Framing a Lost City

Science, Photography, and the Making of Machu Picchu

Amy Cox Hall

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781477313701
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Photography

An " engaging" study of Machu Picchu's transformation from ruin to World Heritage site, and the role a National Geographic photo feature played ( Latin American Research Review ). When Hiram Bingham, a historian from Yale University, first saw Machu Picchu in 1911, it was a ruin obscured by overgrowth whose terraces were farmed by a few families. A century later, Machu Picchu is a UNESCO World Heritage site visited by more than a million tourists annually. This remarkable transformation began with the photographs that accompanied Bingham's article were published in National Geographic magazine, which depicted Machu Picchu as a lost city discovered. Focusing on the practices, technologies, and materializations of Bingham's three expeditions to Peru in the first decade of the twentieth century, this book makes a convincing case that visualization, particularly through the camera, played a decisive role in positioning Machu Picchu as both a scientific discovery and a Peruvian heritage site. Amy Cox Hall argues that while Bingham's expeditions relied on the labor, knowledge, and support of Peruvian elites, intellectuals, and peasants, the practice of scientific witnessing, and photography specifically, converted Machu Picchu into a cultural artifact fashioned from a distinct way of seeing. Drawing on science and technology studies, she situates letter writing, artifact collecting, and photography as important expeditionary practices that helped shape the way we understand Machu Picchu today. Cox Hall also demonstrates that the photographic evidence was unstable, and, as images circulated worldwide, the "lost city" took on different meanings—especially in Peru, which came to view the site as one of national patrimony in need of protection from expeditions such as Bingham's.

Notes

Abbreviations

AAG	Albert Giesecke Archive at Instituto Riva-Agüero, Lima, Peru
AGN	Archivo General de la Nación, Lima, Peru
BFP	Bingham Family Papers, Yale University, New Haven, CT
BN	Biblioteca Nacional, Lima, Peru
CBC	Fototeca Andina, Centro Bartolomé de las Casas, Cuzco, Peru
IRA	Instituto Riva-Agüero, Biblioteca, Lima, Peru
LEV	Archivo de Luis E. Valcárcel, Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Lima, Peru
MRE	Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Lima, Peru
NA	National Archives, College Park, MD
NGS	National Geographic Society, Washington, DC
YPEP	Yale Peruvian Expedition Papers, Yale University, New Haven, CT

Introduction: Seeing Science

The epigraph is taken from Bingham to his wife, July 26, 1911, YPEP, box 5, folder 26.

1. Andean Air 2011. According to Peru’s Instituto Nacional de la Cultura, the total number of visitors (national and international) to Machu Picchu in 2007 was 439,122. In 1986, the number of visitors was 146,000 (Flores Ochoa 1996).

2. Throughout this book I use “patrimony” and “heritage” interchangeably. In Spanish, “heritage” is translated as “herencia,” but more typically Peruvians refer to Machu Picchu as “nuestro patrimonio” or “el patrimonio de la nación.” The word “patrimony” is not common in the United States, but there is significant heft to the word in Peru, implying ownership from a physical, personal, spiritual, and historical standpoint.

3. Salvatore 2003.

4. Spivak 1988; see also Coronil 2004.

5. Said 1978.

6. This literature is vast, but some prominent works include Hulme 1983; Haraway 1989; Wolf 1989; Greenblatt 1991; Shumway 1991; Sommer 1991; Asad 1995.

7. T. Kuhn 1962; Biagioli 1993; Golinski 1998; Salvatore 1998; Cañizares-Esguerra 2002; Daston and Galison 2007.

8. Haraway 1989.

9. Latour 1987; Dumit 1997, 2004.

10. Daston and Lunbeck 2011, 1.

11. Foucault (1972) suggests that modalities of seeing are rooted in materialities and techniques.

12. In June 2013, Social Studies of Science published a special issue titled “A Turn to Ontology in STS?” Like John Law and Marianne Elisabeth Lien (2013), I believe that empirical studies in ontology have existed for some time in STS, even if not referred to as such.

13. Traweek 1988; D. Miller and P. Reill 1996; Dumit 1997, 2004; Rapp 1997.

14. Mol 2003; Brives 2013.

15. Thomson 2002a.

16. Some of the places included the Quinnipac Club, History Club, Lampson Lyceum, Seaside Club in Bridgeport, Patria Club of New York, and American Alpine Club (W. Bingham 1989); see also BFP, box 101, folder 69, and box 103, folder 80. The naturalist on the 1915–1916 expedition, Edmund Heller, gave a lecture titled “Hunting Experiences in the Peruvian Andes” to the Explorers Club in New York. After the talk there was a smoker.

17. BFP, box 100, folder 58.

18. A magazine at the time referred to Bingham as an industrial scout (see R. Miller 1976, 144). Char Miller believes that Theodore Roosevelt’s A Strenuous Life (1900) influenced Bingham. The text posited that men of means should not work at a desk (C. Miller 1982, 135).

