Communicating Discovery: Hiram Bingham and the Making of Machu Picchu in the Big Picture Magazine

• In Event: Re-Mapping Machu Picchu: towards a theory of ruins in the Latin American and U.S. imaginary

Abstract

In July of 1911, Hiram Bingham, a history lecturer at Yale and self-proclaimed explorer of various Latin American countries, climbed the hills of the outskirts of what he believed could be the lost city of the Incas. Taken aback by the immensity of the ruined city, he immediately set up his camera and began to take pictures—capturing the scene for his cosmopolitan American audiences. Upon this dazzling discovery and prompted by the mystery involved in the question, “What could this place be?”, there ensued the story of the discovery and construction of Machu Picchu for the modern world. Having brought together these previously separate worlds that for thousands of years had stood mutually unaware of each other, Bingham and his exploration team performed yet another chapter of Western expansion onto “unknown and untouched” territories and cultures. For they would be given new meaning as they were incorporated into the flow of capital and mass communication products that emerged and gained speed at the turn of the century.
In this paper, I demonstrate how multiple practices of modernity (i.e. scientific exploration, Western imperialism, the rescue of an ancient past as a modern commodity, collection and restoration, photographic representation and dissemination, mass communication acts, and the fetishization of history) allowed Bingham to transform his travels to Peru into a notable public event and enabled him to present himself to the world as a heroic explorer of the American nation.

Author

• Alexandra C Klaren, University of Pittsburgh