Fototeca Latinoamericana FoLa (FoLa) based in Buenos Aires, Argentina presents “Machu Picchu, Incas and Photographers”. From March 9th to June 12th, the exhibition is a recap of the journey made by explorer Hiram Bingham while he discovered Machu Picchu, along with the views of important Peruvian and American artists like Edward Ranney, Martin Chambi and Javier Silva Meinel, among others.
The exhibition is an opportunity to enter the history of ancient civilizations and get to know a magic and unique place.
The beginning of the relationship between Machu Picchu and photography dates back to 1911, when North American explorer Hiram Bingham took the first photos for scientific purposes,that were published by National Geographic. From then on, this archeological site became one of the most photographed places in the world.
Over the long road travelled to try to understand and represent the majestic work of the Incan Empire, photography has shown us, for more than one hundred years, the different faces of Machu Picchu.
If visual material is very important and caters to different subjects, it is possible to see the importance of the contributions made by the four photographers brought together to construct an image of the Incan site.
Through the photographers’ objectives, the role of the visual image on Machu Picchu changed. Photography being the most appropriate means to catalogue and classify the Andean world for this scientific project, Martín Chambi offers us an iconic image of Machu Picchu, full of feeling and emotional connections to the land.
Edward Ranney’s images incorporate a formal and modern language, reconciling Incan abstraction and Western abstraction. It internationalizes a language capable of expressing and synthesizing the essence behind the representation.
Javier Silva-Meinel’s Machu Picchu, as described by José Carlos Huayhuaca, is vaporous and humid. Instead of using light and climate to better capture the Incan structures, his photograph integrates the atmospheric component as a way to disfigure them and enter into a zone of contingency where perception is favored over description.
In this exhibition, there is a focus on the first images and bodies of photographic work of Machu Picchu, but there is also an interest in the process (as historical as it is ideological) that gives way to other visual subjectivity and approximations.
EXHIBITION
Machu Picchu, Incas and Photographers
From March 9th to June 12th, 2016
Fototeca Latinoamericana FoLa
Godoy Cruz 2626 Distrito Arcos
Buenos Aires, Argentina
5789 – 2773 / 2873 / 2748
[email protected]
http://fola.com.ar/wp/
