Immemorial time: archeology photography

The pre-Hispanic ruins captivated (and captivate) the most disparate photographers, from the travelers of the nineteenth century –fans of the new photographic medium, archaeologists or explorers– to the photographers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries –photojournalists, film-photographers or artists.

Millions of images of the ruins of pre-Hispanic temples, palaces and monuments make up a vast and exciting iconographic collection about the ancient civilizations that populated what is now our country before 1521.

What could have attracted –or even demanded– the attention of such a great variety of views and interests?

Archaeological vestiges, be they abandoned walls, broken columns, remains of facades, friezes or cracked reliefs, have undeniable power and visual appeal.

Its mystery, framed in an ancestral time, seems to demand to be documented and interpreted by the curious who explore beyond their own borders.

Photographers who entered the world of stone remains, with their photographic devices, delved into the beauty and enigmas of other cultures. 

They, explorers and adventurers, sought to unravel either with panoramic or details shots, volumes and shapes, light and darkness, but, above all, moments of a remote and, apparently, lost time.

Désiré Charnay, Augustus and Alice Le Plongeon, Teobert Maler, Henry William Jackson and Charles B. Waite, among many others, were some of the pioneers of archeology photography in Mexico.

Already in the 20th century, the photojournalist Juan Guzmán –a German nationalized Mexican— continued this undertaking by photographing, among other archaeological sites, the ruins of Teotihuacán, Tula, Xochicalco, Monte Albán, Mitla, Uxmal, Tulum and Chichén

Armando Salas Portugal revealed, in a gray scale, the ruins of Uxmal, Chichén Itzá and Palenque emerging from a jungle and a sky retouched with color.

Gerardo Suter, from a perspective that –in the words of Alfonso Morales– “transcends the superficial appreciation of the ruins”, has reinterpreted some pre-Hispanic icons, such as the Atlanteans of Tula and the Aztec Stone of the Sun.

Pre-Hispanic vestiges have led to the emergence of the most varied representations: from the cinema, in films such as El signo de la muerte (Chano Urueta, 1939);

Salón México (Emilio Fernández, 1948);

Cabeza de vaca (Nicolás Echeverría, 1990);

and Deseada (Roberto Gavaldón, 1950).

In advertising, such as Annie Leibovitz’s 1986 Mexico Soccer World Cup commemorative portfolio;

to artistic and scientific photography that experiments with the possibilities of the photographic medium, such as the Maya Puuc series by Tomás Casademunt.

With a large format camera, the Catalan photographer captured the rest of the Mayan ruins under the moonlight. The largely unpredictable result plunges us into an immemorial time typical of stone constructions.

Among the pre-Hispanic vestiges, there are very popular motifs, for example, the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán and the Temple of Kukulcán (also known as El Castillo) in Chichén Itzá.

But other motifs –stone masks, friezes and stelae, stairways and temple finials, sculptures and idols— have also been immortalized in photographs used as postcards, collected in albums, published in books and films.

The abundance and repetition of these images confronts us with multiple versions of, for example, the pyramid of the Sun...

Yet despite time, viewpoints, and diverse functions of archeology photography, every stone remnant that has been unearthed, documented, and photographed is still there to be rediscovered and deciphered.