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The exhibition Machu Picchu & the Camera presents
the 'lost city of the Incas' as a twentieth century phenomenon,
discovered by the American explorer Hiram Bingham on July 24 1911,
and made known to the world through photography.
Hiram Bingham's first few hours at Machu Picchu were spent taking
photographs. The camera's long love affair with Machu Picchu had
begun.
After that first afternoon he did not return to the site until 1912
but sent some of his colleagues to Machu Picchu in September 1911,
most notably Herman Tucker who took many of the most important early
photographs.
In 1912 Bingham returned with a much larger expedition
funded by Yale University and the National Geographic Society to
clear and document the site.
Party of visitors at Machu Picchu, 1929. Martín
Chambi |
During these months Bingham took over 2,000 photographs
including some of the spectacular panoramas shown in this exhibition.
The following April, for the first time, a complete issue of the
National Geographic Magazine was devoted to a single article 'In
the Wonderland of Peru' containing 250 photographs by Bingham and
his colleagues.
Bingham made a brief visit to Machu Picchu in 1915 and he continued
to explore the surrounding area and found it, once again, completely
overgrown.
In 1917, the Peruvian photographer Martín
Chambi, who lived and worked in Cuzco almost all his life made his
first visit to Machu Picchu.
In the following decades he made many visits to Machu Picchu with
his friends, sometimes acting as experienced guide as well as photographer.
Senorita Ricarda Luna leads her friends across
a bridge in the way to Machu Picchu, 1928. Martín Chambi |
While there is a serious side to his photographs
in that he belonged to the generation of indigenistas.
They were the Peruvian intellectuals who wanted to reclaim the Inca
patrimony as their own, he was also 'enchanted by light', as his
daughter Julia remembered, and many of his photographs have a playfulness
and sense of fun.
His reputation as a photographer of international importance grew
after his death with the discovery of his archive of 17,000 negatives
and has resulted in exhibitions and acquisitions of his prints by
major museums all over the world.
The joy and sense of wonder that Chambi experienced
in his visits to Machu Picchu are shared by many of today's visitors
who also reach for their cameras in an instinctive response to its
visual impact.
The Incas may have experienced Machu Picchu in the same way. Professor
Richard Burger has suggested that Machu Picchu was a royal estate
used by the Incan royalty in the Andean winter to relax, hunt, and
entertain visitors.
It was a luxury for the elite and when the socioeconomic system
underlying it collapsed, it was abandoned.
The beauty of Machu Picchu is still enjoyed by
the 500,000 people from all over the world who visit Machu Picchu
each year, bringing life and colour and their own exoticism to these
remote ruins high in the Andes.
They are inspired to visit Machu Picchu through the photographs
they have seen and return home with their own photographs of one
of the most photogenic places in the world.
Their experience is recorded in the photographs
of Charles Chadwyck-Healey and Hugh Thomson, taken in the first
years of this century.
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