Plaza de Armas de Santiago

In Santiago's Plaza de Armas, this guide follows the fotógrafos minuteros, itinerant portrait photographers who spent a century developing strangers' pictures inside a simple wooden box a few steps from the cathedral. It traces the tradition from an 1859 photograph by Eugène Maunoury through a 2006 count of the country's last surviving practitioners. Look for the men still crouched under black cloths at the edges of the square, boxes propped on three splayed legs.