Coirón - Hardcover

by Pie Aerts (Author)

Coirón is a long-form documentary project, photographed over six years in the Chilean region of Magallanes, following aging gauchos known as puesteros, who live and work alone for months at a time across vast private ranches.

Their lives, often silent, are shaped by distance, physical labour, and long periods of solitude, on land they do not own and with little security once their body begins to fail.

This new body of photographic work follows their daily labour and stillness, offering a collective reflection on rural life in contemporary Chile, where meaning emerges through repetition, gesture, and the slow accumulation of time.

The wider region is undergoing rapid social, cultural, and economic change, and fewer young people feel the desire to pursue a life on the land, breaking a generational cycle of farm life. Caught in the middle, many puesteros move between embracing change and resisting it. Their interweaving stories form an intimate, complex portrait of a way of life on the brink of disappearing, and invites the viewer to pause within a world moving too quickly to keep up.

The book also includes a poem by Iván Rojel Figueroa and an essay by Alberto Harambour, Associate Professor at the Universidad Austral de Chile.

Author Biography

Pie Aerts (b. 1985) is a Dutch photographer based in Haarlem. His work examines and questions the intricate and often melancholic relationship between people and place, in an attempt to explain why we seem increasingly disconnected from each other, ourselves, and the environment that sustains us. By offering nuanced and personal perspectives on memory, longing and human resilience, he explores how cultural identity is deeply intertwined with the natural landscapes we inhabit. In doing so, he consistently chooses to prioritize hope over despair.