Lost City of the Incas (Phoenix Press) (6 page)

So, that same month, Bingham wrote to George Eastman of Eastman Kodak, requesting ‘at least 3 Kodaks as good as the 3
A
Special’ he had used on the previous expedition. He also asked for a Panoram Kodak, strong leather cases for all the cameras, 3,500 negatives, ten folding wooden tripods and five developing units for use in the field. An inveterate opportunist, Bingham asked Eastman Kodak to donate the above equipment for free, on the basis that it could prove an invaluable test of how well it would stand up to tropical conditions. George Eastman agreed.

This was to be a South American expedition fuelled by the need for more photographic material, just as previous centuries had seen explorers driven by quests for El Dorado, mineral concessions or colonial occupation.

Bingham approached the task with his customary efficiency. He was a natural quartermaster. Each member of the cumbersomely named ‘Yale Peruvian Expedition of 1912, under the auspices of Yale University and the National Geographic Society’ was issued with a Welcome Photographic Exposure Record in which they had to fill in the date, exact time of day, aperture, shutter speed and a column for ‘notes on lighting’. As Bingham later wrote, ‘a minute and careful record of all photographs taken is to be kept in the photographic record-book supplied to each member … extreme pains should be taken to record the exact time of day and date’. Members of the expedition were also issued with their own personal set of negative numbers to use (000–500, 501–1,000 etc) so that there could be no duplication.

Bingham took the main burden of the photographic work upon himself. It became almost his chief occupation during the long season the expedition spent at Machu Picchu in 1912. Truth to tell, as he had no professional qualifications as an
archaeologist, he needed a role to supplement that of just being ‘Director’ of the expedition. It was a task he set about with considerable enthusiasm. With uncharacteristic modesty, Bingham had already written to George Eastman asking for advice on how to take better photographs, and his many subsequent shots of Machu Picchu (
plate section 2
) show an increasing mastery of the medium. It is from these later photographs that he chose to illustrate
Lost City of the Incas
.

On looking through the complete set of contact prints held in the archives of the Peabody Museum at Yale, the overwhelming impression is of how thorough Bingham was. As his workmen stripped the ruins bare, he photographed almost every corner of Machu Picchu, using a reference map to give the coordinates of each shot taken. He evidently relished his new found ability to make photographic sense of what lay before him, as his contrasting pictures of the site before and after clearance show (
plate section 2, pages 1 and 4
).

However, the photographs are not just a conscientious documentation of what he saw but part of a developing argument. It was during this 1912 season, when he spent five months based at Machu Picchu, that he began to elaborate his theories about the site and his choice of subject matter often reflects this.

It is striking how many shots he took of the Temple of the Three Windows (
plate section 2, pages
2–3), which held for Bingham a totemic importance: he saw it as proof that Machu Picchu was the semi-mythical originating city of the Incas which was always supposed to have just such a building. He had photographed this on his first visit, in 1911, but without paying it much importance and only including one window in the shot. Now in his superb panoramic shot of the Sacred Plaza, it draws the eye as the centre of the composition, and Bingham also shot the reverse angle, where it dominates the skyline. The first three pictures of Machu Picchu in the subsequent
National Geographic
article are all of the Temple, with captions advancing his interpretation of it.

In order to illustrate another hypothesis, that some stones set in the floor would have been used for grinding corn, he asked
his Indian workers to pose doing just that, for ethnographic validity (
plate section 2, page 7
). As with his ‘origin of the Incas’ idea, Bingham’s interpretation has since been disputed: the depressions are far wider than historical or current Andean mortar stones would suggest.

The one camera Bingham had told Eastman he didn’t want to take was the Speed Kodak as (one can almost hear his dry Yale academic voice) ‘we do not have to take pictures of the fastest moving objects’.

