HBO productions Entre Hombres and Jardín de Bronce both put me back in Buenos Aires with a very different brief. But this remains the set I show people first when they ask what my personal work looks like.

Partly because nobody is selling anything in it. Mostly because these men gave me exactly forty minutes and then went back to work, and forty honest minutes will beat a full production day more often than anyone in advertising wants to admit.