photographers in andean visual culture - majluf, natalia

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This article was downloaded by: [FU Berlin] On: 10 May 2015, At: 17:03 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK History of Photography Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/thph20 Photographers in Andean visual culture Natalia Majluf Published online: 19 Jan 2015. To cite this article: Natalia Majluf (2000) Photographers in Andean visual culture, History of Photography, 24:2, 91-100, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2000.10443375 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2000.10443375 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Page 1: Photographers in Andean Visual Culture - Majluf, Natalia

This article was downloaded by: [FU Berlin]On: 10 May 2015, At: 17:03Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

History of PhotographyPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/thph20

Photographers in Andean visual cultureNatalia MajlufPublished online: 19 Jan 2015.

To cite this article: Natalia Majluf (2000) Photographers in Andean visual culture, History of Photography, 24:2, 91-100, DOI:10.1080/03087298.2000.10443375

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2000.10443375

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) containedin the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of theContent. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon andshould be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable forany losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use ofthe Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: Photographers in Andean Visual Culture - Majluf, Natalia

Photographers in Andean Visual Culture Traces of an Absent Landscape

Natalia Majluf

One of the most striking facts of Andean cultural history is the virtual absence, until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, of local representations of the natural scenery of the Andes. 1 Indeed, landscape as a form of visual and literary representation only entered the Andean region towards the end of the century, evolving, even since then, as a fragile and marginal tradition.2 But the mounting interest in nineteenth-century Andean photography since the late 1970s has revealed a series of views of loc<!l scenery associated with railroad development and scientific exploration that appears to deny this general statement:3 At first glance, this expanded visual repertory could allow us to name photography as the single most important medium for representing landscape in the region. Yet this initial impression is deceptive. Careful observation demonstrates that the landscape itself is rarely the main subject of these photographs and that natural scenery surfaces only a~ a subsidiary element that frames and contains other narratives.

The marginality of landscape in the Andean region is all the more significant when one considers that, in the Western tradition, the genre has been a dominant form of visualizing space and a fundamental element in forming conceptions of a nation's space. Nineteenth-century Peruvian elites could not sustain the notion of 'pure landscape' and did not approach their geographical surround­ings as though it carried inherent aesthetic qualities. Landscape here refers not only to an artistic genre, nor to specific natural scenery, but to a set of social practices and cultural conventions. 4

When photography arrived in the Andean region in the early 1840s it encountered a social and cultural context quite unlike that of contemporary Europe. Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador in particular were emerging from the crisis of independence, which had by then effectively dismanded the political structures of colonial Spain. But the new nations had not yet consolidated their own administrative structures and institutions; Spain's colonial heritage and visual traditions effectively continued to dominate cultural and intellectual life during the decades following political emancipation.

In the ca~e of landscape, this colonial legacy proved to be decisive. The genre did not exist as an autonomous aesthetic category during the colonial period and the Andes were rarely subjected to naturalistic description in either literature or the visual arts. Tied to the patronage of the Church and framed by a scholastic mentality, colonial artists were especially unable to accommodate most forms of naturalistic representation. As part of an otherworldly sphere inhabited by holy figures, the idealized landscapes which appeared as backdrops for religious narratives ultimately derived from the equally imaginary conventions of the Flemish models which served as their main pictorial source. The origins of this generalized indifference to nature and the related absence of landscape representation is a complex issue, which requires an examination of Hispanic cultural precedents, pictorial traditions, and their assimilation in the American colonies. What

HISTOR~ OF PHOTOGRAPH~. VOI.UME 24. NUMBER 2. SUMMER 2000

is relevant here is that the persistence of this colonial attitude into the nineteenth century defined the ways in which Andean societies framed their relationship to their surroundings.

Peruvian elites openly embraced European culture after Independence. They did not, however, adopt the European landscape tradition and its accompanying discourses on nature. The idea of an inherent beauty existing in nature was not applied to the specificity of Andean geography. Thus, Alexander von Humboldt's renown in the Americas did not automatically imply an adoption of his views on nature and its representation. It was actually left to European and North American artists such as Johann Moritz Rugendas, Frederic Edwin Church and others to interpret the South American landscape along the lines set out by Humboldt at the beginning of the century. The publicity which surrounded the exhibition of Church's Heart rf the Andes in New York and England in 1859, md its subsequent year-long tour through the United States, testifies to the broad public appeal and the social significance that landscape painting had achieved in North American society. It is significant that the work of painters who, like Church, expounded the grandeur of South American landscape was not widely known or acknowledged in the region, and that no comparable works with the same fublic repercussion can be found in the history of Andean painting.

Even when invoked in the Romantic poetry of the mid­nineteenth century, the Andes appeared only as a rhetorical figure, an allegory of the splendour and richness of American geography. Depicted as a single schematized mountain in commemorative medals, coins, and seals, the mountains remained an emblematic representation with no ostensible narrative import beyond its status as a sign of rich natural resources. This utilitarian view of nature defined even Peru's national escutcheon, created in 1825, which featured a representation of the Quinua tree, a vicufia, and a cornucopia overflowing with coins, symbolizing the nation's natural bounty.

While there was no established aesthetic framework for the contemplation of nature, a serious tradition of geographic exploration had developed since the late eighteenth century. The scientific reconnoitering of the region, based on utilitarian conceptions of the human sciences, new technologies, and the application of such knowledge to industry and commerce, was actively supported during the nineteenth century by the Peruvian government and international entrepreneurs and explorers.6 It was this scientific and pragmatic approach to nature that came to define early photographic approximations to the geography of the Andean region.

In the late 1850s, the abandonment of the daguerreotype in favour of the wet collodion plate allowed photographers to travel outside large urban centres. The British photographer William Glaskell Helsby explored the Southern Andean region in 1856,

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Natalia Majluf

photographing ports on the Pacific coast and various sites around Lake Titicaca Basin? A few years later, in 1859, the Lima studio of the French photographer Felix Carbillet announced a collection of stereoscopic views of Peru. John Adams, a North American photographer active in Lima between 1851 and 1866 and later in Chile, also photographed throughout the country.8 Although other documentary references can be cited, not many photographs from this early period survive and few have ever been identified.

