Misk’i Kachi Runakuna / Sweet Salt People

The center of Salzmann’s attentions came to be two locations between Pisac and Ollantaytambo: the town of Maras and the settlement of Huílloc—the former known for its spectacular ancient salt ponds, and the latter a traditional Quechua-speaking community. In both places, Salzmann’s proximate task was to visualize the events of daily life. To do so, he tacked back and forth between those events that are repeated and ritualized, from labor to commerce to religious observance, and those events that are unique to some moment of personal and communal interaction, from the street corner to the family hearth. In his photograph of a Maras laborer at dawn, we look southwest across a highland landscape helpless before its own aesthetic surplus—a rich palette of dusty browns, ochres, blues and purples with touches of green. It is late fall in the mountains. A worker in dark clothing shoulders a bundle of cornstalks half his own size and probably a good part of his weight. He leans slightly forward in mid-step, from which we can infer something of the steady pace and the energy required to sustain it. The husks he hoists rise higher than his head, and hover in the horizon’s own wisps, rhyming with peaks partly concealed in trails of morning cloud cover. The world of this work at this hour on this day falls into alignment. The worker seems to support the weight of the whole panoramic vista, and does so almost effortlessly, with a body made nearly transhuman, half legs and half plant fiber, and the third half the spirit of wind and airmass.