Thanks to the high demand for portraiture at the beginning of the twentieth century, Benjamín de la Calle’s camera sketched a frank portrait of Antioqueño society. Among his subjects were presidents such as Carlos E. Restrepo and Olaya Herrera, and magnates like Carlos Coroliano Amador (1914), the wealthiest man in the country at the end of the nineteenth century and the person who brought the automobile to Colombia; but also poets and writers considered idle, circus performers, actors, musicians of little fame, and individuals from popular everyday life and the hidden circles of traditional Antioqueño life. Rosa Emilia Restrepo is an example of this. Born as Roberto Durán, this “false woman” was prosecuted for robbing the family homes she entered as a domestic servant. During her trial she was also photographed as a man by De la Calle, even despite her protest that she would not wear men’s clothing, since as a child “her mother always dressed her as a woman.” His technical and compositional contributions to portraiture cannot be overlooked either; the theatricalization and staging of images, as in the case of N. Castillo – Costa Rica (1927) or the Reverend Mother Gaitana (n.d.), sought to give photography less rigidity and more naturalness. On the other hand, the chromatic manipulations in watercolor or the interventions on the negative in the form of seagulls, moons, clouds, etc., contribute enormously to the atmosphere, but also to giving more meaning and coherence to the light sources present in the scene.
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