None of these independent photographic enterprises attained any significant commercial success. Travelling through the interior of Peru was difficult, costly, and involved a great deal of risk, and the small Lima market was not sufficient to sustain the photo­graphers' investment. The absence of broader discourses and frameworks for the appreciation of landscape further limited the possibilities of marketing such views and, consequently, local studios rarely listed them in their newspaper advertisements. Unlike Europe or North America, where photographic views coexisted with a rich and diverse tradition of pictorial and literary discourses, and where landscape had an established presence in panorama views or the printing industry, the consumption of landscape imagery was not generalized in the Andean region. Thus, once the novelty of representing distant places had been exhausted, local photographers abandoned these ambitious projects and devoted themselves to the more profitable business of carte­de-visite portraits.

The emergence of the photographic landscape view in the Andean region would be supported mostly by specific commissions, which derived from the rise of projects for scientific exploration and capitalist expansion. The manner in which nature came to be framed and conceived in these projects depended on the way entrepreneurs were defining new economic and social enterprises and new understandings of the relation between a nation and its territories.

Peru remained a largely rural nation after Independence in 1821; but the state - politically and economically centred in Lima -lost substantial regional control. Lacking the bureaucratic structure of its Colonial predecessor, the weakness of the republican government created a wide gap between urban centres and the rural sector. The commercial routes that had activated a dynamic exchange between urban and rural areas during the Colonial period were seriously disrupted. Major cities in the highlands such as Cuzco and Huarnanga entered a period of serious economic decline. This situation did not change significantly with Peru's econornic affiuence during the 'guano era', which allowed the consolidation of the Creole state at mid-century. Economic activity continued to be centred on the cafital of Lima, extending mainly north and south along Peru's coast.

This geographic distribution of political power and economic resources defmed a new national order, whose social and cultural implications would leave a profound mark on the development of modern Peru. Urban elites, centred increasingly on the coast, were separated, socially, culturally, and economically, from the Andean highlands. The concentration of bourgeois and cosmopolitan society, based around the growing commercial exchange of Lima, created the image of the capital as a source of 'civilization', the point of origin for the dissemination of knowledge and resources.

This special sociopolitical division informed a new understanding of the nation's space. Modernity and progress, radiating from the capital, would have to surmount the neglected highlands in order to reach the Amazon, perceived then as an unexplored but potentially rich territory. This itinerary of progress came to outline an imaginary and highly simplified territorial map, creating the ideological construct of the 'three natural regions', a tripartite division of the nation that has dominated geographical thought until the present. Benjamin Orlove has shown that this ideological construct could be transposed onto a conventionalized graphic representation, dividing the national territory into three parallel bands: the thin coastal strip on the west, the Andean highlands in the middle, and the Amazon Basin to the east. As

92

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. _ .. ~ ... ~., ··t"~~:~~:·n: ~ ~1:'.:: .. :." ' -~ -·,:. ;~.

Figure 1. 'Port of lslay', engraving after a photograph by William Glaskell Helsby, c. 1856. From Mariano Felipe Paz Soldan, Atlas geogr4fico del Peril (Paris, 1865), plate XLVI.

Orlove has observed, 'Where colonial geographers depicted mountains as interspersed with lower lands, republican geographers presented them as a single vast barrier, quite literally an insurmoun­table obstacle that prevented different regions from being connected to each other'. 10

This is the image of the nation that coastal elites had effectively internalized by the 1850s, and which informed their programmes for national integration. State-sponsored scientific and topogra­phical surveys, intimately tied to the promise of capitalist expansion, enabled photographers to create the frrst sustained records of the region's geography. The businessman and the explorer appear as the central figures in photography of the interior of Peru; they alone were responsible for the production of the first visual representations of the country's geography.

Starting at mid-century, the Peruvian state lent substantial support to individual local and foreign scientist~ and explorers for the production of geographic documentation. The government published and distributed the works of the Italian geographer Antonio Raimondi (1826-1890), who dedicated his studies to

Peru's botanical and mineral resources, with special emphasis on the economic and social promise of the exploration of the Amazon. 11 Again, in 1861, it also financed the publication of Mariano Felipe Paz Soldan's national map and his Geografw del Per-U, the earliest totalizing attempt to chart the geographic and political divisions of modern Peru. As a complement to his previous works, in 1865 Paz Soldan published in Paris his Atlas geogr/ifico del Peril, the frrst publication to make the country's geography available to a broad public. 12

In this ambitious editorial project, regional maps alternated with engravings of city views, monuments and ports. Most of the engravings were based on the photographs taken by William Helsby in 1856 and br Emilio Garreaud during his trip to the interior of Peru in 1862.1 Paz Soldan did not commission photographs for his work. Instead, he selected images from the existing corpus of Peruvian photographs made before 1865. It is difficult to determine the extent to which his selection was guided by personal preference or the limitations imposed by the scarcity of views then available. The fact remains that the character of the images in his Atlas is consistent with that of other photographic views produced during the following decades.

Few of the engravings in the Atlas describe forms of natural scenery. Most are urban surveys, architectural monuments, city views, and coastal scenes, signs of 'civilization', commerce, and industry. The coastal scenes in particular reveal the pragmatic emphasis behind even the most pictorialized and composed scenes. The engraved view of the Southern port of lslay {ftgUre 1 ), based on a photograph by Helsby, gives great emphasis to the surrounding

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natural scenery, creating a dramatic composition by focusing on the rocky promontory in the foreground. The view of the bay, however, serves only as a frame for the representation of the port facilities in the background. The inclusion of this engraving was carefully calculated, since Paz Soldan had dedicated a lengthy discussion in his Geogrtifia del Peril to the importance of this new port for commercial development in the Southern Andean region. He inserted a copy of the proposal he made to the Minister of Public Works for the construction of a railroad uniting Islay with the city of Arequipa and he also placed in the Atkls an engraving of the proposed plan for the railroad. 14 The landscapes incorporated by Paz Soldan were thus primarily portrayals of civilization and not of nature. Likewise, most of the coastal scenes available in the Peruvian market during the 1860s and 1870s were devoted to the depiction of ports or to the Chincha islands, rich in guano deposits, the natural fertilizer that had become the main source ofincome for the Peruvian economy.

Like Antonio Raimondi's geographical exploits, Paz Soldan's enterprise was based on the idea of geographic documentation as a foundation for the larger progress of industry and the strengthening of the national state. Urbanization and industrialism were part of the dream of progress and not a tangible reality. Framed by the industrial visions of an urban bourgeoisie, the Andean landscape could not be apprehended as countryside or rustic retreat. Rather, intellectuals such as Paz Soldan gave shape to the country's geography through their hope of transforming the rural world into an extension of the modern metropolis.

