Irving Penn travelled a lot, sometimes on commission by Vogue who he ended up being employed by for more than sixty years. In 1948 he visited France, Italy, Spain and Peru. When he was done with a fashion shoot in Lima he extended his stay in Peru in order to portray the local population in Cusco. The city is set high above the sea, in the Andes, and was once the cultural and religious centre of the Inca Empire. Penn visited the city over the Christmas weekend, a holiday where the indigenous population arrived in the city to sell their goods and arts and crafts. During the three days that Penn photographed in Cusco he took more than 2000 images. Eleven of these, including this image of the two small children, were published in Vogue in 1949 as part of a feature entitled “Christmas at Cuzco”.

As was Penn’s custom the portrait was taken in a borrowed daylight studio. A simple canvas background and a bare stone floor frame a small solitary pillar table. The children are in the same frayed clothes and hats they would usually be wearing. The looks on the children’s faces are impenetrable, and in some ways timeless. They’re young and barefooted, yet at the same time dressed as grown-ups and with such serious eyes. Their interlaced hands form the focal point of the image.

Other examples of this subject are included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Several motifs taken at the same time in Cusco can be found in the collection of Moderna Museet.