History and Anthropology, 2025
Photography has been inextricably linked with Machu Picchu since Hiram Bingham first brought his ... more Photography has been inextricably linked with Machu Picchu since Hiram Bingham first brought his Kodak to the site in 1911. Initially, the cameras included on the three Yale Peruvian Expeditions (1911, 1912, 1914-15) were used to picture Machu Picchu as a monumental discovery, to survey the landscape, and to mark sight lines for the expeditions' topographers. Later, photography was enlisted to document local maladies and as part of the team's larger anthropometric project. Returning from the field, expeditionary photographs were subsequently translated as illustrations for newspaper and magazine articles, as art for display in galleries and exhibitions, and as evidence of a nation's imagined glorious and noble Incan past. Although Bingham and his team made over 9,000 photographs, only a small fraction of them made their way into the public domain. Consequently, National Geographic and the handful of scientific publications that used a narrow subset of photographs have had an outsized influence over our understanding of expeditionary science as it was practiced in Latin America during the early twentieth century. In this paper I examine a few of the uncirculated photographs catalogued in twenty-three albums created by Kodak at Bingham's request. I ask what it means to be uncirculated and what that lack of circulation tells us about the limits of the sentimental and the role of indigenous actors in an expeditionary science reliant on heroic masculinity.
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Books by Amy Cox Hall
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.
Papers by Amy Cox Hall