In 1859, the future President Manuel Pardo, then a rising political figure, formulated the first sustained discourse in favour of railroad development in Peru. With foresight, Pardo envisioned the likelihood of the depletion of guano reserves and the consequent need to diversify industry and promote increased exports. Railroad development lay at the heart of Pardo's programme. Improvements in transportation would become an aid not only to economic development but, most importantly, to the integration of the provinces into the civilizing mission of the Central state. The railroad quickly came to be perceived as a panacea to Peru's social dismemberment.

In 1869, the Peruvian state signed the contract for the most ambitious engineering project of its time: the construction of the Central railroad, uniting Lima with the mining region of La Oroya. More than any other contemporary project, the Central Line rode on the promise of national integration. From La Oroya it would serve the rich agricultural centres of Tarn1a and Jauja, the nearby mining town of Cerro de Pasco - which had been in decline for almost half a century - and, finally, the highland rivers that converged on the Amazon.

The leading figure behind the development of Peru's ambitious railroad Prt:!iects was Henry Meiggs, a North American entrepreneur who had achieved renown through his successful railroad projects in Chile. In 1868 he obtained his ftrst contract in Peru, to build a line from the port of Mollendo to the city of Arequipa. By the end of 1871, Meiggs had obtained another six contracts for the construction of railroads in Peru. This achievement depended largely on his reputation, built on the success of his previous commissions and on his ability to manipulate and convince politicians and investors. Through large­scale public events, like the opening of the Mollendo-Arequipa line, the minting of commemorative medals, and public presenta­tions, Meiggs made himself a highly visible figure, a modem hero of technology and progress who embodied the hopes and aspirations of an expectant urban bourgeoisie. 15

Meiggs understood the importance of providing Peruvians with images of his ambitious projects. The absence of a local landscape tradition in painting and the lack of exhibition spaces limited the possibilities for the dissemination of a pictorial presenta­tion of the railroads. It should not be surprising, then, that when Meiggs decided to commission paintings of the Central Line, doubtless his major project, he hired Norton Bush, a North American artist whose paintings, significantly, are not known to have been exhibited in Peru. 16

Photographers in Andean Visual Culture

It is possible to speculate, however, that even if Meiggs had found an active community of painters, he would still have resorted to photography, which was perceived as an achievement of modem technology and a sign of progress. 17 Already in 1863 he entrusted Chilean photographers to produce a series of views to illustrate a promotional publication for the railroad from Valparaiso to Santiago. 18 He followed a similar model in 1870, when he hired Benjamin Franklin Pea~e to ghotograph the line from Mollendo to Arequipa in Southern Peru. 1 Although none of the views taken by Pease are known today, they were exhibited with great success at the National Exhibition of Lima in 1872.20 Photography thus became the principal medium for the local marketing of Meiggs's achievements.

Most extant views relate to the construction of the Transandean, or Central Railroad, begun in 1870. One of the great engineering feats of the century, the Central Line was also one of the most expensive railroad projects in history. Although it was not completed during Meiggs's lifetime, the most difficult phase had been accomplished by 1875: over 6000 workers had laid the tracks that began in Lima and made the difficult a~cent up the steep slopes through innumerable switchbacks, cutting dozens of tunnels through the rock and bridging steep gorges and ravines to reach the town of Chicla at 3745 metres above sea level. By the mid-1870s the depletion of guano reserves compounded by the international economic crisis had begun to endanger the completion of the project. Meiggs's death in 1877 and the outbreak of the War of the Pacific in 1879 further stalled the continuation of the Central Line. The section joining Chicla with La Oroya would be finished only in 1893.

The most important collection of these photographs, contained in an album belonging to the Peruvian railroad company, was produced around 1875, when the section to Chicla was concluded.21 Although this album was probably put together by the Lima firm of Eugenio Courret, whose name is inscribed on the cover, there are also valid reasons to attribute many of the views to North American photographer Villroy L. Richardson, who was active in Lima from 1859 until around 1872.22 As Keith McElroy has observed, untrimmed copies of the same photographs in other collections reveal a system of numbering the negatives that allows an attribution to Richardson. It is possible that both photographers collaborated on the project, or even that Courret may have acquired Richardson's negatives after his departure from the Lima market, which occurred at about the same time as the album was compiled. 23

It is significant that the photographs were taken before the railroad had reached its final destination, a fact that suggests they may have been intended to secure support for the project at a time when its exorbitant cost and the country's economic crisis created doubts about its future. The photographs marketed by Courret tell only a part of the railroad's story. They were intended to promote the railroad, not the history of the arduous process of its construc­tion, achieved only at the high cost of hundreds of Chilean, Chinese, and Peruvian lives.

Courret's photographs narrate the technological difficulties of the ascent up the Central Andes, the obstacles encountered and the means devised to surmount them. They are stark views, omitting extraneous details, never recording sites along the line for their own sake. People seldom appear, and when they do, they serve as diminutive markers of the vast scale of the project. Likewise, the locomotive itself is rarely the subject of the photographs. It appears occasionally entering a tunnel or leaving a bridge, but always following the line of the tracks, never imposing itself on the landscape or the infrastructure that supports it. Rather, it is the tunnels, bridges, and switchbacks that represent the Central Line as the great engineering feat that it was.

The primacy of the railroad's structure over the landscape is constant in Courret's views. In the photograph of the Viaduct cf Chaupichaca (figure 2), Courret places himself at a point that allows us to see the structure sustaining the bridge, which thrusts dramati­cally into the foreground over the deep ravine. The figure of a man

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Figure 2. Eugenio Courret, Viaduct of Chaupichaca, c. 1875, albumen print, 27 x 20.5 em. Musco de Arte de Lima, Acquisitions Fund 1996 (2.11-478). Transparency by Daniel Giannoni.

posing midway across the bridge appears like a tiny speck against the rough surtace of the mountains behind. Though barely visible, his tiny presence, isolated in this arid and hostile environment, becomes the focal point of the image, providing a powerful sense of the scale and dimension of the bridge and its setting.

The view of the Viaduct of Inf~m~illo (figure 3), one of the steepest and most dangerous passes on the ascent, clearly establishes the natural scenery as an obstacle to be overcome. Suspended over the river, the bridge imposes its presence against the solid fuce of the mountains that rise up like walls in the background. The folds of the hills recede in dramatic compression into the background, obstructing our view and giving no sense of an opening beyond. The only respite from the overwhelming presence of this constric­tive nature is the small piece of the sky, barely visible above the peaks, along the upper border of the image. The tunnel cut on the side of the rock and the regularity and simplicity of the bridge's iron structure emphasize the achievements of modern engineering. This image, above all others of the Central Line, sums up the narrative of the railroad's progress, its ability to penetrate the massive solidity of the mountainous rocks.

