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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:
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Photographers in Andean Visual Culture

Traces of an Absent Landscape

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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,
JSSN 0308-7298/00 0 2000 Taylor & Franci> Ltd.

91

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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

', .. ,'

~~;;\

. _..~...~., 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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Photographers in Andean Visual Culture

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

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

93

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Natalia Majluf

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.
94

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.

Photographers in Andean Visual Culture

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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.

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.

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

95

Natalia Majluf

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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.

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

96

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

Photographers in Andean Visual Culture

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''
,7;:'''

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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.

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

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 ...

97

Natalia Majluf

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Figure 11. Anonymous photographer, Equestrian portrait, c. 18751890, 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
98

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

Photographers in Andean Visual Culture

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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.

Figure 14. Javier Silva Meinel, Qorilazo montado. Chumbivilcas,

Cusco, Pern, 1996, gelatine silver print. Transparency courtesy of

Javier Silva Meinel.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

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

8.

photography. I am also indebted to Jaime Blanco, of ENAFER, for his

help in obtaining photographs from the company's collection.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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), 2o27. 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 camar6grafos 184o-t940', Boktln de Ia Academia Chilena de Ia Histt,ria 96
(1985), 253-54.
'Avisos diversos. Carbillet', El Comerrio (Lima), 26 February lf!59;
'Cr6nica loc.ai.John Adams', El Nacional Lima, 29 October 1866.

99

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Natalia Majltif
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 ofother 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 18391876', 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

100

24.
25.

26.

27.

28.
29.

30.
31.

32.

33.
34.
35.

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.
For a discussion of this image, first published by McElroy, see 'The
History of Photography in Peru .. .', 188.
'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.
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.
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
110 in Villalba's album served for engravings iUustrating part I, chapter
XXIV and part II, chapter Ill ofWiener's Pbou tt Bolivie.
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.
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.
Albert Boime, The Magistrrial Gazt. Manifr5t Dt5tiny and American
Lanthcape Painting, c. 183Q-1865, Washington and London, Smithsonian
Institution Press 1991.
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.
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.
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.
For the most exhaustive study of Figueroa Aznar see Poole, Vision, Race,
and Modernity, Ch. 7.
Fran Ar1tmann, 'The Peasant Miners of Morococha', Apntull' 90 1983,
60-72.