Paper short abstract:

Part of a project to refashion national identities, ruins recur frequently in early- to mid-twentieth century Peruvian photography. This paper analyses what the presence of Indians in such images says about photography, archaeology and indigeneity in Peruvian visual culture during this period.

Paper long abstract:

During the first half of the twentieth century, Peruvian photographers worked alongside historians and archaeologists as part of a widespread fascination with pre-Colombian ruins. For many Peruvian intellectuals, Inca ruins offered a unique and concrete set of motifs around which national and regional identities could be refashioned in the face of the rapid and destabilising transformations brought about by mechanisation, modernisation and land reform.

In this paper I will look at the role of photography within this project of mobilising ruins, focusing especially on the presence of Indians in images that include ruined sites. On the one hand, photography was used as a scientific tool that lent visual authority to written documentary research. In such images indigenous figures were scientific yardsticks for the photographic gaze: literal and metaphorical measuring tools, they lent an aura of authenticity to both image and ruin. On the other, however, expedition and society photographers documented ruins as the site for lunch breaks, outings, and party gatherings. As vestiges of the past, ruins in these photographs are no longer objects of scientific study or sacrosanct spaces of the Inca past. Instead, they become sites of habitation and engagement.

What role, therefore, do indigenous figures play in this photographic corpus? Are they ever transformed from objects of the past into active stakeholders in the photographic project of ongoing presence? And what does their inclusion in more quotidian, playful images of ruins do in terms of their political and cultural agency?