Landscape in and for itself is never a subject ofCourret's views. Occasionally, as in the scene of Rio Blanco (figure 4), where the mountains are clearly a commanding presence, one finds elements that suggest a primary interest in the natural scenery. Yet even in an image such as this, the railroad remains the dominant subject. The rich textures of the mountain that cut a strong diagonal along the centre of the composition do not sustain our interest for long, rapidly forcing us down to the valley below, where the railroad tracks become immediately visible. Following the curves of the riverbed, the tracks lead us across a small bridge, through the station, and recede into the landscape through a seemingly endless succession of mountains. The view acquires significance only through the presence of the railroad which, following the natural contours of the valley, allows us to penetrate the landscape.

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Figure 3. Eugenio Courret, Viaduct of Infiernillo, c. 1875, albumen print, 24.7 x 18.1 em. From the album 'Recuerdos del Peru -Ferro Carril de Ia Oroya', collection ofENAFER, Lima. Transpar­ency by Daniel Giannoni.

The tone of Courret's images is that of a straight, unmediated depiction, precluding any suggestion of a personal vision in the elaboration of the views. There is a sense of mechanical accuracy in these photographs, which establishes a certain equivalency between the railroad as technical achievement and photography's status as a modern medium for representation. But the figure of the photogra­pher is not absent from the narrative of the Central Line. The subject of Cuesta de San juan. Time/ No. 5 (figure 5) is not just the actual tunnel in the background, but also the photographer's

Figure 4. Eugenio Courret, Rio Bkmco, c. 1875, albumen print, 20.5 x 26.5 em. Musco de Arte de Lima, Acquisitions Fund 1996 (2.11-471). Transparency by Daniel Giannoni.

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Figure 5. Eugenio Courret, Cuesta de San Juan. Tune/ No. 5, c. 1875, albumen print, 24.5 x 18.2cm. From the album 'Recuerdos del Peru Ferro Carril de Ia Oroya', collection of EN A FER, Lima. Transparency by Daniel Giannoni.

.. \

_, ;·~~Jjt~~f!fA :·- ··~"'<i:[~'

;. ~ .~ :-:. .'\': . . ,,

Figure 6. Ricardo Villalba, Mundo Nuevo, c. 1874, albumen print, 24.8 x 20.4cm. From an album in the collection of ENAFER, Lima. Transparency by Daniel Giannoni.

Photographers in Andean Visual Culture

assistant and his equipment, which occupy the middle ground. 24

No attempt is made to arrange the darkroom or the tools that lie in disarray on the ground. The photographer is represented as a worker, and the image insists on showing the difficulty of the labour involved in making the views. Posed to the side, in a manner that parallels the position of the tracks that lead into the tunnel, the photographer's enterprise comes to be equated with the railroad's construction. The inclusion of this print - rarely found in other collections of views of the Central Line - in the album belonging to the railroad company clearly shows an attempt by the Courret firm to identity with the heroic narrative of the railroad.

Ricardo Villalba's views of the Southern railroad, uniting the port of Mollendo to the highland city of Puno, offer a significant contrast with Courret's vision. Villalba is an interesting and certainly the least studied photographer active in the Andean region in the nineteenth century. He worked in La Paz and Oruro, Bolivia, and Arequipa in Southern Peru during the 1870s.25 His photographs of the Southern Line are known only through an album containing one hundred prints in the collection of the Peruvian railroad company.2f• The segment of the Southern railroad that united the port of Mollendo to Arequipa (which had been registered by Pease), was finished by 1871, but the line to Puno was only completed three years later. The existence of the album in the company's archive suggests that the views were commissioned by the railroad entrepreneurs upon the line's completion in 1874.27

Whereas Courret had omitted the train from most of his photographs, with Villalba it becomes a dominating presence. Mundo Nuevo (figure 6) shows the train approaching, emerging from behind the slope of a hill to the right. In the background, ViiWba takes advantage of the natural contours of the mountains and the line of a switchback (emphasized by a string of workers placed on the side of the track), to create a sense of receding planes. The manner in which he frames the view allows the curving tracks in the foreground to suggest that the locomotive will eventually reach the foreground, locating the viewer on the train's very path. Thus, in spite of the stillness of the image, Villalba is able produce a suggestion of movement and re-create the train's course over the landscape. While Courret's views of the Central Line focused on the infrastructure of the tracks, engaging the difficulties of the railroad's construction, Villalba's photographs always allow the viewer a more comprehensive understanding of the railroad's itinerary and its ascent. The photographer ably establishes a meaningful relationship between the train and its surroundings.

In contr.1st with the austerity of the photograph~ of the Central Line, Villalba's images thus go beyond the depiction of the railroad as a technical achievement. His photographs present what was absent from Courret's visual narrative, incorporating views not directly related to the operative aspects of the railroad and recording sites of historical and archaeological interest along the route. Gardens of the Incas (figure 7) depict.~ a site on the shores of Lake Titicaca, near the city of Puno, then the final destination of the Southern Railroad. The landscape here acquires a presence of its own. The curving line of the beach in the foreground leads the viewer simultaneously into the slopes on the right and the va~t expanse of water to the left. The composition is carefully cut diagonally by the beach and the slopes, making a strict symmetrical division. The small boat stranded on the shore below, and the horizontal bands formed on the slopes by the remains of pre­Columbian terraces, help create a sense of depth, while giving the scene a picturesque quality.

Photographs such as this cannot be studied in isolation from the albums that contain them or the projects that gave rise to their production. In the context of the railroad company's album, Villalba's views of Lake Titicaca contribute to the idea of modern technology's ability to overcome natural obstacles and to transform Peruvian society's relationship to its geography. This remains the underlying narrative in Villalba's organization of the photographs in the album. Our understanding of a picturesque view showing traditional straw boats on Lake Titicaca is thus radically transformed

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Figure 7. Ricardo Villalba, Gardens of the Incas, c. 1874, albumen print, 25 x 20.5cm. From an album in the collection ofENAFER. Lima. Transparency by Daniel Giannoni.

when we tum the page and find a bold image of the 'Y apuri', a modem ship built to navigate the lake. This opposition between tradition and modernity constitutes a recurrent theme of Villalba's album.

This contrast acquires a particular inflection in the photographs depicting pre-Columbian ruins. The view titled Ruins oft~ Ttmplt of the Virgins (figure 8), which shows a pre-Columbian structure on the shores of Lake Titicaca, is among many views taken by Villalba of pre-Columbian sites near Puno. In the context of an album dedicated to the portrayal of the Southern Railroad, the photographs seem to suggest a par.illel between the achievements of pre-Columbian societies and those of modem technology.

