A video of the inauguration night at Xapiri Ground in Cusco, Friday 18th March 2022.
David Díaz Gonzales is a freelance Shipibo-Konibo photographer based in Pucallpa, Peru. He is trained in digital graphic design, but his passion led him to pursue photography and film. As a photographer, he specializes in portraiture, following an Indigenous tradition with the introspective vision of the Shipibo people, of which he is a part. Through his photography, he aims to show an intimate and genuine vision of Indigenous people, so that his work can chronicle the Shipibo-Konibo people for future generations — without the stereotypes that build a false narrative of his community.
This photographic project is a tribute to David’s ancestors and a portrait of the Shipibo-Konibo people of many years ago. Beyond being a mere work or anthropological investigation, these portraits coagulate into a family album where the intimacy of the photographer as an artist can be observed.
The images evoke nostalgia for the irreplaceable, bringing with them ghosts of people he never got to know, but who deserve to be remembered. In this commemoration, he shows how ancestral customs have disappeared today, since the arrival of the Jesuits and Christianity, and how peoples withdrawn from their communities now live marginally on the periphery of human settlements.
Each black and white portrait is also a tribute to the pioneers of photography who, with their gaze, inspired us to capture the reality of a people that mutates, that changes constantly in the face of a society that ignores them and lives with its back to them.
