The Peruvian investigator Jorge Heredia, who lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, claims that Chambi’s photographic work has been revelatory since the late 1970s with very diverse results, possibly as diverse as the nature of his legacy, whose density, Heredia adds, can emphasize any supporting point for any type of presentation.

“He has been the photographer of whites who covet his images, but also of Indians and Mestizos.” – Jorge Heredia

Heredia also affirms that Chambi can be considered “a precise documentary photographer” and that his work can “approach a certain formality or be considered as nothing more than a simple work of art, just as was possible for pictorialism in its time.”

It is said that Chambi had a clear sense of a practical and professional image. This is indicated by experts in the field, such as the filmmaker José Carlos Huayhuaca, author of the book Martín Chambi, fotógrafo, who stated that Chambi was a man “with his feet on the ground.” However, it was not to the point of doing things for monetary reasons, or he would have stayed in Arequipa, where there were more opportunities than in Cusco. One of the periods in Chambi’s life that is seldom mentioned in detail was his work as a photojournalist for the newspaper La Crónica ("The Column”) and the magazine Variedades ("Varieties") (1920-1927). These Peruvian publications used Chambi’s unedited photographs, all of them suggestive, clear, and perfectly conceived, to illustrate many of their pages during Agusto B. Leguía y Salcedo’s second presidential term in Peru, known as “El Oncenio de Leguía.”

Events, curiosities, singular facts, summarized news, were what the lens of the man from Puno, adopted by Cuzco, revealed in his daily work, not only for the capital in Lima, but also for the cosmopolitan city of Buenos Aires, where he collaborated with the newspaper La Nación ("The Nation").