Fran Antmann

Photographer

Guatemala

Follow Hire

Location: Brooklyn

Nationality: American

Biography: Fran Antmann is a documentary photographer , writer, and professor. Her photographic work has focused on the lives and culture of the indigenous people of Guatemala, Peru, Mexico, the Dene First Nation people of the Western Canadian Arctic... MORE

In Peru, in the barren stretches above the Andean timberline, there is a mining town named Morococha. In Quechua, the Indigenous language, it means "lake of many colors." At 15,000 feet, the air is scarce and breathing torturous. No greenery survives, not even the tenacious ichu, the wirelike bunch grass that can endure the gales of the high puna.

I came to Morococha to recover and research the work of an unknown Peruvian photographer Sebastian Rodriguez who had been the only photographer to document the life of the mines in South America beginning in 1928.

For two years I traveled between Morococha and the miners' hometowns throughout the Peruvian highlands searching for fragments of that past. I've continued to photograph the lives and culture of these people.