Coirón takes its name from the tough tussock grass of the Magallanes, the Chilean far south, and from the lives that persist around it. For six years Pie Aerts photographed the puesteros, aging gauchos who live and work alone for months at a stretch on vast private ranches. The land is not theirs; the work is season after season of it; and there is little security once the body begins to fail. What Aerts records is not only labour but its intervals — the sitting, the waiting, the silence that accumulates between tasks.

The book’s method is patient and cumulative. According to the publisher, the volume runs to 116 pages and 59 four-colour images; meaning surfaces through repetition, gesture and long stretches of time rather than through incident or argument. Aerts has said that he long feared being alone, and that the company of these men altered his sense of silence. That admission matters to how the pictures read: they are not portraits of isolation observed from outside so much as an encounter with solitude as a condition, and with the composure it can produce. The sequence was made in a region under rapid social and economic change, where few young people wish to continue on the land. The puesteros move between accepting that change and holding it off, and the book holds both positions without resolving them.

A poem by Iván Rojel Figueroa and an essay by Alberto Harambour, associate professor at the Universidad Austral de Chile, accompany the photographs; Harambour writes of a breeze that passes through the images, realistic yet finally ungraspable. The volume is published by GOST Books in a large-format clothbound hardback, with the cover issued in two colours and copies allocated at random.

The book brings together photographer, poet and historian around a single subject: a way of life at the point of disappearing, made with the patience that subject requires.