Lindos Paisajes, Valio La Pena Gallery
Cuzco, Peru 2014
® Sandra Pereznieto
Photographing in the Sacred Valley is like having the key to freedom, letting the gaze get lost in the clouds and valleys to infinity.
The prying eyes of alpaca, llama, faces burnt by the sun and the air that freezes the skin, the air that is missing while walking along the ridge of the mountains. Magic moments sodden of light rain and billowing clouds of cotton passing hastily in the vast sky. Smells of flavors of the earth and of moist potatoes from an elapsed time. The silence and simplicity of life in these parts of the sky is almost complete. You can go for miles without seeing almost anyone, and the silence allows you to give a break to your eyes and your soul, and feel at peace with yourself when it comes time to grasp a bit of that incredible beauty in a framing.
The dream of the mountains, it can also become a mirage. Coming down from the mountain I tirelessly look for these images that I recorded in my memory, but the camera seems to have forgotten that these are not my memories but others and thus begins a new journey, a bit similar to that of life, in which I believe that I’m the character that I’m, although looking for him in I find myself. And in this going I learn to look again and to search through the images something I have just left behind.
This continuous return to Ernesto’s workshops is perhaps what makes you feel the need to go deeper and deeper, and the certainty of arriving, easily becomes a chimera. Where am I going? If the end what I like is to walk, without mattering too much where to, but without getting tired of walking. And with a teacher who knows how to lead me, the road is sweeter, more solid are the steps, the final destination doesn’t have to have the name of a city, can be what you want that it is at each particular time. And the more I follow his courses, the closer I get to the beginning, the more I feel that the journey has just begun.
Sandra Pereznieto