University of texas press, december 2017
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 by a 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 Bingham 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.
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. Notably, the book demonstrates that the photographic evidence deployed by Bingham 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.
REVIEWS
“This is one of those rare books that should be read and appreciated by scholars, students, and a broadly curious public alike—all who are interested in the part played by science in fashioning Peru’s monumental heritage site, Machu Picchu. Amy Cox Hall’s rendering of this powerful narrative is in itself a marvel of first-rate storytelling.”
“This is really good historical research that demystifies the romanticism surrounding Machu Picchu’s ‘scientific discovery.’ It also provides a window into what ‘science’ was in the early 20th century.”
“Hall’s focus on expeditionary photography and her impressive juxtaposition and analysis of archival sources, including photographs, correspondence, photographic circulars, reports, newspapers, and magazines, make Framing a Lost City original and distinct...Framing a Lost City is a welcome and important contribution to the scholarship on photography, nation, and science in Latin America. ”
“The detailed archival work that forms the basis of [Framing a Lost City] is exhaustive and admirable, and this archival complexity is narrated with great clarity. This alone makes Framing a Lost City a substantial contribution to the literature. ”
“Engaging...Theoretically sophisticated, the book builds on the work of scholars such as Jorge Coronado and Deborah Poole that scrutinizes the way the Andes and its people have been imagined...Photographic images, the focus of Cox Hall’s well-researched work, played a significant role in shaping Machu Picchu as a lost city waiting to be found. ”