Nazca Earth Drawings
Portfolio
Nazca Earth Drawings
1978
Portfolio with vandyke prints
1/10
Overall (closed): 15 9/16 × 18 3/8 × 11/16 in. (39.5 × 46.7 × 1.8 cm)
Gift of William R. Peterson
1988.0086.0001-0010
DescriptionPortfolio with 10 Van Dyke Brown prints of the Nazca Markings; earth drawings made by artists in the Nazca plain of southern Peru beginning from around 500 B.C. and continuing for almost a thousand years. At least seventy-eight drawings are known to exist, spreading across thirty miles of desert terrain. The drawings are of various animals, created by scraping away the fragmented rock covering of the pampa to expose the white alluvian undersurface, and are remarkably intricate for their immense scales, often reaching dimensions of a thousand feet in length. The photographs, whose process Bridges details as "Van Dyke Brown emulsion handcoated on 14 1/2 by 17 1/2 Reves BFK paper exposed to the image by arc lamp and processed according to archival standards," were taken from a small plane at a height of approximately three hundred to five hundred feet. The prints, with their high contrast and sepia tone, appear almost abstracted in many instances. The series, listed on the introduction by Bridges as the first in an edition of ten, is housed in a thin, plain, gray, clamshell box with a faint pencil marking of 6/10 in the bottom left corner. Its condition is fair, with visible signs of wear along edges and at corners.
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