Portraits of a People, Lost in Time

HISTORIC PHOTOGRAPHS OF ANDEAN VILLAGERS BY

CARL DUISBERG

My old friend Carl has a background similar to mine, including years spent in South America, and a long-standing love of photography. Not long ago, he came across a long-forgotten cache of 35 mm negatives that had been packed away with his memorabilia. Two dozen rolls of black and white film, hundreds of photos that he shot in Peru and Bolivia when he was living there, back in the early 1970’s. He’d processed the film himself, because that’s what we did in those days, but he never got around to making any prints, so he’d never actually seen any of the pictures. He asked me if I knew of any reliable mail-order photo labs capable of making a set of small prints from old negatives. I had a better idea. I told him to send them all to me.

Anyone who has ever worked with old 35 mm film is aware of the challenges. Carl’s negatives had been packed away for half a century, and the film had long since started to degrade. High resolution scans brought out every wonderful detail in the photos, but they also exposed every flaw in the emulsion—specks, streaks, scratches and worse. Most of the scans came out good enough for the purpose, which was simply to digitize my friend’s old travel photos, so that he could look through them, and perhaps stir some pleasant memories. I could have easily left it at that, but once the scanning process was underway, it was obvious to me that these photographs deserved much more than “good enough.” The process of properly restoring old photos using Photoshop, is meticulous, labor intensive, and incredibly time consuming. I’d had a fair bit of practice with my own ancient negatives, so I got right to it by selecting a dozen images, and giving them my very best effort. I was so pleased with the result that I, well, I simply kept going!

Carl’s photographs are extraordinary: candid portraits of Andean natives in their traditional dress, taken in mountain villages and outdoor markets that had not yet been tainted by outside influences. In the early ‘70’s, even the capital cities of Peru and Bolivia were barely connected to the modern world, and the remote villages were so primitive, they were like a throwback to another century. When the pictures were taken, they captured an anachronism within an anachronism, and now, fifty years later, they’re a window into a whole different era. The humanity expressed in these photographs is universal, and it is timeless.

This is the first in a series of posts featuring Carl’s photos. It’s a sampler of sorts, two dozen of my personal favorites, chosen at random from the collection as a whole; portraits, that were, quite literally…lost in time:

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This is an interactive Table of Contents. Click the pictures to open the pages.

Long Ago and Far Away: South America in the Early 1970's

A few years ago I wrote a book about road trips in Arizona and New Mexico that's a lot like this website, packed with interesting information, and illustrated with beautiful photographs. Check it out! You can find it on Amazon, and at all other major booksellers.