To Pisac to Market

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Sunday is market day in Pisac. Back in the town at the bottom of the valley, I hurry after Jane - don't want to lose her - while trying to find compositions in the constantly shifting street traffic. This is the town the Spanish built to replace the one on the mountain which they had destroyed. Jane stops to admire some drums - gives me a moment to pause. I try to compose the ever advancing and receding parade, hope for the right colors, costumes, faces, try to find the magic moment that will lead the eye through the image as the people pass on their trajectories. And then the chase after Jane toward the market square continues.

 While exploring the ruins above us, we had seen how historically the town had controlled the traffic, how roads from the farms and villages of the Sacred Valley and from the rain forest deep in the Andean jungle and from Cuzco, the Inca capital, all met here. On Sunday the local population speaking quechua still comes here to barter goods in the market square. Something like that may have always gone on here. Sprawling around them now other local merchants sell goods for cash to tourists like us. In the streets around the market square the constituencies pass.