In Framing a Lost City: Science, Photography, and the Making of Machu Picchu, Amy Cox Hall delves into the archives of Hiram Bingham and the Yale Peruvian Expedition of 1911, 1912, and 1914–15 to explore the role of visualizing technologies in transforming Machu Picchu into a national icon and internationally recognized heritage site. It was through the camera, Hall argues, that Bingham “materialized and made factual the imagined discovery of a lost city” (p. 69). This “aesthetic of discovery,” inflected by the scientific, commercial, and national desires of the early 1900s, may well be, Hall concludes, Bingham's most significant and enduring contribution.
By drawing on the work of Edward Said, Lorraine Daston, and Elizabeth Lunbeck, Hall stands with scholars such as Deborah Poole and Jorge Coronado, whose work in the Andes has interrogated how people and places have been seen and represented as well as how power and technology...
