Lost City of the Incas (Phoenix Press) Read Online Free PDF Page B

found the ruins of Machu Picchu awaiting him, he had a Kodak 3 A Special camera.
    Confronted by a set of previously unreported Inca buildings, which he immediately recognised as being of the finest possible construction, the American explorer’s first action was not to describe them in his pocket notebook or to do a detailed plan, as might have been expected. That came later. The first entry in his notebook shows that he immediately set about taking a series of photographs.
    The camera’s long love affair with Machu Picchu had begun.
    As was his habit, Bingham carefully listed his shots, naming each feature as he photographed it: the ‘Royal Mausoleum’, the ‘Sacred Plaza’ the ‘Intihuatana’ (‘hitching post of the sun’) – the names they still have today. But his thirty-one initial pictures are hesitant and exploratory. It is as if the new city did not fall easily into the frame. Contrary also to his later recollections, the sun was not shining and the light was bad (one reason his othercompanions from the expedition had refused to accompany him was because it had been raining that morning). Scrubby brush covered the ruins and he had only a single Indian assistant to help him clear the sections of stonework he tried to photograph.
    Worse still, from the point of view of his later positioning of the site as the ‘lost city of the Incas’, some of the buildings had been re-occupied by farmers, who had roughly thatched the roofs and were growing crops on the terraces. In one photograph, maize can be seen growing in the area between the Intihuatana and the Sacred Plaza. In another, a woman sits spinning in a doorway with her small child beside her, a placid domestic scene that could be observed in any Andean village.
    Other photographs were to be of more use to him: he took pictures of the Temple of the Three Windows and of the great rounded bastion of the Torreón, with a tree growing out of its centre; he also took a panorama made up of two photographs of the valley dropping away dramatically into clouds beyond the West Group, clearly showing that this was ‘in the most inaccessible corner of the most inaccessible section of the Central Andes’. Although the clouds and shafts of light make this an arresting image, Bingham would not normally have taken pictures in mixed lighting and was only forced to do so because of his imminent descent. His ideal was a flat, neutral light by which archaeological remains could be recorded under scientific conditions.
    As we have seen, Bingham was initially unsure how to interpret his find and the next day, July 25th, proceeded on down the Urubamba valley with his colleagues towards their original destination. Only at the end of that same expedition season, in September, did he despatch two of his junior assistants, Herman Tucker and Paul Lanius, back to the site for further investigation and photography.
    Paul Lanius arrived first at Machu Picchu, on September 8th, and spent some days clearing the buildings before Herman Tucker’s arrival with the camera a week later. Both of them ascended from the downriver or Western approach, a vertiginous route that few would choose to take today. Lanius described it as ‘one of the steepest slopes I have ever climbed’.
    Herman Tucker was a more exuberant and occasionally frivolous photographer than Bingham. Tucker took pictures of what amused him – a dog lying on his Indian hosts’ floor at San Miguel, or an accompanying Peruvian helper posing on the top of the Temple of the Three Windows. Bingham was later to issue a stern warning to members of future expeditions: ‘Snap shots are not desired.’
    From the progression of photos that Tucker took on September 15th, it is clear that he too initially struggled to make photographic sense of Machu Picchu. His first picture was a high wide-angle shot from above, which shows that apart from a small area cleared by the farmers, most of the site was still covered in vegetation. Then he