At the End of the World, Patagonia's Aging Solitary Ranch Hands

In Chilean Patagonia, near the southern edge of the continent, a dwindling group of men called puesteros live alone in remote cabins, hired by landowners to tend livestock and ranches. The work pays little and demands months of isolation, so younger people avoid it — leaving an aging cohort with almost no successors. Dutch photographer Pie Aerts first saw them as distant silhouettes during a 2018 stay, but only during the 2020 lockdown did he begin thinking seriously about prolonged solitude, which led him to filmmaker Matías Bolla and several return trips to Chile.

Their collaboration produced a feature documentary now in post-production and a photo book, ‘Coirón,’ named for a hardy native grass. The images pair portraits of the men with their spare interiors and the immense surrounding landscape, and Aerts came to see the project as less about solitude than about precarity and dispossession — men who work land they will never own and face old age with little pension or welfare support. Some photographs are plainly legible; others (a taxidermied puma in an empty room, armadillos on a couch) are deliberately strange.

A notable methodological wrinkle: Aerts doesn’t speak fluent Spanish, so Bolla handled interviews while Aerts built rapport nonverbally — cooking, playing music, sitting in silence with the wind. He frames that limitation as productive, a counter to a hyper-connected world’s habit of always filling the void, and the resulting portraits register both hardship and resilience.