Somewhere in the middle

Peru v. Argentina


Sleeping Arrangements:

Country Mouse

City Mouse

Backyard:

Mountain Woman

Urban Woman

Things on the side of the road that make me uncomfortable:

El baño.
Along the road to Huyro

Birds.

Along the road to La Luciérnaga

Trabajo (Work):

Incan agricultural map we found in a set of ruins in Sector 3 on Quochapata.  Lines were etched into the rock to depict the layout of a series of terraces.  It´s probably over 500 years old.

Portraits of the chicos of the Luciérnaga spray painted on the wall surrounding the building.  Less than 500 years old.

Totally different lives, equally incredible experiences.  I can appreciate both the city and the country, but in reality, I belong somewhere in the middle.

Segunda Toca (Take Two!)

Second try, pretty stale, gotta use a flash.  Pero mejor que la primera.  

Hay que sacar más.

Buen idea, pero gotta work with this one a bit.

A photo that´s in focus!  I amaze me.

Contra la pared afuera de La Luciérnaga

Franco, adentro de La Luciérnaga edificio.  Ese pintura también es de Cuello.

Amputated feet.

La Luciérnaga, ramblings on photography, and my new project

As I mentioned in my previous post, I´m working at the Luciérnaga, a magazine created and sold to help out street kids.  Right now, until my Spanish becomes a bit better (it´s already good, but I´m hardly ready to be conducting interviews and writing articles), I´m focusing mainly on photography to go along with some of the articles.  And photographically, this is turning out to be an incredible opportunity.

Aside from taking the photos that they want for the magazine, I´m beginning my own photo project featuring each of the kids.  When I say "kids," I really mean young adults - they´re my age.  Anywhere from 16-26, there are about 20 to 30 people that come in regularly for a meal and to sell the magazine.  This photo project is an art of simply hanging out and getting to know these guys well enough for them to be comfortable enough to let me do a portrait session or two.  And the first step in this is establishing a mutual level of respect.  A lot of these guys really don´t respect women - not in the sense that we´re used to in the states anyway.  And I´m afraid that if I don´t approach this the right way, they´ll think that I don´t respect them.  So it´s just a matter of being cool with each other - standing up for myself, but not letting any disrespectful comments bother me.  And proving to them that just because I come from a totally different background doesn´t mean that I´m any better or worse than they are.  It´s a slow process.

But the great thing about this is that it´s my job - the photos that I have so far, simply, are awful.  But it´s a beginning.  And my job is to go back and shoot and reshoot until I get what I´m looking for.  If there´s one thing that I learned from the portrait series that I did for the Metro Pulse (http://www.metropulse.com/photos/galleries/2011/jun/29/what-makes-you-knoxvillian/),
it´s the importance of reshooting.  Honestly, any of the photos that I took in college that might have been considered to be "good" were luck.  I didn´t work for them.  I was in the right place at the right time and pulled the trigger enough times to get something that could be worked with.  I never reshot anything (except for my skateboard friends, and oddly enough, those turned out to be some of my more successful shoots).  And gosh, I wish I had.  The difference between shooting something once, and going back and reshooting that same subject, is the level of authenticity.  This is even evident in my photos from Carnival a few posts earlier - they´re not good because I was just a spectator who happened to be in the right place at the right time.  If I had known something about what was happening, or had had the opportunity to reshoot it even once more, the photos would have been a lot better.  It´s shallow and unfocused, like so much of what I´ve done so far.

But enough ramblings, here are some photos from my first day of hanging out with some of the guys.
They´re not what I want - at all, but they´re a beginning.  I´m just trying to get comfortable with everyone and to get them comfortable with me.  And it´s all part of getting beyond the level of shallowness that I´m so familiar with.  Rilke wrote, "...sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better."  These early, awful photos are me getting the shallowness, my own sickness, out of the way, so that I can get down to something real.

Gonzalo

Buenhonda

Fumar

Fumados

Fumando

Los Chicos

Adelante a Argentina!

Here in Córdoba I´m working at a magazine called La Luciérnaga, which means "firefly" in Spanish.  It´s a magazine sold by street kids ("kids" is used loosely, these guys are anywhere from mid-teens to mid-twenties).  More than a magazine, La Luciérnaga is a place where the guys can go each day for breakfast and lunch, and where mothers can find clothes, diapers, and formula for their kids if they need it.  But most importantly, as Tata, the Luciérnaga´s social worker informed me, it gives the guys who sell the magazine a bit of structure in their lives.

My job here is to help with whatever they need, in addition to being their photographer.  I´ve been helping to organize the library - cleaning shelves and books, as well as helping to assemble the most recent magazine that came out this past week.

The back gate - an artist named Cuello did all of the paintings around the building

La Luciérnaga!

The kids of one of the girls who comes in

Carnival - Ollantaytambo

Saturday, Feb. 18, Ollantaytambo.  It was the kick off of Lent and the Easter holidays.  I didn´t think it was happening until next weekend, but the horns, drums, and water balloons proved me wrong.

