Irina Werning understands how powerful hair can be. The Argentinian-born artist, now based in London, has spent almost two decades photographing South American women and girls with long hair. This ongoing series, Las Pelilargas, explores how hair affects the way these women move through the world, the way they're perceived and perceive themselves.

Brought together in a new book published by GOST, the photographs capture what it means to embody both ancient and modern concepts of beauty. Werning’s images are infused with a sense of play, capturing hair from different women braided together; belted in trench coats, adorned with ribbons, drooping over staircases or worn loose amid cacti, flowers, rocks and horses. 

We spoke with Werning about the hybridity of South American communities, from Argentina to Ecuador; the enchantment of hair competitions, and why ultra long hair is a young person’s game.

There’s an acute sense of play in the photos. How did you orchestrate that feeling when you were photographing?

Irina Werning: I was always trying to find new ways of celebrating these women. There is a component of collaboration – trying to get to know them and understand who they are or what makes them special. There is a bit of playing with the environment. In a lot of pictures, you can’t even see the face of the person. I shot either in direct sun, because I needed a lot of light on the hair to have contrast and shine, or indoors with flash. It was very important for me to  be able to have complete details. The character was the hair.

Can you talk about group scenes, and how they came together?

Irina Werning: I always like the idea of interconnecting. In South America, communities are very important and we live in a very interconnected way – sometimes too much, I think, compared to other places. But this was something that I wanted to transmit in these group pictures: connection.

Tell me about how you started this project in 2006. Why was this a subject you became fixated on?

Irina Werning: It started really spontaneously: I was in the north of Argentina within an Indigenous community, doing a story on rural schools in the mountains and traveling with these teachers by donkey to these tiny schools with three or four families and one teacher for every kid. I was meeting a lot of long-haired girls, and I was getting distracted by them [laughs]. I spent six months doing this project on location, but I kept on taking these pictures of [them] on the side. 

After I returned home, I decided to go back and search for more women with long hair. In 2006, there was not much social media. I was shooting on film, and I was finding women in very analogue, old-school ways, putting up signs in schools or markets or hospitals. I always carried, like, 10 pictures in my pocket, and then I’d show the women. As soon as they saw the pictures, they understood; they connected immediately to the project. 

I was also organising long hair competitions in little towns just to find subjects – women with long hair often have it tied up, because it's otherwise very uncomfortable in their day-to-day lives. The search was the biggest part of the project. It would take me time and a lot of work to travel to them, then getting to know the person and collaborating and really making a picture that means something to them, not only to me.

What is a hair competition, exactly?

Irina Werning: It’s crazy. I did this in different places in Argentina: some more rural, others in the city. When I made a sign, I would write that there was a photoshoot involved and that everyone would get an award for their time. I hired local people to help me, measuring the hair and the height of the person, then dividing the hair by the height, so you would have the proportion. This allowed the inclusion of younger children – an eight-year-old girl had hair to the floor, and she won. It would be so much fun, the participants would bond, and the conversations included tips about how to look after their hair. For example, lots of them boil rosemary and then rinse with it instead of using conditioner. They would talk about their daily life with long hair, even what having sex was like with it.

Can you talk about the gendered aspect of long hair? Was a shoot different if you were photographing men versus women?

Irina Werning: There wasn’t a difference. I didn’t photograph many men throughout, but as I was going to finish the project three years ago, I decided to go to Otavalo in Ecuador. The Kichwa community lives there and the men have very long hair. I travelled there for two months. This was such a small part, but I didn’t want to finish the project without photographing men. 

As soon as I began photographing in Ecuador, they told me, 'you cannot touch our hair'. In lots of Indigenous communities, only very close family can touch the hair. It’s a very intimate and spiritual thing. This was a big challenge for me, because I love rearranging hair before I shoot the picture. Instead, a family member would come along and I would say, 'Okay, now move it here'.

In the book you say that you asked women, “why do you have long hair?” Tell me about those conversations – were the answers varied or were there common threads?

Irina Werning: In Indigenous communities, there is no written history, it’s all oral. The way of passing down culture is, for example, a grandmother braiding her granddaughter’s hair and speaking about [Andean deity] the Pachamama and the importance of respecting nature. Through that, she’s passing down the tradition of long hair and why it’s related to the land, why the hair is very similar to how nature represents itself. 

The populations of Argentina, and South America in general, are a mixture of waves of immigration that came from Europe and Indigenous communities. These traditions pass on through to the wider population. In South America, women have longer hair than in other Western countries – and this has to do with ancestral culture spreading to the broader population. But mostly the girls were responding, 'because my grandmother looks after it. Because my mother had long hair'.  This is how culture is transmitted.

Was it always about heritage and family? Was there not also a sense of expressing a certain femininity?

Irina Werning: Yes, a little bit about femininity, a lot about families and, in some cases, more about traditions.

In showing these images, did you feel like you had something to say about femininity? 

Irina Werning: Besides femininity, it speaks about community between women – often you cannot braid a braid yourself. 

Did Las Pelilargas make you feel differently about your own hair?

Irina Werning: No, but I recognised my younger self, because I used to have very long hair. That is very common in South America growing up – then there’s an age when you cut it. It’s over, and you never go back to that. So it was like talking to my younger self. 

Do you consider this an anthropological document, bringing wider attention to Indigenous communities, among others?

Irina Werning: Yes, I think it became like a documentary or anthropological project about the population of South America, which is very mixed. Nowhere else in the world will you find this mixture. If you go to other Indigenous communities, like the Native Americans in the United States, they have long hair also, but this has not been mixed with the rest of the population. 

In South America, the population is so hybrid that, for me, it was a way of understanding who we are. What’s culture, what’s tradition, where do we come from? What’s sacred? These were the questions that started coming to me as I was doing the project. Usually I work on stories where there is something ‘going on’: a story. In this case, as I was photographing, it was becoming this more philosophical – more poetic – project about the population of South America.