Smithsonian magazine's 22nd Annual Photo Contest | Made possible through the support of MPB.com

19th Annual Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest Travel
El Camino - Faces and places around Sacred Valley

"We are concentrated in cities, we develop technologies to control everything, when everything cannot be controlled, we are stressed and oppressed by everyday life. At a certain point in our life a need arises, ancestral, intimate, to get away for a moment, not to escape but to rediscover the true essence of things, to give value to the essential, to activate the survival instinct, arriving at the deepest part of ourselves, taking a different path and like every other path must start from the beginning. So my journey began." This is the intro of my last photographic work made in Peru. I wanted to tell a journey not only physical but above all spiritual and introspective in one of those most mysterious and magnificent place on our planet: the sacred Valley of the Incas and Machu Picchu. The work was created and designed on a photographic level as a sort of reportage in which aspects of daily life were emphasized, faces, places and breathtaking panoramas. Above all, I have committed myself to capturing unique, perfect and unrepeatable moments. Contact with nature is total: the sensations that I felt along the way are indescribable in words but with the powerful medium that is photography, I tried to convey them to the best of my ability. All of this has had a big impact on me and I felt the need to share these feelings.

Photo Detail
Date Taken: 04.2019
Date Uploaded: 11.2021
Photo Location: Cusco, Peru
Camera: NIKON D5500
Copyright: © Giandomenico Veneziani