Figueroa Aznar, Juan Manuel

Juan Manuel Figueroa Aznar, born in 1878 in Caraz, Ancash, was a pioneering Peruvian photographer. He is considered one of the most prominent representatives of the photographic flourishing of Cusco between the early and mid-20th century. A multifaceted artist, he primarily saw himself as a painter, unaware that one of his subsidiary and intermittent practices would be appreciated in the few but significant anthologies of Peruvian and Latin American photographic art. His preference for portraiture drew him to photography and to a fashionable technique, the photo-oil or colored photo, a technique that combined the varnishes of Western pictorial tradition with modern trends. Similar to Max T. Vargas in Arequipa, where he worked as a backdrop painter, he introduced a very rare practice for the time: photographing indigenous people in the studio, a setting reserved for the wealthy. In the 1920s, he associated with the intellectual circle of indigenism led by Luis E. Valcárcel, who appointed him artistic director of the Peruvian Mission of Inca Art that toured La Paz, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo in 1923, bringing along a team of Cusco musicians and actors who were captured by the photographer's lens.