Textile Market Under the Mountains, Peru, 1960s

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Textile Market Under the Mountains, Peru, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Textile Market Under the Mountains, Peru, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-F96BDA

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The blankets and ponchos are laid out on the pavement the way they always were before anyone built a proper stall for it, weighted at the corners against wind that comes down off the Andes without asking permission. A woman in a straw hat and full skirt tends her spread of woven alpaca while a boy sits on the curb doing the job every market boy has done since markets existed, which is to watch and wait and occasionally look bored for the camera.

Behind them the town goes about the business of being a town, adobe walls and tiled roofs standing in the same arrangement they had stood in for generations, with a single street lamp installed at some point in a fit of municipal optimism about electricity reaching this square. Foreign visitors were starting to arrive by the busload in this decade, cameras ready, under the general belief that a woven rug bought here was somehow more authentic than the same rug bought anywhere else.

Nobody in the frame looks especially aware that the transaction happening at their feet would, within a generation, be marketed abroad as heritage tourism. For now it is just Tuesday, or whatever day this is, and the rugs need selling before the sun moves the shade off the wall.

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