One hundred years in the shadows.

• Author: Buck, Daniel
• Position: Photography

Fred Magner was twenty-five years old when h left his home in Paris, a small towel in eastern Illinois near the Indiana line. The year was 1892. Where he was heading and what were his plans are unknown, but within a few months he was five thousand riffles away, working for the Inca Mining Company at the Santo Domingo gold mine in the southern Peruvian Andes. He spent the next decade-and-a-half in Peru, returned to Illinois about 1907, and died nine years later at the relatively young age of forty-eight. He never married and left no immediate survivors.

Magner, who had studied engineering, was one of countless young men who left their prairie homes to seek their fortune in the world (he had picked an inauspicious moment: the depression of 1893 was looming), and his life might have gone unnoticed were it not for the fact that he took up photography. No one is certain whether he was a buff in Illinois or was bitten by the muse once he landed in Peru. The result was the same.

Before Magner died, he gave his sister a box of 330 prints from his South American adventure. She later passed them on to her daughter, and decades later, in 1984, she gave the collection to her great nephew in California, Chris English, as a wedding present. Late last year, he brought them to the attention of Americas.

The prints are in a variety of sizes, mostly eight by ten and five by seven, and processes--albumen, silver gelatin, and even a few cyanotypes. The subjects reflect Magner's work and travels in southern Peru--Mollendo, Arequipa, Cuzco, Puno, the Santo Domingo, and the rubber country--and fall loosely into the categories of documentary, travel, and perhaps industrial, but it's doubtful he gave much thought to taxonomies. He was having too much full recording his exotic life, making pictures of gold shipments, miners, churches, boxing matches, waterfalls, Inca ruins, glaciers, rubber workers, and steamboats. His Andean views, of pillowy clouds and fluvial glaciers, have a soothing, anodyne quality, while the workplace images alternate between hectic compositions and tableaux vivants, with a you-are-there moment, as if they were taken this morning. Perhaps because of the difficulties in making exposures under poor lighting, there are few images of the interiors of the gold mines.

Although Magner is thought to have taken photographs throughout his stay in Peru, the surviving prints are numbered consecutively and arranged in geographical order, intending to...