First edition of Las Pelilargas by Irina Werning (2025)

First impression 

Medium format hardback in excellent, as new condition.

Signed and dated by Irina Werning at PhotoLondon 2026 to front end paper.

195 x 250mm

128 pages, 88 images

With texts in both English and Spanish

About

Werning began this extensive body of work in 2006 in the Andes where she had been photographing the schools of Argentina’s Indigenous Kolla community. She encountered many women with exceptionally long hair, and intrigued, began to take their pictures and listened to their stories. Guided by her intuition she went on to spend months in remote mountain towns putting up signs in schools, hospitals and markets, and organising hair competitions in an effort to seek out those with long hair. She found that traditions were not just surviving, but evolving with long hair symbolising both continuity and subtle rebellion. In recent years she also began to make portraits of Indigenous Kichwa men living in Otavalo, Ecuador, where men and boys wear long braided hair to reclaim the tradition after a history of forced hair cutting during Spanish colonial rule.