Bright colors, dancing, drinking, and a tug-of-war across the bridge in the center of town were the central focus of the festivities.  

Word of advice: never try to travel the weekend of Carnival - you won´t bode well, as we found out the next day when we tried to leave Urubamba.

To make matters worse, my camera is on its final leg, and barely made it through this surprise festival.

The original photos I had posted were awful - like I said already, I don´t have any photo editing or photo filing software with me, so I´m selecting original files based on how they look on the back of my camera and how they appear once posted.  I didn´t realize that half of these were out of focus, and I´m embarassed to have left them up so long. So here´s my second try!

    

Machu Picchu

If you come to Peru, you have to go.  Even though we live just on the other side of the mountains, it´s a 4 hour journey in comvy (local bus), taxi, and on foot (including a 2 hour hike along the train tracks into Aguas Calientes).
Things to note:
- the importance of water for the Incas - they had an elaborate system of canals and ditches bringing water from the mountain glaciers down and through the city.
- Even though there is a "princess room", there was no princess.  Sorry Disney lovers.
- Hiram Bingham wasn´t the first to discover the city, he just received credit for it.
- The walls were at one point covered with plaster and natural paints
- It was built by slaves.  The city is actually built on two mountains.  The tops were cut off of both mountains, and the rock from this was used to fill in the space between the mountains, creating a flat surface upon which the city was built.
- Each slave had his own personal style of laying the stones for each building - this can still be seen today.

This one needs to be lightened a bit, but this is the city at daybreak.

Tourists along one of the terraces

The path along the terraces

This ain´t Appalachia...

View from above

La madrugada

Upon my return to society...

6 weeks in Peru have passed, and while my intention was to keep a blog detailing the happenings here, computers, electricity, and internet aren´t the most readily available goods in the jungle.  Mosquitoes, potatoes, and machetes, however, are plentiful. 
That being said, I could fill pages with stories about mountain adventures and digging coffee fields, but I will spare you, dear reader, the details that will probably only serve to confuse and bore you.  Instead, I will cover the main points and post photographs and leave your imagination to fill in the blanks.

For the past month and a half, I have been staying in Huyro (pronounced oí-roh), a town of about 3,000 people, on the edge of the jungle, at the base of the mountains, roughly 12-15 km away from Machu Picchu.  I´ve been living on an agricultural compound, in what used to be a stable (affectionately called the Establo), along with 5-6 other volunteers and a smattering of staff members.  The purpose of our work here is to study the Incas.  Manco Inca, the last Incan ruler at Machu Picchu fled from the Spanish conquistadors to find refuge in Vilcabamba - passing through Huyro and the valley surrounding it.  Our work takes place on two mountains - Quochapata and Incatambo, in addition to the known sections of the Inca trail running through the valley.  The ruins consist mainly of houses - those on Quochapata are thought to be part of an agricultural community, most of which were only occupied for a couple of months out of the year by farmers carrying coca leaves across the mountain to Machu Picchu.  The ruins on Incatambo are much closer together, and could have possibly been a village or small city, based on their locations along the mountain.  The Inca Trail running through the valley is the path that Manco Inca took during his flight, however, as he fled, he destroyed parts of the trail to throw off the Spaniards and make it more difficult for their horses and carriages to pass.  Furthermore, centuries of farmers removing the stones marking the trail, in addition to landslides and clumsy cattle, have resulted in its disintegration.  But there are points that we know of, and our work has been to assist local archaeologists in mapping, clearing, assisting in excavations, and finding ruins and parts of the trail. In addition to archaeology work, community building has been a focus of the project, and finding a hiking trail from Huyro to Machu Picchu is a potentially huge opportunity for the community.  A trail would mean another way into Machu Picchu, which would mean tourist dollars.  But if there´s one thing I´ve learned, it´s that there´s a fine line between the help that tourist dollars can bring to a community, and the cultural exploitation that comes along with it.  But who am I to judge?  And a conversation with an old lady on a long bus ride to Cusco gave me a little faith in the power of tourism.  Besides, who am I other than a tourist who likes to stay a little too long?

Personally, the work has been incredibly rewarding.  2 days a week, weather permitting, we´ve been going into the mountains, hiking to different ruins to carry out work, and slashing our way through the jungle with machetes.  Another day out of the week is dedicated to the Inca trail, and the other two days are dedicated to work around the establo and in the community.  We cleared a field and dug almost 600 holes in preparation to grow coffee plants, in addition to moving banana trees, painting a mural on the wall of the first library in Huyro (a bachelor´s degree in art doesn´t mean I can/should paint), and making educational boards to be used in local schools.

So here are some photos! 
Just to preface, I don´t have any photoediting software here, these are all original files.  Nor do I have software to go through and check each photo - these are the ones that looked the best through the little window on the back of my camera.  Needless to say, I miss my laptop terribly...

A look into the Sacred Valley.

Stopped by a landslide at the police control point in San Luis, I was looking for some food.  I found this guy.

 Two of the former mayors of Huyro - I love these portraits.

Llamas at Sacsayhuaman

Lady at Sacsayhuaman - 2 soles.