These views are also revealing because it is here that Indian figures, absent from the vast majority of views ofboth the Central and the Southern railroads, make their appearance. The minor presence of the Indian in most nineteenth-century photographic views is significant, but it is especially telling in the images related to the Southern Line, which was built along a traditional commercial route that had served the Southern Andean region for centuries. The train intruded into a landscape that had been occupied by Indian muleteers and tradesmen transporting goods from the interior of Peru into the rich mining region of Bolivia.

Villalba includes Indian figures only in the context of pre­Columbian sites, as in Ruins oft~ Templt oft~ Virgins, where he poses an Indian in traditional dress in the central gateway of the temple. In Peruvian photography of the nineteenth century Indians are generally portrayed as ethnographic ~es, isolated from the landscape in urban studio cartes-de-visite. It is significant that Villalba, whose carte-de-visite portraits of Indians in traditional dress form one of the most impressive achievements of Andean studio photography, generally excludes Indian figures from his railroad views, an omission which certainly facilitated Peruvian enrrepreneurial elite's ideological appropriation of the Andean landscape.

North America's expansion required the representation of the Western territories as uninhabited lands in order to mask the dis­placement of Native Americans. By contrast, the Andean region, as

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Figure 8. Ricardo Villalba, Ruins of t~ Ttmple of t~ Virgins, c. 1874, albumen print, 20 x 25cm. From an album in the collection ofENAFER, Lima. Transparency by Daniel Giannoni.

an already charted and colonized territory, could not be conceived of as a tabula rasa. The independent republics inherited from the Spanish government an extensive administrative system, and Indian communities, who held land titles and paid taxes to the central state, were inscribed within the legal and political structures of Peruvian society. The colonization of the Andean region by modem technology implied a strategy of incorporating the Indian into the nation, a 'civilizing' mission to rescue Indian communities from their perceived stagnation. Peruvian statesmen and intellectuals of the nineteenth century saw the Indian as an impediment to progress and characterized indigenous communities as one of the major reasons for Peru's failed industrialization and development. By placing Indian figures in archaeological sites, photographers such as Villalba appear to emphasize the contrast between the glories of the Indian past and present degradation.

Both the Central and the Southern Lines originated on the coast and penetrated the Andean mountains. Their trajectory thus seemed to materialize the aspirations of coastal elites of 'civilizing' the highlands, which, as Benjamin Orlove has noticed, was consis­tently identified as 'Indian' land. Creole discourse demonstrated a sense of unease with respect to Indian communities, which raised issues about the legitimacy of Creole's political and economic hold on the nation. Indians were portrayed as the originary Peruvians and rightful owners of the land. In this context, Creole leaders, as heirs of the Spanish conquest, were inevitably placed in the role of usurpers. 29 Perhaps because of this, the Andes were not visualized as a space with depth, as a scenery that could be surveyed or immediately embraced. Unlike the 'magisterial gaze' that gave shape to North American photography and painting of the nineteenth century, the landscape of the Andean region could only be approached through partial and fractional views. 30 The railroad and industrial projects and the photographic record that was constructed around them seemed to hold the promise of reconciling coastal elites from their sense of estrangement from the land.

During the 1860s and 1870s Peruvian elites held an otherwise uncontested belief in their ability to impose progress and 'civiliza­tion' on the Andean landscape. Most of the pictures discussed here were taken before the disastrous War of the Pacific (1879-83) crushed Peru's 'fallacy' of progress. These photographs spoke for the capacity of modem Peru to overpower the Andes, that massive natural obstacle to communication and progress. They can be understood as prospector's views, as testimonies of the partial realization of modernizing projects and of the possibility of future expansion. Even during Meiggs's lifetime, the snow-capped peak of

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Figure 9. Anonymous photographer, Hunt of the Condor, 1870s, albumen print, 24 x 18.5 em. Musco de Arte de Lima, Acquisitions Fund 1996 (2.11-529). Transparency by Daniel Giannoni.

Ticlio on the Central Line was named in his honour. The signifi­cance of the newly baptized Mount Meiggs reflects the desire to impose a new nomenclature upon the landscape, to appropriate it in the name of industry and progress.

This assurance is revealed in photographs like the anonymous view of the Hunt of the Condor, also taken during the 1870s (figure 9). In this carefully crafted image, the hunter is placed against the background of a rugged mountain slope, upon which the body of the condor is exhibited a~ a trophy, its wings extended to show its size. Holding his hunting rifle with his right hand, the hunter stands proudly beside his prey, reclining almost casually against the craggy surtace. Next to the limp body of the condor, his confident yet relaxed pose asserts a sense of mastery over nature.

This photograph, part of a series devoted to mining activity in the Central Andes, acquires particular significance when set against the larger context of the Gildemeister Album, from which it derives. The album was compiled by the Peruvian businessman Federico Gildemeister Prado, son of the German immigrant Johann Gildemeister Evers, and Peruvian Manuela Prado.31 The Gilde­meister f.unily enterprises were based on commercial activity in Lima and the southern city of lquique, but they also held important mining interests in Yauli, which was to become a station along the Central Line.32 It is likely that the hunter portrayed in the photograph, who also appears in other images surveying different aspects of the mining process, is a member of the Gildemeister f.unily, and possibly Federico Gildemeister himself.

Isolated by the frame of the viewfinder, the image of the entrepreneur as hunter asserts the idea of a direct confrontation of man with nature, thus denying the broader context of the mining activity which makes his presence possible in these rugged heights. A photograph from the same series shows the hunter a~ mining entrepreneur, comfortably supervising the harsh work of the labourers who surround him. It is significant that the Gildemeister album also contains a number of Courret photographs of the

Photographers in Andean Visual Culture

.,-_- ,:

' ' ,7;:'''

Figure 10. Anonymous photographer, Transport of a millstone for a mine, 1870s, albumen print, 16.5 x 25cm. Musco de Arte de Lima, Acquisitions Fund 1996 (2.11-523). Transparency by Daniel Giannoni.

Central Line, a railroad that had been specifically designed to promote the mining industry and which formed an integral a~pect of capitalist expansion along the central Andes.

