The Mountain of Seven Colors: Portraits From Vinicunca, Peru

Travel and portrait photography from Vinicunca, the Mountain of Seven Colors, high in the Peruvian Andes near Cusco — where the Quechua families are as unforgettable as the landscape.

The Mountain of Seven Colors — Vinicunca, or Montaña de Siete Colores — sits above 5,000 metres in the Andes south of Cusco. Most photographers travel there for the striped mineral slopes, the bands of rust, ochre, turquoise and violet laid down over millions of years and revealed as the glaciers retreated. I went for the slopes too. But I came home thinking about the people who live beside them.

At that altitude the air is thin enough to make every step deliberate, and the weather changes by the minute: sun, then cloud, then a sudden squall of snow. It is a hard place to work and a humbling place to stand. The mountain does not care that you have travelled a long way to photograph it.

Working at 5,000 metres

Photography at this elevation is a negotiation with your own body. You move slowly, you breathe carefully, and you accept that you will not be running around chasing angles. In a strange way that is good for the pictures. The thin air forces patience, and patience is most of portrait photography anyway. You set up, you wait, you let the light and the moment come to you.

The light itself is extraordinary and merciless. One minute the slopes glow; the next a wall of mist rolls in and the whole world turns to soft grey. I learned to shoot fast in the open windows and to embrace the murk in between, because the mist gave the portraits a quiet, painterly background that the harsh midday sun never could.

The people beside the mountain

The Quechua families here farm and herd at an altitude that would flatten most visitors within an hour, and they do it in clothing of astonishing colour. Reds, pinks and yellows that seem to argue with the grey of the rock and the white of the snow. The monteras, the woven textiles, the bright blankets — none of it is costume. It is daily life, carried with a dignity that has nothing to do with the camera.

I photographed them with their horses, on the trails, in the cold, mostly just letting them be exactly who they are. A child wrapped against the wind. A woman under a red montera, half-smiling. A man leading his horse across a frozen plain as if the altitude were nothing at all. These are environmental portraits in the truest sense: a person and the place that shaped them, in the same frame.

“Travel work is at its best when it resists the postcard.”

Beyond the postcard view

Vinicunca has become one of the most photographed landscapes in South America, and there is a version of this trip that produces only the famous shot — the rainbow ridge, the queue of tourists, the drone-flat panorama. That picture exists for a reason; the mountain really is that beautiful. But it is also, by now, a little empty. Everyone has seen it.

What you have not seen is the particular woman who lets her horse graze on the ridge every day, or the way a herder's red poncho looks against falling snow. The landscape is the headline, but the people are the story. I try to give most of my frames to the story.

Why I keep going back to places like this

Travel photography, done well, is a kind of respect. It is the difference between collecting a destination and actually meeting it. The mountain is beautiful, of course — but the portraits are the reason I keep returning to high, hard, faraway places. They are where the trip stops being about scenery and starts being about people. It is the thread that connects this mountain to San Andrés at dusk and the candlelit cemeteries of Día de los Muertos.

These images are what I carried down from Vinicunca: a handful of faces against an impossible landscape, and the reminder that the most memorable thing in any great location is almost always a person who calls it home.