Irina Werning spent eighteen years travelling across Latin America in search of people with long hair. Beginning in 2006 in the Andes, where she had been photographing schools in Argentina’s Indigenous Kolla community, she encountered many women with exceptionally long hair. Intrigued, she began to take their pictures and listen to their stories. That first encounter turned into an extensive body of work. She spent months in remote mountain towns, putting up signs in schools, hospitals and markets, and organising hair competitions in an effort to find those willing to sit for her.
Las Pelilargas, published by GOST Books, gathers that work. Werning photographs in black and white and in colour, moving between the natural landscape, with its cacti and rocky outcrops, and domestic interiors where her sitters are arranged, at times playfully, at times with a surreal wit. In colour, the subtle differences in hair colour highlight inherent individuality alongside conformity. Hair is sometimes adorned with colourful accessories, sometimes still and sculptural, sometimes caught in motion. Recent portraits of Kichwa men in Otavalo, Ecuador, who wear their hair braided, extend the project into a reclamation of a tradition interrupted by forced cutting under Spanish colonial rule.
The photographs rest on a question about where the sacred sits in ordinary material. For many Indigenous communities, hair is a physical expression of thought—an extension of the self, much like the way rivers flow or plants grow from the earth. Werning treats it as a subject with spiritual weight rather than as an exotic attribute. Because Indigenous customs in Latin America have blended with successive waves of migration, long hair can symbolise both continuity and subtle rebellion. The book is an anthropological search, as the photographer describes it, about where we come from, what we keep, and how something sacred can hide in something as simple as hair.
What distinguishes the collection is the patience behind it. Eighteen years of travel and searching give the portraits a cumulative force that a shorter project could not carry. The photographs do not reduce their subjects to a single trait; the person and the place hold equal weight with the hair. The book contains 128 pages and 88 images.
