Klaus Zinser

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, German photography Klaus Zinser (born 1950) made numerous trips to Peru, before finally relocating from Freiburg (in south-western Germany) to Lima, where he spent four years documenting the country’s rare blend of ancient and modern. Entranced by Peru’s preservation of Inca cosmology and spiritual values, and its unique syncretism between native Inca and colonial Catholic religions, Zinser undertook to pursue traces of the ancient in the everyday. The photographs gathered in this new large-format monograph easily shrug off the traps and clichés of the tourist gaze, highlighting instead the ordinariness of the archaic—with an occasional breathtaking panorama of an Inca temple high up the Andes, surrounded by vast stretches of forest and mountainscape. Throughout the book, Zinser’s text offers contextualizing commentary on the survival of ritual and tradition in all regions of the country.