Palais des Nonnes à Chichen-Itza

Between 1857 and 1860, Désiré Charnay traveled throughout Mexico photographing the architectural ruins of ancient sites at Mitla, Palenque, Izamal, Chichén-Itzá, and Uxmal. Funded by the French Ministry of Public Instruction, Charnay’s expedition was inspired by the archeologist John Lloyd Stephens’s 1843 book Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, illustrated with engravings after daguerreotypes. Charnay captured the same sites using wet collodion glass negatives, and produced a visual record of the region that became the touchstone for subsequent archeologists and photographers working in Central American in the nineteenth century. He published a portfolio of 42 albumen silver prints as Cités et ruines américaines, Mitla, Palenque, Izamal, Chichén Itzá, Uxmal in 1862. This photograph (plate 26) is from a series of seven within the portfolio depicting the ruins of the Mayan city of Chichén-Itzá, and represents the so-called Nunnery, or Nun’s Palace, a governmental palace built between 600-800 CE. In Charnay’s Romantic interpretation, the patterned stone structure materializes from a dense thicket of vegetation.