Our topic, our hobby, is Ecuador. As we are in the pre-election vigil and due to fatigue, I forget about politics for a moment, but I continue to talk about a country that does not give up. Veiled by a Catholic, counter-reformation and baroque culture that despised the natural sciences and everything “earthly”, Ecuadorians were unaware of their country. For this reason, its discovery, in a multidimensional and deep sense, was initiated by foreign adventurers, researchers and scientists, who come from other cultural backgrounds. Exceptionally, the natives of these regions devoted themselves to such studies, almost always with the encouragement of a strange predecessor. Where do we come from? Why are we like this? These are questions that are answered in the visitors’ memories. Hence the great importance to be attached to reviews of works and documents produced by astute outsiders.

In this sense, the collection Memory, travel, photography and forgetting, edited by photographer and filmmaker Juan Diego Pérez, makes a key contribution by adding a little-studied and essential dimension: the image. Since the end of the 19th century, visitors have not only described these latitudes with words, but armed with their cameras they will evoke mountains and beaches, plants and animals, people and buildings. Thus, readers from other continents had a more real and intense idea of ​​that different world. But we, who live in the 21st century, with these publications have access to that world that seems as far away to us or more than it seemed to those who saw it after hard travels. How did it produce what we have now? The first volume under the title Amnesiaperformed by Pérez himself, saves the work of the German Artur Eichler, who became famous for one of the most beautiful books created in this country: Snow and jungle in Ecuador. He continues to try to find the mysterious Colombian Horacio López Uribe robinson, a spirit on the tops of volcanoes. And it culminates with a piece by Rolf Blomberg, the tireless Swede who has made so many invaluable contributions.

silent look This is the second volume of the series in which a selection from the huge collection of photographs by the German Gottfried Hirtz is published, with a biographical perspective of his son Christoph. It is about a romantic life, full of interesting events, typical of the years of the Second World War, which is enriched with photos of the biography, which combined journalistic opportunity with artistic talent. Close collection volume A trip for a tripwhich collects work Adventures through Ecuador by American writer Blair Niles, with several photographs of her husband, and preceded by an introductory essay by historian Fernando Hidalgo-Nistri. Unlike other prejudiced and arrogant travelers, Ms. Niles gives us an objective and entertaining vision of Ecuador, especially Guayaquil. Incidentally, between the time when this work was written and the years of Whimper’s and Orton’s travel memoirs, to give examples, there is a very strong differentiating factor: the railway, which marked a turning point in the country’s history. (OR)