Photography and Latin American Ruins

Abstract

Ever since the nineteenth century photographers have regularly turned to Latin American ruins to express a diverse range of scientific, colonial, aesthetic and spiritual desires. This article looks at photographs of Latin American ruins from the nineteenth century through several archaeological expeditions in Central and South America over the course of the twentieth century. Focusing in particular on photographs of ruins that include human subjects, I argue that the human-material interactions evident in these images undermine the traditional view of a split between the archaeological subject and the material object, serving as a reminder of the political actuality of ‘classical’ ruins, sites that have sometimes been left out of the West’s contemporary fascination with the dark underbelly of modernity. Acknowledging that such politics is by no means always innocent, sometimes reflecting as it does the embedded power relations of neo-colonial desires, I argue nonetheless that ancient ruins in Latin America continue to be spaces around which social relations can be formed, not least through humour and pleasure.

Keywords:

• Ruins
• photography
• Latin America
• modernity
• archaeology

Notes

1. The notion of the ‘instant’ here is understood in relative terms. Even the long exposure times of early photography and archaeological photography more broadly are still ‘instants’ in comparison to sites that are hundreds of years old.

2. As Cornelius Holtorf has argued, various tropes of the archaeologist – colonialist explorer, guardian of vestigial remains, discloser of knowledge – have circulated at different moments in the history of the discipline (Holtorf 2007).

3. According to notes on the back of the photograph, pictured are: back row (left to right): Karl Ruppert, Edith B. Ricketson, Oliver G. Ricketson, Ann Axtel Morris; front row (left to right): Ernest Crandall, Earl Morris, Morley.

4. For further information about this archaeological site see Ministerio de Comerio Exterior y Turismo n.d..

5. As Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering note, nostalgia is sometimes expressed via indigenous populations (2012, 130), an approach very evident in certain traditions of early twentieth-century Peruvian painting and photography.

6. Marisol de la Cadena points out that in the early decades of the twentieth century intellectuals living in and around Cuzco ‘used national racialized geography to emphasize Lima’s inherent hispanophilia [and] they boasted about the authenticity of their nationalism, seeing it as geographically and historically legitimated by the rank of their city as the capital of the Inca Empire’ (2000, 22). A decade and a half after this photograph was taken Abancay and its environs would provide much of the setting for José María Arguedas’s neo-indigenista novel Los ríos profundos (1958). In the novel the author explores the tensions and fusions between the legacies of indigenous and Hispanic cultures and their impact on social inequality, labour unrest and gender politics.

7. For more on this acceptance of ancient and modern in the region see, for example, Willie Hiatt’s study of Peruvian aviation (2016).