The Snapshot

My daughter’s camera and new perspectives

Elisa and I found the fiestas in Otavalo.

During Inti Raymi, the celebration of the pachamama, which is centered around summer solstice, the indigenous people of Otavalo (Ecuador) dress up in costumes, make offerings to the sun god, Inti, and bask in general revelry for an entire week. So when baby Lucia fell asleep early, it was our chance for a night out together, just me and Elisa.

It was already dark when we started walking down the steep cobblestone roads of Otavalo. Hand in hand, we talked about searching for the fiesta, the sounds of the music coming from nearby homes, and how the violin is a cousin of the guitar. In the US, these instruments are objects of academia, a lost art form that we teach our kids about for one hour a week, if they are lucky. Here in Otavalo, the men tune their violins in the street, and guitars seem to outnumber the cars.

I asked Elisa if she liked taking photographs. Before setting off on this 10-month road trip across South America, we gave her an old digital camera. Since then, she has charged the battery three times, using it to document her own journey, taking a lot of photos of Mino, her sister, her stuffed cat, Jinx, and random signs. Capturing the fiestas was her biggest photography challenge to date.

We were on our way to the Plaza de Ponchos, where Inti Raymi fiesta-makers were already banging drums and blowing flutes. Leading up to the plaza a series of tents marked where the walking concerts of 10–20 people were supposed to stop on their way down the street. Under each tent, they danced in circles while singing songs, orbiting the violin, guitars and drums playing sun-inspired rhythms. Elisa quickly set up for her first shot, laughing with the people, pointing her lens, reviewing each foto, deciding if she should erase then and there, or if it was good enough and made the cut. She looked for colorfully decorated masks with exaggerated noses and long stringy hair. I gave her a few tips on where to stand, and off she went, shooting an episode of Otavalo’s famous Inti Raymi festivities.

Campervan travel can be slow and steady. Its plodding nature allows you to feel those gradual transitions that take place over long distances and over time. From Bogota to Otavalo-some 1,500 kilometers-everything from the vegetation to the humidity, from the personalities to the language, changes. Colombia and Ecuador have a lot in common: volcanoes, páramos, and Pacific coastal beaches, but from one country to another, the economies change, musical instruments vary, and the food is as different as potato soup is from fried guinea pig.

Let’s say you start on the Caribbean and you move south toward Ecuador and Peru, the people change: from boisterous, loud-mouthed, costeños, who are never too tired to dance, to tight-lipped, introverted indigenous communities, who show little interest in interaction and might prefer to do it in Quechua instead of Spanish.

They say humans are shaped by geography; in the tropics of Latin America, coastal towns and cities, where afro populations have flourished, are embodied by hip-swinging caliente latinos, whereas in the highlands, among these vast, austere spaces, where the people are battered by the sun, wind, and cold, geography has molded a folk who may like to dance, but prefer to do it wearing a mask, in the name of their gods.

Through the camera lens, Elisa has been gifted a series of new perspectives from her back seat van cushion, from sea level to 4.000 meters in elevation. Because it is never the same to reach a destination by airplane as it is to reach it walking, hiking, biking, or in our case, driving in a campervan.

Hopefully one day, when Eli is a plucky teenager with a mind to follow her passions, she can go back to these digital memories, and see all the spaces in between, the ones that connected the dots signify the transition from one world to the next. And then this way, maybe she’ll learn to appreciate them more.