Alone at Machu Picchu

San Diego photographer Mike Torrey captures the historic Inca site in new book

While photographing architecture is a living for San Diegan Mike Torrey, snapping photos of 500-year-old ruins from the ancient world is anything but everyday work. However, a trip to Peru’s Machu Picchu as part of an architecture tour with San Diego’s NewSchool of Architecture & Design yielded a photo project worthy for publication.

As Torrey displays in Stone Offerings: Machu Picchu’s Terraces of Enlightenment (slideshow below), “what I was doing was connecting the points between manmade structures and architecture and nature — the human and natural environments and the way they intersect, both in form and the space as the clouds acted on it, [and] the light acted on it," he says. "We see it in our own environments, but it tends to be either more manmade or more natural.”

Though shooting without appearing to feature any humans sounds daunting, Torrey says he’s used to it in his line of work. But aside from that, he says he just simply turned his brain off. “I just needed to be quiet and in the moment, and look and discover and see what was there, and what was unfolding.”

Although shrouded from the invading Spanish conquistadors hundreds of years ago and until the last century, Machu Picchu fully offered itself to Torrey and his lens.

Stone Offerings: Machu Piccchu’s Terraces of Enlightenment is available now. stoneofferings.com.

 

 

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