Corridor, Ciudadela Rivero, Chan Chan

The photographer Edward Ranney has addressed the subject of landscape—both natural and designed—in the United States and Latin America from the 1970s to the present day. Best known for his work on Inca monuments and archaeological sites in the Andean region of South America, his recent studies have addressed the ancient cities of the pre-Inca cultures of Peru’s desert coast. This photograph invites the viewer into the corridors of power at Chan Chan, capital of the Chimú Empire, which flourished on Peru’s north coast between the tenth and fifteenth centuries AD. Chan Chan was famed for its artists, particularly its metalsmiths, and exquisite sculptures and vessels in silver, gold, and other materials were stored within monumental compounds (often called ciudadelas) at the center of the city, thought to be the palaces and ultimately the mortuary structures of the Chimú lords. This photograph focuses on the monumental adobe perimeter walls of one of the last palaces to be built at the site, once called Ciudadela Rivero, after the nineteenth-century Peruvian geologist Mariano Rivero, but now known as Chol An. Ranney’s image captures both the scale and grandeur of Chan Chan, but also a certain anxiety on the part of its builders—a concern to secure the palace’s inhabitants and their treasures in the face of external threats. Ultimately this palace’s massive double-walled perimeter proved insufficient, and the Chimú were conquered by the Inca around 1470.

Joanne Pillsbury, Andrall E. Pearson Curator, Arts of the Ancient Americas, 2016