Framing a Lost City

<p>When Hiram Bingham a historian from Yale University first saw Machu Picchu in 1911 it was a ruin obscured by overgrowth whose terraces were farmed a by few families. A century later Machu Picchu is a UNESCO world heritage site visited by more than a million tourists annually. This remarkable transformation began with the photographs that accompanied Bingham’s article published in <i>National Geographic</i> magazine which depicted Machu Picchu as a lost city discovered. Focusing on the practices technologies and materializations of Bingham’s three expeditions to Peru (1911 1912 1914–1915) this book makes a convincing case that visualization particularly through the camera played a decisive role in positioning Machu Picchu as both a scientific discovery and a Peruvian heritage site.</p><p>Amy Cox Hall argues that while Bingham’s expeditions relied on the labor knowledge and support of Peruvian elites intellectuals and peasants the practice of scientific witnessing and photography specifically converted Machu Picchu into a cultural artifact fashioned from a distinct way of seeing. Drawing on science and technology studies she situates letter writing artifact collecting and photography as important expeditionary practices that helped shape the way we understand Machu Picchu today. Cox Hall also demonstrates that the photographic evidence was unstable and as images circulated worldwide the “lost city” took on different meanings especially in Peru which came to view the site as one of national patrimony in need of protection from expeditions such as Bingham’s.</p>