The landscape in the southernmost part of Chilean Patagonia, often called the End of the World, has a post-apocalyptic quality. At the final stop, so to speak, before Antarctica, the weather is harshly volatile, and in the wilderness surrounding the few small cities and towns, civilization dwindles almost to nothing. Most of the human presence in that region is transient\u2014tourists who marvel at nature and soon depart. But a small number of people do live on the land, in isolated cabins, often going weeks, and sometimes months, without seeing one another, or anyone else. Known as puesteros, they are solitary men employed by landowners to look after ranches and livestock. Because this onerous and not very lucrative work is unappealing to younger generations, the puesteros are an aging breed, with few lined up to replace them.<\/p>\n
In 2018, during a nine-month stay in Patagonia, the Dutch photographer Pie Aerts often spotted puesteros from a distance: lone figures atop horses, silhouetted against the horizon. \u201cIn that huge landscape, they appeared stoic, but extremely vulnerable, as well,\u201d Aerts told me recently. Those distant encounters were the whole of his contact with the men during that trip; it wasn\u2019t until the compulsory lockdown of 2020, which Aerts endured back home, in Amsterdam, that he began to consider the effects of prolonged isolation. Recalling his visions of puesteros, he searched for more information online and came across a short documentary that chronicled their seclusion. He reached out to the film\u2019s director, Mat\u00edas Bolla, an Australian filmmaker of Chilean descent who was also spending quarantine in his home country. The exchange led the pair back to Chile in 2022, on the first of several trips that have resulted in a feature-length film, currently in post-production, and the photo book \u201cCoir\u00f3n\u201d (GOST Books), which takes its title from an unusually resilient grass that is native to the region.<\/p>\n
The book features portraits of puesteros between shots of domestic settings and local landscapes\u2014the little that belongs to them and the vastness that does not. Though Aerts initially intended to focus on solitude, he came to see that the lives of these men were equally shaped by precarity and dispossession, by \u201cthe fear of retirement that they all carry, with few pension funds or social-welfare conditions for them in place,\u201d Aerts said. He quoted a puestero who said, \u201cWhat a shame to come to love the land that will never be mine.\u201d In one photo from the book, two paltry berries rest on a man\u2019s open palm, fresh soil under his fingernails.<\/p>\n
Outside the modest cabins, seasons pass. One stands starkly in the dead white of winter; another appears almost to melt into the pink-hued mountains surrounding it. Inside the homes, sunlight falls on faded posters, worn furniture, and an old radio by a window. Other photos present less legible scenarios. There is a taxidermied puma lying in the middle of an abandoned room, five taxidermied armadillos arranged on a couch, three mattresses collapsed under an overcast sky. These images baffle, then linger, suggesting that life in this remote countryside is stranger than we may understand it to be.<\/p>\n
Aerts is not fluent in Spanish; during visits with the men, Bolla conducted interviews while Aerts sat in the background, absorbing what he could. This turned out to be a fertile constraint. His relationships with the puesteros were largely built on nonverbal exchanges: playing music, cooking dinner, sharing in stillness. \u201cSometimes it was required to sit in a room and not speak at all, just listening to the wind,\u201d Aerts said. \u201cIt was a big shock for me, coming from a world where everything is so connected, and where we\u2019re always filling the void.\u201d Silence is palpable in the portraits of the men, photographs that show hardship coexisting with resilience, that quiver with pathos but do not collapse.<\/p>\n