Instead, he requested a No. 4 Panoram Kodak, a dauntingly advanced piece of equipment which demanded considerable technical and compositional skill, much as an IMAX camera does today. The No. 4 achieved its panoramic wide angle of view by having a lens on a vertical pivot which swung right across the film during exposure. The resulting 12 by 3 1/2 inch negatives allowed for superbly detailed prints to be made, but only four such exposures could be taken from each Bulls-Eye film cartridge.

It was with the Panoram that Bingham took some of his most remarkable pictures: as well as the Sacred Plaza, he used it to illustrate Machu Picchu’s remoteness (‘it is essentially a city of refuge’) with wide compositions showing the canyons dropping off below (
plate section 2, pages 2–3
). As with all extreme wide-angled lenses, the camera needed careful placing, but the results could unlock some of the more serpentine of Machu Picchu’s architectural vistas, such as the Princess Group or around the Torreón. He used it elsewhere in the field too, taking well-composed pictures of Sacsahuaman, Ñusta Isppana and even the snowy passes between Arma and Choquetira, where operation must have been exceptionally difficult.

On his return from Peru at the end of 1912, Hiram Bingham wrote to Eastman Kodak asking for prints from 2,000 negatives. No less than two hundred and fifty of these were used in the specially expanded edition of
National Geographic
magazine on Machu Picchu which appeared in April 1913. The triple fold-out poster (
plate section 1, pages 2–3
) was also included at the considerable extra production cost of $2,000, as Grosvenor
complained to Bingham.

However, overall Grosvenor was delighted by the photographic wealth with which Bingham had returned, adding a special ‘Editor’s Note’ at the head of the article: ‘As we study the 250 marvellous pictures which are printed with this report, we are thrilled by the wonders and mysteries of Machu Picchu.’ He also wrote to tell Bingham ‘you have brought back full value for the subscription we made to your last expedition … Your photos of Machu Picchu are wonderful’.

Over 500,000 tourists now visit Machu Picchu every year. They have become its population and the way they inhabit the site may be less different to the Incas than might be imagined. The tourists come mainly in the dry season from April to November, just as the royal court probably did when they retreated from the winter rigours of Cuzco. And they come for pleasure, as it seems the Incas did as well, given the widely-held interpretation of Machu Picchu as a
moya
, a country estate where the elite could indulge themselves with appropriately monumental architecture and spectacular views, views which modern tourists never tire of trying to capture.

Indeed a form of fotophilia often seems to grip today’s visitor, just as it affected Bingham. Tour groups usually begin their photographic engagement with Machu Picchu at the Watchman’s Hut above the city, planting tripods on the marks left by those before them. From here they can take the classic ‘pack-shot’ picture of the city with Huayna Picchu behind it, and this has a certain appropriateness – the same view would have presented itself to the Incas when they arrived from Cuzco along what is now known as ‘the Inca Trail’. But after that each photographer is on his or her own, and can roam freely through the intricate and playful buildings, seduced by Machu Picchu’s infinite variety into shooting endless images.

Why is it that Machu Picchu holds the camera’s gaze so well?

Perhaps it is partly the nature of classical Inca architecture which makes photographing the site so endlessly beguiling. Two of the guiding organisational principles of Inca design are the open window and the blind niche. One reveals the view, the
other constantly encloses and hides it, and it is the constant play between these two impulses that continually draws the camera on. For every niche, every immaculate dead end, every sculpture like that at the heart of the Torreón with its mysterious and shell-like containment, there is a corresponding and heart-stopping opening – the sudden views granted by the Temple of the Three Windows to the Urubamba below, or the great expanse of the Central Plaza. Now you see it, now you don’t.

This curious sense the photographer can have of catching the fleeting moment at Machu Picchu, despite the very stationary nature of the subject (Bingham: ‘we do not have to take pictures of the fastest moving objects’), is compounded by the constantly changing light. No two shots of the city will ever be the same. Positioned to face north and therefore track the subequatorial sun, its aspect continually changes as the sun moves across its face. This is accentuated by the broken cloud formations that so often hang over the cloud-forest, causing slashes of illumination to pick out unexpected features.

