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Science, Photography, and the Making of Machu Picchu (Epub & Pdf)

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Framing a Lost City: Science, Photography, and the Making of Machu Picchu by Amy Cox Hall Details

When Hiram Bingham, a historian at Yale University, first saw Machu Picchu in 1911, it was a havoc with the overgrowth in which a few families were sown. A century…

Framing a Lost City synopsis

When Hiram Bingham, a historian at Yale University, first saw Machu Picchu in 1911, it was a havoc with the overgrowth in which a few families were sown. A century later, Machu Picchu is one of the UNESCO World Heritage sites visited by more than a million tourists a year.

This remarkable shift began with the images that accompanied the Bingham article in National Geographic, which portrayed Machu Picchu as a lost city discovered. This book focuses on the practices, technologies and applications of the three Bingham campaigns of Peru (1911, 1912 and 1914-1915), making it a compelling argument that perception, especially through camera, played a crucial role in locating Machu Picchu's scientific discovery and the heritage of Peru.

Amy Cox Hall argues that while the Bingham campaigns relied on the work, knowledge and support of Peruvian elites, intellectuals and peasants, the practice of scientific witness, photography specifically, transforming Machu Picchu into a cultural artifact of a distinctive way of seeing. Drawing on science and technology studies, they develop writing letters, collecting artifacts, and photography as important exploratory practices that helped shape the way we understand Machu Picchu today.

Cox Hall also explains that the photographic evidence was unstable, and with the spread of images around the world, the "lost city" has taken on different meanings, especially in Peru, which has become one of the national heritage that needs protection from missions such as Bingham.



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