Machu Picchu. Interiores y portadas en el Palacio del Jefe (Machu Picchu. Interiors and Façades of the Palacio del Jefe)

The Quechuan-Peruvian artist Martín Chambi is a key figure in twentieth-century photography. The worldwide recognition of his images encompass imagery on Latin America that was disseminated from the 1920s through the illustrated press and postcards. The habitual themes Chambi explored in his work were archeological sites from the golden ages of scientific and anthropological expeditions to Cuzco in the early twentieth century.

In 1924, he visited Machu Picchu in the company of North American ambassador to Peru, Miles Poindexter, photographing the citadel with a medium format plate camera. He was one of the first photographers to photographically document the archeological site after Hiram Bingham, who photographed it in 1911, and whose images appeared in National Geographic Magazine in 1913. In 1928, Chambi went back to Machu Picchu with an expedition led by Peruvuan historian Luis Eduardo Valcárcel, accompanied by the prefect of Cuzco, Víctor Vélez. On that trip, Chambi produced forty plates in a 18 x 24 cm format, works which would be widely published in the years that followed.

His work distils a documentary and aesthetic interest, mixed with an autochthonous language which contributed to the construction of Peruvian modernity.



Suset Sánchez Sánchez