Portrait of two sportsmen

In 1912, when Sebastián Rodríguez was still an adolescent, he met the prestigious Lima photographer Luis Ugarte in Huancayo. His fascination with the medium brought him to the capital, where he would work for ten years as an apprentice and assistant at the Ugarte studio. He later became an itinerant photographer, an activity which led him to Morococha, a mining center situated 4,500 meters above sea level and managed by the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation. After his marriage to Francisca Najera in 1934, he formally established his photographic studio there, which he would continue to operate for almost four decades. Rodríguez records the impact produced by the mining company in the rural environment of the Central Highlands of Peru. As a result, his photographs record the new forms of socialization, such as sport, that would have a broad acceptance between the local population. However, these images of modernity were fixed in the conventions of the nineteenth-century studio portrait tradition in which Rodríguez had been trained.