The ubiquity of this image of Machu Picchu means that the remains of the retreat of the ninth Sapa Inca Pachacuti, who ruled from 1438 to 1471, no longer require a caption. Mention Machu Picchu today and people immediately picture it: a jutting rock spire prominently presiding over a floor of ruins. First photographed by Hiram Bingham in 1911, today over a million tourists take its snapshot each year. When Bingham first visited Machu Picchu and took this photo, he did not know what he had seen. It was not until the publication of the 1913 National Geographic issue entitled ‘In the Wonderland of Peru’ that Bingham realised the magnitude and potential interest of what he had photographed. Although today we often think of a photograph as the result of one person’s decision to click a screen or open and close a shutter, the making of this iconic New World image-object was the result of a specific configuration in time and space of antiquarian science, diplomacy, labour, camera technology, corporate sponsorship, and mass media.
Machu Picchu
The Ruins of the Ancient Inca Capital, Machu Picchu, Hiram Bingham, 1912 (courtesy of the National Geographic Society)
Amy Cox Hall
Further reading
- Andrews, R. (2018) Colorama: George Eastman Museum (Kempen, Germany: teNeues).
- Burger, R., and L. Salazar (eds.) (2004) Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
- Cox Hall, A. (2017) Framing a Lost City: Science, Photography and the Making of Machu Picchu (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press).
- Edwards, E., and J. Hart (eds.) (2004) Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images (New York, NY: Routledge).
- Jacob, J. (ed.) (2011) Kodak Girl: From the Martha Cooper Collection (Göttingham, Germany: Steidl).
- Lutz, C., and J.L. Collins (1993) Reading National Geographic (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).
- Majluff, N., and L.E. Wuffarden (eds.) (2001) La recuperación de la memoria: Perú 1842–1942 (Lima: Fundación Telefónica y Museo de Arte de Lima).
- Poole, D. (1997) Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
- Poole, R. (2004) Explorers House: ‘National Geographic’ and the World It Made (New York, NY: Penguin).
- Rice, M. (2017) Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth-Century Peru (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press).
