Cowboys Book

A really beautiful collection of photographs of Machu Picchu that makes me want to travel there sometime. A few comments and critiques:

-- The final photograph is an overview of the site with points of interest labeled and a page with explanations following. I think it would have been better to have this at the beginning of the book to provide more initial context to the photos. Also, having the photo across two pages for more detail might have been nice.

-- The photographer tried not to get people in his shots, though they show up in a few places, mostly in the background. I can't argue against the results, but I actually like having the occasional person in frame, since it provides a sense of scale that is otherwise lacking. And also a bit of context, since as beautiful as the ruins are, I think it is more interesting to imagine how the site would have looked when it was properly inhabited.

-- I don't really like the title which seems to reflect a modern inclination to project spirituality back onto a largely unknown culture. The people who built the site didn't put all that labor into forming terraces just for their symbolic value; the would have farmed them. I wonder if that desire to view it through this spiritual lens is part of why the photographer tried so hard to avoid showing tourists.

-- Part of what makes me want to push back against this interpretation of the site is actually some of the writing in the introduction which gives a brief but tantalizing mention of the fact that artifacts had remained at the Machu Picchu possibly into the late 19th and early 20th centuries when they were finally looted by European explorers and "discoverers". It reminds me that modern interpretations rest overly much on assuming what we currently see reflects the original reality of the construction, much like how we imagine the ancient Mediterranean cultures decorated with clean white marble statues and columns, though research reveals it was all originally covered in paint, which merely weathered away down the ages.