Book of my Peru images.

I just made this epic tome of my images from Peru.  I built it as a book dummy and portfolio piece.  Its about 160 pages and is being printed on high quality, Ilford Pearl Lustre paper with archival end pages, an oatmeal colored linen cover with this cool, wrap around cover sheet.  You can view it here and even order one though its damn expensive.  My concept for the book was to show different vignettes and photo stories from my 9 months of travel in Peru in 2009 and have fun, colorful chapter breaks with grids of various cultural items.  Some examples below.

Blessing of the Car ceremony in the Southern Andes.

Proud owner of a newly blessed car.

In my last trip to Peru I stumbled upon a ceremony where people came to have their vehicles blessed by a priest in the parking lot of a 200 year old church.  The priest from the church was going car to car and showering cars, people, engines, tires and grandmas alike with holy water as well as blessings to ensure the people safe travel.  The church, located up a mountain from San Salvador in a tiny enclave named Huanca, hosts the ceremony every year and the 200 or so people had driven from all around Southern Peru.

 

The 200 year old church which hosts the ceremony is an hour East of Cusco, the city in the South of Peru that one goes to before venturing on to Machu Picchu.

Elder Andean women celebrating the ceremony by passing cups of beer.

Firecrackers were ubiquitous in the church parking lot.

The priest of the church bestowed blessings and holy water on the cars, its parts in entirety (engine, interior, tires, etc..) and as well as all of the family members.

In a side building off of the parking lot where candles are lite for prayers or in memorium.  (Note the car icons formed in wax in the lower center.)

A couple with their blessed car.

The priest blesses the photographer.

Taxis, personal vehicles and giant trucks were all part of the ceremony.  (Note the womans hair tie)

Confetti, holy water and beer were poured onto the engine of this typical taxi of Southern Peru.

Entire families attended the ceremonies.  (Note the man in the background at right pouring a beer onto the engine.)

The typical dress of Andean women mixes Andean and Spanish influences.

New images from recent trip to Peru.

Just returned the other day from my second jaunt to the land of my girlfriend.  Spent 3 weeks, a couple in Lima then a week in the south where my moms and I tackled a day on the famed Inca Trail and then took in Machu Picchu.  Twice in 9 months..never thought that would happen..so don’t need to go there for about 5 years but lots more to see in Peru. I would like to visit a more recently discovered ruin in the north named “Kuelap” that is said to rival Machu Picchu and gets just a handful of tourists.  Also, the deserts of Ica are amazing for paleontology.  Take a walk back in there and u will literally stumble on exposed whale skeletons.

All the images here are from my G9 Point and Shoot.  I shot 20 rolls of film but haven’t gotten them souped yet.  The images are actually in the chronological order I shot them starting on Dec 21 to Jan 11th.  Lots more to come…

Step out of the seclusion of the up-scale areas of Lima (a city of 11 million) and this is a typical street corner with fairly typical people in Peru, excluding the highlands (the Andean regions) or in the Amazon.

Unintentional art installation from third world telephone wiring

Sunset at the beach two hours south of Lima. Colors have not been tweaked.

Clowns are all the rage at parties in Lima these days. They come in mid-party and pass out balloons and shit. We made a crazy hat which we were obsessed with doing for at least an hour...New Years night, from about 2-3am.

Flash lighting up water in the air at the beach during a quick New Years ceremony on the beach before sunrise.

These ghosts haunted us on our way back to the crib.

Paracas, a chain of islands off the Southern coast of Peru. Labeled the "poor mans galapagos" by Lonely Planet, its populated by tons of birds and fat little penguins. 100 years ago the tens of thousands of tons of bird guano was harvested there every year was Peru's richest exportable resource. It still is 5o meters deep on the islands and groups of men live on the islands for periods of four months at a time harvesting it every year.

A gorgeous lake in the desert isn't impervious to the spoils of Coke.

Controlled(?) burn off the Pan-American Sur on way back to Lima. Would of pulled over if I was driving..love the arrangement of people

Had Chicharron for breakfast. Super tasty/super greasy ham sandwiches.

Pigeons at the San Fransisco Church in Central Lima. The catacombs below it house 100's of mid-evil skeletons.

