In 1988 Teresa Salazar, my surrogate mother in northwest Quito, gave me a packet of negative photographs that had been taken by her father, Alberto Salazar, who was a piano player, leader of the Orquesta Sixto Duran, and a weekend photographer. The negatives were old, dusty, cracked. A few were glass. She couldn't tell me much of anything about his years as someone who took pictures of weekend vacationers, hacienda owners, and, to a lesser extent, the help. I can't say much more about them. Right now they are sitting on a shelf in a professor of visual anthropology's office at the FLACSO University in Quito as a way to remind him to help me think of how we might do more to get the history behind these photos. But if the Salazar-Cardenas family doesn't know, and the municipality of Quito/La Delicia doesn't know (they have digital copies of the photos), then we may be nearing a dead end except to contextualize them in terms of similar photos taken at similar times in the Andes and other parts of Latin America.
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