The Sacred Salt of the Mountain

“The Sacred Salt of the Mountain”
Location: Peru
Date: July 2014
Photographer: John Hurtado Cadavid
Affiliation: Graduate student
Home Country: Colombia
Category: Places
Award: Third Place and People's Choice
2024 International Photography Exhibition

“In the Sacred Valley of the Incas, the Qaqawiñay mountain holds a natural resource that has become a component of Peruvian culture. The water flows from inside the mountain and is conducted to pools, where it naturally dries to obtain the salt. This photo represents a dialogue between the internal natural landscape of the mountain, and how it manages to transform the external landscape to bring new colors to the mountains. In other words, in this photo we can see part of the interior of the mountain that holds the salt: a lesson in the internal value of the landscape and of the human being who should also show the beauty of his inner life. I took this photo because I thought that this place showed how the human being transforms the landscape, obtaining benefits from what a sacred territory makes available for their subsistence. This shows that in the Andean mountains the man and the mountain are unified and co-constituted. The photo is meaningful to me because it represents the interior and exterior landscape, as well as the work of people that transform it. In other words, how the human being and the mountain are constantly transforming each other. In a sacred green valley, the white color that emerges from the mountain it does not represent only purity, but also the constant work of the population that teaches us that human beings are responsible for maintaining the landscape and caring for its beauty.”