On our way up to a giant jesus statue on the top of mountain in Central Lima.

Lima.

Street scene in outer neighborhood of Lima.

Tico taxi's, a Korean mini, are ubiquitous in the south of Peru. This was in Cusco, the mid-evil city which one departs from to Machu Picchu

3 Andean girls descending from their mountain village south of Cusco.

It rained on my dear mum and I for about 5 hours on our hike on the Inca Trail. This was an amazing blossom off of a yucca plant, probably 15 ft high.

Even on our one day hike of the normally 4 day hike of the Inca trail, we still witnessed changes in Eco-systems. Here, we rounded the corner into a cloud forest valley with waterfalls just down the way. Was one of the most stunning natural settings I have ever laid my fairly well traveled feet.

Cloud Forest

Winay-Wayna ruin. Only accessible from the Inca Trail. Pre-Colombian Inca ruin with a huge amphitheater of terraced farming, 3 hours from Machu Picchu.

A bromeliad growing on a moss covered tree in the cloud forest.

The feet of an Andean porter on the Inca trail. His sandals are made from car tires.

Machu Picchu.

Llama at Machu Picchu. The flashy earrings are so the owners can tell them apart in a herd as they roam.

Survey of beef heads in market in Cusco.

Gordo nino en la mercado en Cusco.

Andean women of different regions wear different style of hats. This woman had such serious business concerning the man in the picture she is holding that I could freely shoot this usually camera shy culture.

This was a hilarious attempt of Chicken Cordon Bleu. The restaurant was called "Gordon Blue" and it was the house specialty so I gave it a try. 15/soles which was $5.00. The ham was baloney and the cheese was a white farmers fresh cheese so didn't really work but chicken was fried deliciously but jesus, they were nuts! That's a ton of food!!. Clockwise from Chicken at bottom: Choclo, the giant corn of Peru. Fresh cut french fries. Salad with strips of the fresh cheese, white rice with a poached egg, fried plantain.

View of mountains across from Machu Picchu.

The Urubamba river flows by Machu Picchu on its way north 450 miles to meet up with the Amazon river and then flows east to the Atlantic. This is the same river that the community I worked with in the amazon lived next to. At this point, the river is still near its headwaters in the high Andean mountains but its making its way down into the rain forest.

Cayman in the market…

This little hog-tied pre-historic reptile was in the Belen market in Iquitos.  It was nice to get with-in inches from an animal you would never really get to see let alone study but it was bitter-sweet, as it sucks seeing a beautiful animal waiting to die in such a manner.

“Necessity”, the mother of inventive head injuries.

Jaw dropping differences in safety practices  from the suburban landscapes of the US with this main throughfare in Iquitos, Peru, a Northern jungle town accesible only by air or water, left me safely standing in the middle of an intersection for 2 hours.

The horror….., the horror…..

Bugs.  All sorts of bugs.  I am not sure what specific little bastards ate us raw during the  4 workshops that we conducted in the Amazon but they surely had their way with us.  I only caught it in the neck and back and feet but the rest of the group had a plethora of suffering in different spots…  We were told it was the “white mosquito” that was tormenting us, a tiny, quiet feaster.  This is just one of the reasons I am not upset I will not be returning anytime to soon to the Bajo Urubamba.

Lovely(?) Holga mishaps in the jungle

The Holga camera is a 120 or 2 1/4 film camera with a plastic lens.  It vignettes, distorts and falls apart while using it.  It is generally used to impart an antique, artful vision to your photographs.  I started to use them in school in the early 90′s and continue to as their simplicity is a respite from the hyper-techincal side of photography.  The camera has virtually no functions..a focus dial with little pictures of one person, two people, a group of people or a mountain and shutter speed settings, normal (60th of a sec.) and Bulb (which is setting for holding open the shutter indefinitely).  It has recently had a crazy resurgence in popularity and now comes in multiple models, colors and the lens are being made to fit DSLR’s.  Their is even an iPhone app to make your photos appear as if they were taken with one….You never know what ur going to get with a Holga, one of its simple beauties.