Like the photographs of the railroads, these mining views of the Central Andes become a statement about the difficulties imposed by nature on the modernizing efforts of coastal elites. Nowhere is this clearer than in a photograph showing the transpor­tation of a millstone used for grinding minerals (figure 10). The image shows a large stone being hauled across the landscape by an impressive line of cattle that seems to stretch endlessly across the land. The group has stopped its activities to pose for the photogra­pher who, attempting to fill the frame with the subject, cut out part of the group, accentuating the impression that the row of cattle extends beyond the borders of the photograph. The strong horizontal band formed by the group in the foreground forms a strict parallel to the outline of the mountains in the background. Here, as in other views, the landscape serves merely as context and backdrop for the representation of the entrepreneurial exploits the photographs record.

These are in effect no more than residual landscapes, what is lefi: over after the ostensible subject is eliminated from view. Yet landscape remains a paradoxically potent presence. It is always in the background of the image and, at the same time, it forms an indispensable element for its apprehension. Its signiJYing function is of far greater importance than its subsidiary position allows it to seem. But landscape was not a category valid unto itself. It inevitably remains only as the setting that enables the narratives of progress to operate. The sites portrayed in nineteenth-century photography were the spaces that had been assimilated into dominant discourse through actual interventions on a particular geography. These photographic views were directly generated by these interventions, and would not have existed without them.

If only in this backhanded manner, photography became the place where the natural landscape could be formulated as an image for consumption. Even by the 1880s, at the height of the international rise in naturalist painting, artists of the Andean region still remained indifferent to the portrayal of their immediate natural scenery. In 1883, the poet and essayist Juan de Arona denounced the absence of a coherent pictorial programme for the representation of the local landscape:

Like our writers, our national painters are so only in name; and when the moment artives in which reason and convenience counsel them to be so in fact, they proceed with great effort, and the result is a work in which the indigenous expression is at odds with a foreign conviction ...

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Figure 11. Anonymous photographer, Equestrian portrait, c. 1875-1890, oil on canvas, 49 x 69cm. Private collection, Lima.

Even our painters of walls would not know to conceive a genuine inspiration, one that was at least sincerely felt. Call on any one of them to paint the devise of a ldmbo [an inn or hostelry for muleteers and travellers of the Sierr.1); of.one of those tambos in the suburbs or on the outskirts of'Lima, and. he will trace a nice ... European landscape. The stranger arriving /Tom the Sierra or returning there, must filrcibly accept that this panorama is the emblem of his itinerary; and the overseas guest who is about to set out on a journey to the interior, will believe that alpine landscapes await him, with peoples and towns that seem animated and full of intelligence. This is to paint wishes .... There is as much local truth in this fresco, as in the IOVt of .firtplace, the long winter soirees, the town bell and the smoke from the chimneys that appear in our literature!33

Arona's enumeration of literary tropes derived from the sentimental rhetoric of European Romantic writers reveals his exasperation at the absurdity of invoking images that were irrelevant to a local reality.

Painters of the Andean region resisted the local landscape, even when their subjects seemed to require its presence. The origin of an anonymous equestrian portrait of a rural landowner, painted during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, can only be established as Peruvian through the presence of the traditional silver adornments of the bridle and stim1ps (figure 11). There is nothing in the background that refers to the Andean landscape. The landowner's property is not represented here, and the European-looking cottages with smokestacks (as Arona would certainly have observed) evoke only foreigrl pictorial conventions, ready-made models of a standardized 'landscape' ideal.

The same disregard for the representation of a native landscape is evident in the painted backdrops of nineteenth-cenn1ry studio photographs, which became, in effect, one of the main sites for the encounter between painting and photography. Vague and undefined, the generic landscapes that served as settings for the portraits of the urban middle classes were rarely recognizable in terms of location. Devoid of any kind of specificity which would allow a regional identification, these placeless landscapes signalled only the elegance of the setting, an insinuation of refmement that evoked the bourgeois expectations of both photographer and sitter. As a backdrop, the landscape becomes no more than a prop, on the same level as the mahogany tables or the richly ornamented pedestals that studio photographers used to create a context for their subjects. The self-sufficient space of the photographic studio, its privileged social confinement, allows the presence of the landscape backdrop only as a sigrlal element of'culture'.

The conventions of the nineteenth-century studio backdrop were to be maintained by Lima photographers only until the first two decades of the twentieth century; in the provinces, however, its use would be prolonged. In Cusco,Juan Manuel Figueroa Aznar

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Figure 12. Sebastian Rodriguez, Woman of Morococha, gelatine silver print, 35 x 27.5cm. Print made /Tom the original negative by Michaella Allan Murphy. Donated by Fran Antmann. Museo de Arte de Lima (2.11-303). Transparency by Daniel Giannoni.

(1878-1951), painter and photographer, would stage elaborate narrative scenes in front of his painted backdrops, portraying &ntastic landscapes with complex ornamental structures and European architectural elements. Like the Flemish scenes which served as settings for the biblical subjects of colonial painting, the artificial nature of Figueroa's landscapes betrayed a desire to associate, through the medium of photography, with the 'civilizing' qualities perceived to be inherent in painting as art. 34

A similar gesture surfaces in the work of Sebastian Rodriguez (1896-1968), a photographer active in Morococha, a Central Andean mining town dominated by the presence of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation. Working for the mining company, or individually for its workers, Rodriguez created some of the most memoro~ble portraits in Peruvian photography. Like Figueroa, before migrating to the highlands, Rodriguez had been an apprentice at the Lima studio of Luis Ugarte, where he probably came into contact with the landscape backdrops that were still in &shion in the capital. With the aid of his brother Braulio, a painter, Rodriguez made for himself a painted backdrop representing a Swiss landscape, copied from an imported cookie box.35 It would be difficult to fmd a more incongruous image than that of the Morococha miners and their families posing in their traditional dress against this idealized Alpine landscape (figure 12). Rodriguez's images are a striking parallel to the 'Alpine' landscapes Arona had denounced in his writings while they confirm the continuing function of the landscape backdrop as sigrl of social prestige.

The portable foreign-landscape prop became the trademark of itinerant Andean photographers. A portrait of a rural landowner by the name ofVillacin (1871), solemnly posing on his horse against a naively painted backdrop, confirms the tradition (figure 13). It is difficult to distinguish whether or not the photograph was made indoors, but an effort was clearly made to pose the subject against

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Figure 13. LOpez Hnos, Internacional, Senor Villaran, 1871, albumen print, 12.1 x 18cm. Private collection, Lima. Transpar­ency by Daniel Giannoni.

the backdrop, which shows a crude depiction of a veranda overlooking a landscape. The ornamental elements present in the backdrop, such as the column and the pedestal with Rowers, are obvious signs of a calculated effort to convey a certain idea of 'culture'. Rut the distance required to frame the full figure of the horse betrays the intent of the photograph. Unable to crop the image, the photographer is forced to expose the dirt ground of the studio and the shopworn borders of the backdrop, elements that would have remained hidden in a bust or three-quarter-length portrait. We know nothing of the photographer who made this image, save for the inscription 'LOpez Hns. lnternacional', stamped on the reverse of the thick cardboard mount. Next to the precarious structure of his rural studio, the self:.important tide reveals something of the photographer's aspirations, or, at least, of the associations the photographic portrait was intended to have for his customers.

