Mick Hartley

Photographer Irina Wearing, celebrating the longhair culture of Latin American women:

[Photographs © 2025 Irina Werning]

From Colossal's favourites of 2024:

For the last 17 years, Irina Werning has traveled throughout Latin America photographing women and girls for her ongoing series, Las Pelilargas, or The Longhairs. Shot in color and black and white, the portraits document a distinct cultural practice through an incredibly alluring, even surreal lens. Many subjects are camouflaged behind their cascading locks, their identities obscured by hair that sometimes even appears to consume their bodies whole.

Werning began Las Pelilargas in 2006 when people connected with one another primarily offline. “Back then, in the absence of social media, I would travel to mountain towns and stay there for months, putting up signs in markets, schools to find them, and even organizing long hair competitions,” she tells Colossal….

While her approaches to identifying subjects and pinpointing unique ways to share their stories have shifted since the project started, Werning’s intent has remained constant: to honor and celebrate “their long hair, the patience and love and dedication of years of growing it.”