19. Salvatore 1998, 81.

20. For example, see Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo’s (1994) work on Mexico, the world’s fair, and the desire for modernity.

21. Knauft 2002.

22. “Modern” not only is a descriptive and periodizing term in the development of capitalism, but also indicates the desires and imagining of what modern looked like in the form of behavior, dress, and attitudes (Ivy 1995).

23. Benjamin (1955) 1969; D. Poole 1997; López Lenci 2004.

24. Thomson 2002b, 2. Lawrence Clayton suggests that the articles and images published in National Geographic Magazine were crucial to opening up the American reading public to a world previously known only by industrialists, diplomats, and occasional tourists (1999, 95). Ricardo Salvatore refers to the expedition as a “machine producing mass images of Peru” (2016, 81).

25. H. Bingham 1930, 20.

26. Mitchell 2005.

27. Jordanova 1989, 2000; Pratt 1992; Chambers and Gillsepie 2000; Majluf and Wuffarden 2001; Pimental 2001; Podgorny and Lopes 2008; Podgorny 2009. Although not typically associated with scientific expeditions, Spanish chronicles of the sixteenth century prefigured ethnological sciences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, seeking to order difference through observation and descriptive text (Salomon 1985; Greenblatt 1991, 1993). Works by Father Cristobal de Molina, such as Account of the Fables and Rites of the Incas (1573), and by de Molina and Father José de Acosta, such as Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590), provided detailed accounts of pre-Hispanic religion as well as a scientific description of Andean agriculture. Pedro Cieza de Leon’s The Discovery and Conquest of Peru ([1553] 1999) included minutely detailed descriptions of Incan administration, local organizations, and the relationship between the state and agriculture, placing events in historical time frames. Two centuries later, the naval officers Jorge Juan and Antonia de Ulloa described the marriage rites and social mores of Quechua subjects in A Voyage to South America ([1748] 1964). The duo later wrote a clandestine book about the colonial oppression and abuses of the Spanish Empire in 1826.

28. Pratt 1992, 15.

29. Pimental 2007. Andean peoples who assisted in the social and material outcomes of expeditions often remained invisible in European accounts, their contributions underplayed (Safier 2008).

30. Pratt 1992, 120; see also Padgen 1993. Scientific expeditions that served as instruments of expansion for European nations relied on contact and an exchange of ideas with the local populations (Pratt 1992; Cañizares-Esguerra 2006). Alexander von Humboldt’s interpretations and conceptualizations of the Andes as a microcosm of all climates, and thus as containing all the flora and fauna of the world, were based on the contacts made with Spanish American intellectuals (Cañizares-Esguerra 2006). Humboldt’s representations of the Americas, formed in a contact zone, were as much a product of European desire as Spanish American science (Pratt 1992).

31. Wulf 2015, 51; Trigo 2005. At the time of his death, Humboldt was the second most popular person in Europe, behind Napoleon Bonaparte. He was a wealthy Prussian aristocrat who “discarded a life of privilege to discover for himself how the world worked” (Wulf 2015, 3). Humboldt’s books were published in a dozen languages, and his explorations of Latin America with the French botanist Aimé Bonpland from 1799 to 1804 were memorialized in the multivolume set Le Voyage aux Régions Equinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (1814–1820). Numerous smaller editions were also published. Included in these volumes were color prints and engravings.

32. Wulf 2015.

33. Vues des Cordilleres contained sixty-nine engravings of South America (Wulf 2015, 135).

34. Humboldt inspired many naturalists and artists, including Frederic Edwin Church. Church took two trips to South America. His Heart of the Andes (1859) was acclaimed for its detail and naturalism.

35. Salomon 1985; Edwards 1990; Podgorny and Lopes 2008; Riviale 2000.

36. Castro-Klarén 2003, 189.

37. Ibid.

38. Until the work of William Hickling Prescott, North American ethnologists’ field of vision did not encompass the modern Andes.

39. Sir Clements Markham and George Ephraim Squier are perhaps the best known, but others such as Adolph Bandelier, Percy Fawcett, Lardner Gibbons, and Richard Spruce contributed to the US imagining of the Andes and Amazonia. Fawcett is best known for his disappearance in the Amazon on his quest to find “Z,” an ancient lost city. Gibbons was a lieutenant in the US Navy whose exploration was captured in William Herndon’s Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon for the US Navy. Markham has been referred to as an imperial botanist and bio-pirate (Hecht 2013). Prescott, though not an explorer, is credited with writing one of the most influential histories of Peru, The Conquest of Peru (1862). For a discussion of the impact of these explorers on, for example, cocaine, see the study by Gootenberg (2008).

40. Poole 1998; Barnhart 2005; Ravines 1970.

41. Poole 1998, 121. Ethnology for Squier was a race-based pursuit for studying humanity scientifically through antiquities. Working during a period of great debate between monogenism and polygenism, Squier pressed for a focus on science rather th...