It is this tradition of the rural studio and itinerant photographer that inspires Javier Silva Meinel's recent photographic series of Andean festivities. Their background is not the actual landscape in which they take place but a painted backdrop, executed in imitation of early twentieth-century provincial photographic studios. This setting, a self-evident social construction, emphasizes the theatrical nature of the festivities, their role as a form of self-representation for Andean communities. Within this series one group of images in particular reveals the artifice which underlies the entire project. In one of them, a mask representing a hull's head is placed against the landscape in the foreground of the image; in another, the subject becomes the severed head of a horse. Yet in this group one of the most haunting images is perhaps that of a man sitting astride a horse against the painted backdrop (figure 14). In the end, the costume of the actors and the fabricated animals conform strictly to signifYing the function of the backdrop, which, more than an artificial surrogate of an actual landscape, serves openly as a disguise for it.

The objectification of landscape as a sign of culture reverses photography's privileged claims to transparency. Whether as a sign of high culture in nineteenth-century studio production, of 'culture' as kitsch in Andean photography, or as a self-conscious historical reflection on artifice in Silva's work, the landscape as backdrop is a another facet of a wider cultural tradition that conceives of landscape not as nature, but as a form of artifice. In denying the possibility of a naturalistic description of the environment, it rejects the concept of the landscape as view and, consequendy, radically transforms the cultural and social reality that the landscape frames and contains.

Notes

I. I would like to thank Jorge Villacorta for his helpful comments and Daniel Buck for his willingness to share his knowledge of Bolivian

Photographers in Andean Visual Culture

Figure 14. Javier Silva Meinel, Qorilazo montado. Chumbivilcas, Cusco, Pern, 1996, gelatine silver print. Transparency courtesy of Javier Silva Meinel.

photography. I am also indebted to Jaime Blanco, of ENAFER, for his help in obtaining photographs from the company's collection.

2. There are few in-depth discussions on the absence of landscape. See especially with regard to literature. Raul Porras Barrenechea, 'Estudio preliminar', to Jose de Ia Riva-Agilero, Paisajes peruanos Lima: Pontificia Universidad Cat6lica del Peru, Instituto Riva-Agilero I 995, xxx-xxxiii. In relation to twentieth-century indigcnist painting and writing see Mirko Lauer, Andes imaginarios. Discursos del indigenismo 2, Cusco and Lima: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos 'Bartolome de Las Casas' and SUR 1997, 59-8S.

3. Keith Douglas McElroy, 'The History of Photography in Peru in the Nineteenth-Century 1839-1879', PhD dissertation Universiry of New Mexico I 977. See ..Jso Natalia Majluf, eel, Regi>lro> del tmitCirio. LAs primeras decodas de IAfotografJa 1860-1880, exh. cat., Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima 1997.

4. This approach defines Nicholas Green's innovative approximation to French landscape imagery in Th~ Spectacle cf Nature. Landrcape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century Franct, Manchester and New York: Manchester Universiry Pre-. 1990. See al~o W. J. T. Mitchell 'Introduction', in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, Chicago and London: Universiry of Chicago Pre~s 1994.

5. See Katherine Emma Manthome, Tropicol Rl'tlaissance. North Aml'rican Arlists Exploring Latin America 1839-1879, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press 1989. In a more recent essay, Manthome argues fur the importance of comparative readings oflandscape represen­tations in the Americ.as. See 'A Transamcrican Reading of the 'Machine in the Garden': Nature vs. Technology in 19th Century Landscape Art', in Arte, historia e identic/ad en America: Vi.siones comparativas, ed. Gustavo Curiel et a/., 3 vols, XVII Coloquio Intemacional de Historia del Arte, Estudios de Ane y Estetica, 37, Mexico: Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico I 994, I, 234-5 I.

6. For a general introduction to exploration of the Americas at the time of Independence see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Trawl Writing and Transculturation, London and New York: Routledge 1992, especially Ch. 6.

7. Apart from the references and images in Paz Soldan's publication, there is scarce information on I Ielsby's travels through Southern Peru. Daniel Buck publishes a view of the ruins of Tiahuanaco from the collection of Tulane Universiry's Latin American Library in 'Ayer, imagenes modernas hoy, tesoros de archivo', Americas 46:5 (1994), 2o-27. On Helsby's activiry in Chile and other Latin American countries see Heman Rodriguez Villegas, 'Historia de Ia fotografia en Chile. Registro de Daguerrotipistas, fot6grafos, reporteros gcificos y camar6-grafos 184o-t940', Boktln de Ia Academia Chilena de Ia Histt,ria 96 (1985), 253-54.

8. 'Avisos diversos. Carbillet', El Comerrio (Lima), 26 February lf!59; 'Cr6nica loc.ai.John Adams', El Nacional Lima, 29 October 1866.

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9. Paul Gootenberg, 'Population and Edmicity in Early Republican Peru: Some Revisions', Latin American Research Rtview 26:3 (Summer 1991), 109-57.

10. Benjamin S. Orlove, 'Putting Race in its Place: Order in Colonial and Postcolonial Peruvian Geography', Social Research 60:2 (Summer 1993), 316-21.

11. I cannot explore here the large corpus of photographs relating to the exploration of the Amazon, which still demands exhaustive study. I have recently seen an album of views of the Chanchamayo region in a private coUection that I have been unable to study or photograph adequately, but which could possibly be related to the activity of Cuzco photogra­pher Bernardo Puente de Ia Vega.

12. Mariano Felipe Paz Soldan, Atlas gtograjico del Pern, Paris: Fermin Didot Hermanos 1865,5, 66.

13. In 1862 a newspaper advertisement announced Garreaud's return from 'a trip to the interior'. See 'Retratos', HI Comtrrio, 22 October 1!:162. Save for Paz Soldan's publication of engravings after his photographs, there are no further references to this trip.

