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BestsellerE-book
Author Hall, Amy Cox, author.

Title Framing a lost city : science, photography, and the making of Machu Picchu / Amy Cox Hall.

Publication Info. Austin : University of Texas Press, 2017.
©2017

Item Status

Edition First edition.
Description 1 online resource (xiv, 267 pages) : illustrations.
Physical Medium polychrome
Description text file
Series Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture
Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture.
Summary When Hiram Bingham, a historian from Yale University, first saw Machu Picchu in 1911, it was a ruin obscured by overgrowth whose terraces were farmed a by few families. A century later, Machu Picchu is a UNESCO world heritage site visited by more than a million tourists annually. This remarkable transformation began with the photographs that accompanied Bingham's article published in National Geographic magazine, which depicted Machu Picchu as a lost city discovered. Focusing on the practices, technologies, and materializations of Bingham's three expeditions to Peru (1911, 1912, 1914-1915), this book makes a convincing case that visualization, particularly through the camera, played a decisive role in positioning Machu Picchu as both a scientific discovery and a Peruvian heritage site. Amy Cox Hall argues that while Bingham's expeditions relied on the labor, knowledge, and support of Peruvian elites, intellectuals, and peasants, the practice of scientific witnessing, and photography specifically, converted Machu Picchu into a cultural artifact fashioned from a distinct way of seeing. Drawing on science and technology studies, she situates letter writing, artifact collecting, and photography as important expeditionary practices that helped shape the way we understand Machu Picchu today. Cox Hall also demonstrates that the photographic evidence was unstable, and, as images circulated worldwide, the "lost city" took on different meanings, especially in Peru, which came to view the site as one of national patrimony in need of protection from expeditions such as Bingham's.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-260) and index.
Contents Introduction: seeing science -- Sight -- Epistolary science -- Huaquero vision -- Circulation -- Latin America as laboratory -- Discovery aesthetics -- Picturing the miserable Indian for science -- Contests -- The politics of seeing -- Conclusion: artifact.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject Peruvian Expeditions (1912-1915)
Peruvian Expeditions (1912-1915)
Yale Peruvian Expedition (1911)
Yale Peruvian Expedition (1911)
Yale Peruvian Expedition (1912)
Bingham, Hiram, 1875-1956.
Bingham, Hiram, 1875-1956.
Machu Picchu Site (Peru)
Peru -- Antiquities.
Peru.
Antiquities.
Anthropological ethics.
Photography -- Moral and ethical aspects -- Peru -- Machu Picchu Site.
Anthropological ethics.
Photography -- Moral and ethical aspects.
Peru -- Machu Picchu Site.
HISTORY -- Latin America -- South America.
Genre/Form Electronic books.
Other Form: Print version: Hall, Amy Cox. Framing a lost city. First edition. Austin : University of Texas Press, 2017 9781477313671 (DLC) 2016054039 (OCoLC)965617478
ISBN 9781477313695 (electronic book)
1477313699 (electronic book)
9781477313701 (non-library e-book)
1477313702 (non-library e-book)
9781477313671 (hardcover ; alkaline paper)
1477313672 (hardcover ; alkaline paper)
9781477313688 (paperback ; alkaline paper)
1477313680 (paperback ; alkaline paper)
Sudoc No. Z UA380.8 H140fr