The final explanation for Machu Picchu’s long and continuing affinity for the camera is the simplest of all – its spectacular positioning.

Most first-time visitors to the site are already aware that Machu Picchu lies on top of a mountain ridge and dominates the valley below. Few necessarily appreciate that the city is itself ringed by a set of yet higher mountains. Presented by that first ‘pack-shot’ view from the Watchman’s tower, while surrounded by the Urubamba and Vilcabamba ranges, the overwhelming effect is of looking down from the top of a roller coaster and yet simultaneously being at the bottom of a vast amphitheatre, a visually kinetic knock-out punch. No wonder that even the most stolid of visitors should go weak at the knees and reach for the widest of wide-angle lenses, just as Hiram Bingham did.

So Eastman Kodak’s sponsoring of Bingham’s 1912 expedition has proved a worthwhile long-term investment. A century later, it is estimated that millions of rolls of film have been shot at Machu Picchu: the silver recovered from the processing alone must be worth an Inca’s ransom.

I would like to thank Richard Burger, David Drew, Susan Emanuel, John Hemming, Vincent Lee, Roderick Simpson and the staff of the Royal Geographical Society for their invaluable help in the preparation of this new edition of
Lost City of the Incas
.

The opening maps, drawn by John Gilkes, incorporate elements from previous maps of Gasparini & Margolies, John Hemming, Michael Moseley, Peter Frost, Gary Ziegler and many others, to all of whom grateful acknowledgement is made.

The final map, showing Bingham’s various routes across the Vilcabamba, compiles his own many diagrams and maps from the early National Geographic reports and his subsequent publications. As always, the spellings of Inca place names have many small variants. I have tried to follow Bingham’s spellings, although he was not always consistent: he interchanges the terms Vilcabamba and Vilcapampa, for instance. The reader should also note that the site Bingham described as Cedrobamba is now more generally known as Sayac Marka.

FEW PEOPLE
realize how much they owe to the ancient Peruvians. Very few appreciate that they gave us the white potato, many varieties of Indian corn, and such useful drugs as quinine and cocaine. Their civilization, which took thousands of years to develop, was marked by inventive genius, artistic ability, and a knowledge of agriculture which has never been surpassed. In the making of beautiful pottery and the weaving of fine textiles they equalled the best that Egypt or Greece could offer. Although the Incas governed their millions of subjects with firmness and justice under a benevolent despotism that allowed no one to be hungry or cold, they had no written language, not even hieroglyphics. Accordingly our knowledge of them has had to depend on what we can see of what they left, aided by the chroniclers of the sixteenth century, contemporaries of Pizarro and the conquistadors, most of whom looked upon their history and politics through European eyes. Even the Inca Garcilasso de la Vega had been in Spain forty years when he wrote his famous account of his ancestors.

Some four hundred years ago, the last of the Incas were living in one of the most inaccessible parts of the Andes, the region lying between the Apurímac River and the Urubamba, two important affluents of the Amazon. Here they were shut off from that part of Peru which was under the sway of Pizarro and the conquistadors by mighty precipices, passes three miles high, granite canyons more than a mile in depth, glaciers and tropical jungles, as well as by dangerous rapids. For thirty-five years they enjoyed virtual independence, as their ancestors had done for
centuries. They had two capitals: Vitcos, a hastily constructed military headquarters where they occasionally received refugees, Spanish emissaries, and Augustinian missionaries, and Vilcapampa, their principal residence, a magnificently built sanctuary to which no Spaniards ever penetrated.

With the death of the last Inca in 1571, Vitcos was abandoned. It was a fortress on top of a mountain and inconvenient as a dwelling-place. Its name was forgotten and its location obscure until we found it. The royal city of Vilcapampa was completely lost. It was a sacred shrine hidden on top of great precipices in a stupendous canyon where the secret of its existence was safely buried for three centuries under the shadow of Machu Picchu mountain. Its ruins have taken the name of the mountain because when we found them no one knew what else to call them.