Photographer Spends Six Years with Chilean Ranchers Who Live in Isolation
A photographer spent six years documenting Chilean ranchers, known as “puesteros,” who live and work alone on vast private lands for months at a time for a new photography book.
GOST Books is publishing Dutch photographer Pie Aerts’ first monograph Coirón in September this year. For the book, Aerts followed aging gauchos known as puesteros, who live and work alone for months at a time across vast private ranches in the Chilean region of Magallanes.
These puesteros, often silent, are shaped by distance, physical labour, and long periods of solitude, on land they do not own and with little security once their bodies begins to fail. Aerts spent nearly six years embedded in the puesteros’ way of life — a way of life that is on the brink of disappearing in Chile.
The wider region of Magallanes is undergoing rapid social, cultural, and economic change, and fewer young people feel the desire to pursue a life on the land, breaking a generational cycle of farm life. Caught in the middle, many puesteros move between embracing change and resisting it. Their interweaving stories in Coiron form an intimate, complex portrait of a tradition that is now nearing extinction in Chile. and invites the viewer to pause within a world moving too quickly to keep up.
Aerts says his time with the puesteros helped him rethink his fear of loneliness, realizing that the fears he’s carried for years may have actually shaped his identity more than he previously understood.
“As long as I can remember, I’ve always feared being alone. Partly in a physical sense, but mostly in a deeper existential sense.” Aerts says. “Spending time in the presence of these puesteros, while seeing them sit through a life of silence, hardship and endurance, I started to open up to a different perspective on the silence I’ve always feared.
“As a result, and for the first time in two decades of self-discovery, I’m starting to embrace the idea that some of my fears have perhaps shaped who I am far more than I ever realized.”
Coirón by Pie Aerts will be published by GOST Books in September and is available to pre-order here.
Image credits: All photos © Pie Aerts.
