The Sacred Valley of Peru, once the capital of the Inca Empire, is a natural for photography. Dramatic landscapes and native people in colorful traditional dress make for great subject matter, but for her final project, on view at Washington College’s Kohl Gallery through June 18, graduating senior Karly Kolaja did much more than take travel shots.
Kolaja’s intention was to tell the story of this present-day center of Peru’s tourist industry, where tradition and tourism meet with mixed results, and she does it with well-crafted photos and not a little wit.
There are positive elements to this story that Kolaja captures in close-ups of hands weaving intricately patterned cloth and a striking shot of a jeweler working on an Incan motif under the brilliant glare of an electric light. Her passion for her subject shows, as does her compositional and story-telling skills, as she catches the pure bounty of a sweep of multicolored vegetables in a busy marketplace and the hushed intimacy of a mass spoken in Peruvian Spanish and Quechua, the language of the Inca.
Kolaja also zeroes in on the inevitable touristy downers. She mischievously documents the sightseers’ compulsion for taking pictures in a shot of a tourist posing between two traditionally clad Peruvian women. With feigned familiarity, she holds their lamb on her lap as her companion takes a snapshot.
In keeping with her double major in English and Photojournalism (the latter a self-designed major), Kolaja provides captions with her photos. There’s a touch of moralizing in some, not surprising given the yawning divergence between native and tourist lifestyles, but the captions and her accompanying essay on the three-year project give good background on the history and culture of this valley.
Two photos in this show sum up the valley’s transitional status with riveting clarity. The first shows a street vendor sitting with her wares, as a tour guide walks by. Both are ethnic Peruvians doing their best to make a living in contemporary Cusco. The comparison of the two women’s choices is immediate, but what is haunting is the handsome profile of the tour guide. In her face lies the very image and majesty of a nearly lost culture. The other photo is of Kolaja’s own guide posing with a native child during a visit to a remote village. All of Kolaja’s other subjects seem guileless in front of the camera, but this woman stares directly at it, self-aware and individualized. Originally from a mountain village, she donned native dress but there is no hiding her changed identity.
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