In Ecuador’s mountains, a photographer’s search for ultra-long hair

Three men in Otavalo, Ecuador, with braids. Photographer Irina Werning's long-term project on long hair in Latin America took her to the Kichwa community for its final chapter. (Irina Werning via CNN Newsource)

Over the past two decades, the Argentinian photographer Irina Werning has traveled around Latin America with a specific directive in mind: find women — and eventually, men — with the longest hair.

Titled “Las Pelilargas,” or “The Long-haired Ones,” the body of work celebrates the shared cultural reverence for long tresses across the region, in both small Indigenous communities and urban centers. In her interviews with the people she met and photographed, Werning heard many personal reasons for growing and maintaining ultra-long hair, but connecting stories was often its role in cultural identity and ancestral traditions.

“The true reason is invisible and passes from generation to generation,” Werning writes on her website. “It’s the culture of Latin America, where our ancestors believed that cutting hair was cutting life, that hair is the physical manifestation of our thoughts and our souls and our connection to the land.”

At the PhotoVogue festival in Milan earlier this month, Werning exhibited the final chapter in the series, called “La Resistencia,” which features portraits of Indigenous Kichwa living in Otavalo, Ecuador.

“I was very intrigued by how it would be to photograph men after so many years of photographing women,” she explained on a phone call with CNN — particularly as long hair is often associated with femininity.

Werning’s extensive body of work began in the Andes. As she was photographing schools around Argentina’s Indigenous Kolla community in the northwest, during her travels she encountered women with exceptionally long hair, and took their images.

“I went back to Buenos Aires, and these pictures were haunting me,” Werning recalled. “So I decided to go back to these small towns.” In the absence of widely used social media platforms in 2006, she put up signs that said she was searching for long-haired women for artistic purposes. As she traveled to more places, she organized long-hair competitions to bring more women together. “Slowly, the project started to grow,” she said. She completed the work in February 2024 with the images in “La Resistencia.”

A symbol of identity

In different parts of the world, braids have become powerful symbols of identity as well as defiance against colonialism and systemic racial injustice. In the Kichwa community, as in other Indigenous groups in North and South America, men and boys wear long braids to reclaim the tradition after a history of forced hair cutting during Spanish colonial rule and pressures to assimilate, Werning said.

“Braids in Indigenous communities are a form of resistance, in a way, because conquerors would cut (them),” she said. “The braid was a symbol of identity, of unity. It’s more difficult to take away someone’s language, but this is a very symbolic act that’s very easy to do.”

In one image from “La Resistencia,” sisters, dressed in traditional white blouses, gather at a table as their father braids their brother’s hair. Werning said when the father, RUMInawi Cachimuel, was young, his family cut his braids so that he wouldn’t face discrimination at school. But now, he emphasizes the importance of maintaining Kichwa traditions to his children, from their clothing and music to their hair, she explained.

“We’ve fought hard for our braids; it was a lengthy struggle to proudly showcase our braids,” Cachimuel told Werning in a translated interview. “As people, we’ve endured significant hardships. Now, I teach my children that they must learn from our ancestors and pass down to future generations what it means to be Kichwa.”

In another portrait, a father and his two boys stand in a line, braiding each other’s hair, which only direct relatives are allowed to do, she explained.

“Las Pelilargas” will be published as a book later this year. As the series comes to a close, Werning says she’s returned to some places she visited early on, wondering if they had been impacted by any major cultural shifts, like the rise of social media platforms.

“As a photographer, we are kind of pessimistic, (thinking) ‘this is something disappearing, so I need to document it,’ and in a way it’s true because globalization really does change communities,” she said. But in the small towns in northern Argentina, where she first began the project, she was happy to find the opposite was true: Las pelilargas were still everywhere.