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The expeditionary eye: reconstructing the first photographs of Machu Picchu, Peru.

Article Excerpt
Images Past, Images Present

As my flight headed south from New Jersey, I felt the presence of a silent companion on the airplane: an antique camera from 1911 and its wooden tripod being hand-carried back to the field to reconstruct one of the great moments in 20th century exploration--the rediscovery of the "lost city" of Machu Picchu, Peru. In 1911, Hiram Bingham, a historian at Yale University, explored and photographed the site. Bingham's photographs were important for establishing the scientific and popular perceptions of Machu Picchu. Although Bingham's hypotheses about the function of Machu Picchu have been shown to be largely false by archaeologists, many of the ideas formulated by Bingham persist.

Re-photographic surveys have proved their worth in geography. A comparison between contemporary photographs and photographs taken years before can reveal significant landscape changes that have occurred over time. My objective in traveling to Peru was to go beyond this traditional method of image comparison and demonstrate a more fundamental role for re-photography. Would it be possible, by re-capturing viewpoints from the past, to recapture also the rationale for those original viewpoints? To what extent could key events in geographic exploration, such as the re-discovery of Machu Picchu, be better understood by finding the original vantage points and re-taking the photographs using the same camera?

I was particularly interested in "pioneer images" that document a first encounter with a place, before impressions become varnished by time and re-telling. Recent studies in geography that view technology as an extension of the human imagination are a step in the right direction with this line of research, but I felt much more could be done to investigate the relationship between photographic tools and geographic knowledge. Done in the right way, such reconstructive work could help us better understand important geographic expeditions of the past and perhaps even rewrite the stories of those expeditions. Producing a fixed image of a discovery has always been a dominant concern of explorers, but the introduction of photography into geographic fieldwork (from the 1850s onwards) made the framing of subjects more of a concern than ever. Therefore, in reconstructing past images, issues such as the angle of view and what is framed through a viewfinder become critically important. For example, the depth-of-field of a 1911 Kodak camera is very different from that of the human eye. By revisiting the location and using the same equipment, one might gain insights into how and why certain components were included in an image and why other components were left out. Also, dealing with the intricacies and quirks of original equipment could reveal important information about the original fieldwork methods. A side-by-side "reading" of before and after photographs is helpful in traditional re-photographic projects, because the photographs take us outward to the landscape and help take us inward to human thought.

The legacy of the 1911 Yale Peruvian Expedition provides an exceptional opportunity to test these ideas. Despite the fact that we are approaching the centenary year of the Machu Picchu rediscovery, remarkably little reassessment of the expedition's rationale or accomplishments has been made. The conclusions drawn by Hiram Bingham III (1875-1956) when he first saw the site, and assertively restated through his various publications, are now dismissed as erroneous by archaeologists, anthropologists and others involved in the study of Peruvian history. Bingham believed the site to be the birthplace of the Inca people; more recent research has shown the site to be a private estate of the Inca emperor. Yet, for my research, these errors of interpretation represent the greatest opportunity of all. We tend to hold a triumphalist view of images in science, with the presumption that visual constructions attest to fact and sound judgment. Less examined is how expeditionary images can become vehicles for incorrect conclusions in...

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