However, if the Amerindians are positioned as a signifier through which history and nation-ness can be ideally reconstructed on the basis of originality and reality, at the same time, because this indigeneity is so skilfully contrived in the photographs, there is distance between the latter and the indigenous people who are precisely excluded from the representation. This is why the declared aim of the Herbstein studio is to recreate these cultures in a primitive stage: there is a clear tension between representation and social encounter inscribed in these images, that is, between the idealised Amerindian and the real Amerindian.

Thus, Huellas shows that the only way in which the indigenous cultures made invisible by the dominant culture can be signified by the latter is through the re-enactment of images and a visual format that refer to a specific moment in the past before Argentina became white and racial homogeneous. Nonetheless, the hyperbolised use of masquerade, performance and staging end up producing a camp effect that destabilises that very aura of authenticity with which the Amerindians are invested with by the authors. By means of sartorial signifiers and artifice, the camp photographs in Huellas point out that race is constructed, a fantasy that can be dress in and staged. But at the same time, it also reinforces the disparities between racial identities since in this case it is the white who is entitled to cross-dressing without consequences. This goes back to the previous statement about the calendar as a site of contradictions that both de-naturalises and reinforces indigenous stereotypes and the position of whiteness in Argentinian politics of race.