14. Mariano Felipe and Mateo Paz Soldan, Geografo del Pern, Paris: Fermin Didot 1862,4900:

15. Walt Stewart, Henry Mrigg5, Yan~ Pizano, Washington, DC 1946, 85. 16. Bush appears to have remained in Peru only long enough to conclude

his commission, returning to the United States shortly after. See Manthorne, Tropical Rmai5sarra, 178.

17. Joel Snyder, 'Territorial photography', in Landscape and POIWr, ed. W. J. T. MitcheU, 175-201.

18. The photographs, taken by Cachoirs and Emilio Chaigneau, were published in Rt5riia histOrica del femxarril mtrr Santiago y Valparal5o, Santiago: lmprenta del Ferrocarril 1863. See Rodriguez ViUegas, 'Historia de Ia fotografia en Chile', 222.

19. On Pease's activities in Lima and his specific railroad commission see Keith McElroy, 'Benjamin Franklin Pea.'IC. An American Photographer in Lima, Peru', History of Photography 3:3 Quly 1979), 195-209.

20. Pease had apparently madt'" vit'"Ws of other railroad projects, as the catalogue entry for the exhibition of1872 clearly states that he had exhibited ftfi:een vit'"WS 'of the roads and constructions of the various railroads of Peru' (emphasis added). See Francisco A. Fuentes, ed., Catalogo de Ia Exposidlm Nacionaldt 1872. Edici/ml!ficial, Lima.lmprentadel Estado 1872,93.

21. The album, tided on the cover 'Rccuerdos dd Peru Ferro Carril de Ia Oroya/E. Courret Fot. Lima', contains 49 views of the Central Line, collection of ENAFER, Lima. The photographs could only have been made after 1875, when the line to Chicla wa~ completed, and prior to 1877, when the French traveUer Charles Wiener acquired a number of these views during his stay in Peru. Wiener later used some of these photographs to serve as iUustrations to his travel account, Pbou tt Bolivie. Rtdt dt voyagt, Paris: Librairie Hachette 1880.

22. After his departure from Lima, Richardson is known to have been active in the Southern cities of lquique and Tacna between at least 1880 and 1889. See Rodriguez Viilegas, 'Historia de Ia fotografia en Chile', 306. As McElroy suggests, his departure was probably encouraged by the discovery of rich nitrate fields in the South, 'The History of Photography in Peru in the Nineteenth-Century 1839-1876', 716-17.

23. Keith McElroy identified the negative plate numbers appearing in copies belonging to the Gildemeister Album Museo de Arte de Lima with those appearing in views he attributed to Villroy Richardson. See 'The History of Photography in Peru .. .', 174. I thank Keith McElroy for helping me with this complex issue at a time when the ENAFER albums were unavailable for study. The issue of the attribution of the photographs of the Central Line is even more complicated. An albwn tided 'Vistas del Peru' containing 271 views, in the coUection of the

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Biblioteca Nacional Lima, contains prints carrying the watermark of Ra&el Castillo that were made from the same negatives. Castillo was an important Lima photographer who became the main rival of the Courret firm and who is known to have had a business association with Richardson. See McElroy, 'The History of Photograhy in Peru .. .', 415. One could speculate that the negative numbers on the Richardson plates were made by CastiUo during their association. This, however, fails to explain why Courret marketed the plates, unless one considers that Castillo might have been hired by Courret to work on the Central Line project. Further research is required to solve this problematic issue. I prefer to attribute the series to Courret, as it was his firm that produced the album in the ENAFER coUection.

24. For a discussion of this image, first published by McElroy, see 'The History of Photography in Peru .. .', 188.

25. 'Matricula de Patentes. Empresarios de Industria en el Ramo de Sueltos', La Bol5a Arequipa, 22 April1875. As McElroy not<.'S, the props that appear in ViUalba cartes between 1874 and 1876 were later used by Carlos Heldt in Arequipa during the 1880s. It seems that Heldt took over Villalba's studio when he moved from TrujiUo to Arequipa sometime after t8n. Set'" McElroy, 765. On Villalba's Bolivian views, see Buck, 'Ayer, irnagenes modemas hoy, tesoros de archivo', 21-26, and 'Pioneer Photography in Bolivia, Register of Daguerreotypists and Photographers 1840s-1930s', Bolivian Studit5 5:1 (1994-95), 125.

26. The untitled album, measuring 32.5 x 44 em, is inscribed on the cover 'Ricardo Villalba Fot6grafo', collection ofENAFER, Lima. The album contains one hundred views, although the pencil numbers on the pages count up to 110 pages. This may suggests that the album has lo~t tt."n pages of views.

27. The photographs were certainly taken before 1877, when the French traveller Charles Wiener acquired copies of these photographs during his trip to Arequipa and Puno. Views numbered 83, 93, 98 100 102 and 1 10 in Villalba's album served for engravings iUustrating part I, chapter XXIV and part II, chapter Ill ofWiener's Pbou tt Bolivie.

28. Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity. A Visual Economy of the Andean lmagt World, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press 1997.

29. Natalia Majluf, 'The Creation of the Image of the Indian in Nineteenth­Century Peru. The Paintings of Francisco Laso 1823-1869', PhD disser­tation, University ofTexas at Au$tin 1995.

30. Albert Boime, The Magistrrial Gazt. Manifr5t Dt5tiny and American Lanthcape Painting, c. 183Q-1865, Washington and London, Smithsonian Institution Press 1991.

31. Detail5 of the history of this coUection, acquired by the Museo de Arte de Lima in March 1996, can be found in Majluf, ed., Rt)lislm5 del ttrritorio. The Museum acquired a large number of loose album pages containing 142 albumen prints. It was later discovered that they came from a mutilated album in the collection of Luis Eduardo Wuflarden in Lima that contained only nine images relating to the earthquake of Arequipa in 1868. The album cover carries the inscription 'F. Gilderne­ister' in gold letters on the cover.

32. The earthquake of 1868, also documented in the album, caused great damage to the family's saltpetre enterprises in the south, helping redirect their entrepreneurial activities to agriculture in the northern region of Trujillo. Majluf, ed., R.tgi5tro5 del tmitorio, 51, note 26.

33. Juan de Arona, [Pedro Paz Soldan y Unanue), Diccionario dt peruanismos (1883-1884), Biblioteca de Cultura Peruana 10, Paris: Desclee, de Brouwer 1938,28-29.

34. For the most exhaustive study of Figueroa Aznar see Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, Ch. 7.

35. Fran Ar1tmann, 'The Peasant Miners of Morococha', Apntull' 90 1983, 60-72.

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