Stuart Franklin photographed a peasant farmer carrying a sack of potatoes along a track in the Peruvian Andes in 1991. Potatoes are a traditional crop in the area, hand cultivated on ancestral terraces, the man himself is a speaker of Quechua, the language of the Inca. For the moment, though, he is struggling under a heavy load and seems to be more labourer than representative of an ancient culture. Franklin’s strategy has been to re-introduce evidence of materiality into his pictures and to show more than just surfaces. (The Photography Book, 1997:156)
