Cataloging Antiquity and the Expeditionary Eye: The Yale Peruvian Expedition Photographic Albums, 1911–15

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 evidence 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 into illustration 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 was detailed and thorough in his photographing of the site and its surroundings, only a small fraction of photographs have made their way into the public domain. Yet, according to an early exhibition pamphlet, there were 1000 photographs made of Peruvian Indian types, 3000 pictures of ruins, over 1000 pictures representing the manners and customs of the Peruvian mountaineers, and 4000 photographs that documented the topography, physiography and geology of the Andes. All of these images and others are catalogued in albums that Kodak assembled for Bingham. Because the albums have not been generally accessible to researchers, there has been little analysis and understanding of the scope of the expeditions’ photography and what role the albums played in establishing early suppositions about Peru. In this paper, I consider the albums as research tools to help us understand how photography was enlisted as a scientific and expeditionary eye and how the albums themselves helped organize and create geographical, cartographical and historical knowledge about Peru’s then present and ancient past.