Diario los Andes: Grasping the Beauty and Terror of the Puna Plains

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

Worldwide | Sunday, October 17, 2010 | 5 photos

I am a sometime student and a constant traveler, and these pictures tell the story of how a band of young urbanites became enchanted with the power of the natural world. I travelled through the Andean highland some years ago with good company and a modest camera. What I captured is not merely a collection of beautiful vistas or a memento of camaraderie abroad, but a documentation of transformational experiences, portraits of people discovering a larger and richer world.

We began near the sea, children at play, and worked our way to the high mountain tops. We witness bloodless bullfights, acts of courage, acts of reckless abandon that made our hearts stop. The 'puna,' the barren plains of the weathered mountain tops, contained a new world, sparse, cold, beautiful. Fast winds stole our voices and cautious farmers eyed us from the distance. Round hills framed an ancient farmland, and the sky reached much higher there than anywhere else we had been. We lay prostrate, paralyzed in the thin mountainous ether.

A single workhorse in repose, caught against the open land, embodies the beauty of this simple, pure, irresistible land. The last photograph, captures the only way that we knew to respond.

I have since returned to the pleasant banalities of everyday life at home, but the world that I inhabit has grown much larger. That trip opened my eyes to the value of travel, as well as the incredible power of photography to not only preserve memories, but to make them objects of public perception and appreciation.