Ugly Cakes of the Amazon

The last time I was in the community I am working with in the southern Amazonian region of Peru, there was a ceremony for kids graduating from kindergarten.  It was at this weird event (natives listening to french waltz, children dressed in western garb, baked goods!) that I was a witness to an array of jungle cakes the world has seldom seen.  Either baked in one of the few mud ovens around the community or just sealed up in molds and cooked over heat on gas burners, the cakes were walked thru a heavy rain to the community building.  These funky looking, nuclear colored American totems struck me as an interesting note showing the current waves of globalization washing over our shrinking world.

and here is a short video of the proceddings:

Images from my last and last jaunt to the jungle

The Andes out of the 8 seater plan I was lucky enough to take for the last two trips to the jungle forgoing the triathlon of nausea I was getting sick of.

The downside of flying to the amazon is being stuck at the base camp of the oil company we are being sponsored by.  Its called Nuevo Mundo (New World) as is the community they rent the land from a 1/2 mile away.  Fuckin missionaries.  It’s tiny and ur confined to little aluminum boxes for rooms with bunk beds and not allowed to leave the little wood walkways.  This is the runway.

I went to the disco in our community to get a light and was scarcely greeted in the dark by this monster.  These two bar-backs did not know what lurked just above them nor would they of cared though this huge spider is quite poisonous. They most likely would have walked around and smacked it dead with their hand.

Anyone know the way to Pgirukotanwu Pwiyawaka?

On the last days of our trip the students took us fishing.  We stopped by the farm of one of my students who had stopped attending class as he had to help out on the family farm. These shots are from that land which was unlike anything I had seen in the amazon; rolling hills, cows, lots of birds, tons of fruit trees and serious traditional living.

The ants are that big.  The voracious insects are one thing I won’t miss about the jungle.

fucking Cameron. Though in defense of my student, who carved this on his handmade oar, his last name is Lima.

I walked up a ravine for about 45 minutes feeling like I was the first man to do so and that I would come upon a giant snake at any moment.  No snakes but did see this butterfly with transparent wings.

This is the living room of the family whose upstairs we used for our tent city each month.  Watching one of the daughters make a cake gave me another inkling about how I may have gotten sick.  I also watched the adorable baby in the background (who we lovingly called the “gorda nina” or “fat baby”) be bathed in a bucket in the kitchen which then after our fish was dressed in before dinner.

I have been told from quite reliable sources that the reasons a lot of the kids had orangish-blond hair was a lack of nutrients in their diet but I am not sure how that would explain the eyes.

This woman is looking at a photo one of my students took of her working in traditional Amazonian ceramics.  That was one of the topics a student choose as there are only 3 woman left in the community still practicing the craft and it surely will die out as the kids get more wooed by the likes of Hannah Montana and what not.  Was a nice moment.  Almost got a smile out of a community member which was quite a feat.

Our martial arts obsessed friend in the Amazon + more!

This guy, who is mute due to falling out of a hammock as a child, is our good buddy when we go to the community.  He has an amazing spirit, smiles a lot and likes to break into spontaneous body-building poses.  I think he may have been drunk here as it’s during a Sunday afternoon futbol match (though he always does this..) More of him can be seem per ur request..  While talking to him he makes this wonderful, high-pitched squeal.  His father communicates with him with a unique sign language.

Here is a video of an amazing electrical rainstorm unlike any I have ever witnessed.  The lightening was not striking down (as far as I could tell) but it was continuous, lighting up the sky and surroundings every 20 seconds.  We were just advised if it happens again to leave our shelter which uses as a roof corrugated steel.  Whoops.  Where should we go?   To someone elses house with a thatched roof in the middle of the night?  The video could use an edit but there are some big flashes in there…  The roof also accounts for the incredible volume.  And the darkness was amazing.  The kind of darkness where you literally can not see your hand in front of your face.  It was kind of freaky actually.  My eyes where straining to focus on something.  In the tent it is completely black.

Here is one more slightly boring video.  It is of this cool car barge boat thing we go over everytime we go into the Amazon.  It loads up cars and then uses a bunch of outboard motors sideways to push across a river crossing. I found it romantic in a primitive sort of way..