Larry Snider’s career as a photographer is distinguished by persistence and going to depth, and he is solidly within the practice and aesthetic of social documentary and reportage. He has all of this in common with Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Meiselas, and others trying to build visual knowledge of areas and people far from their own culture. One visit is not enough. Larry’s work in Santa Barbara, Peru is a good example. Photography has a way of persuading us that we know more than we do about what is in front of the lens, so most of us tend to shoot and move on, confident that we have enough. Larry is productively suspicious of this confidence, returning time and again to fill in gaps, learning more from each visit.

The village of Santa Barbara is nestled in a narrow river valley approximately 13,000 feet above sea level, surrounded by rugged mountains in the Andes highlands, some 100 miles by road southeast of the city of Cuzco. Santa Barbara is a community of approximately 1500 Quechua-speaking native-Americans with deep roots in the area. In the vicinity of Santa Barbara one finds rock painting dated by archaeologists circa 4000 BC that memorialize the hunt of the wild Andean ancestor of the domesticated llama and alpaca. In the same general area one can see field-stone corrals from circa 2000 BC, used by ancient shepherds to shelter flocks of what by this early date had already become the same domesticated llamas and alpacas that today still graze in the same high Andean pastureland. Both ancient hunters and primeval herders who marked the landscape around Santa Barbara belong to a distant past beyond memory.