In the 1830s the explorers John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood were the first English-speakers to study the regions originally settled by the Maya in the Yucatán, Chiapas, Guatemala, and Honduras. Catherwood’s drawings and the images he took with a camera lucida made the sites famous. Katz traveled to the Yucatán in 1984, reconstructing Stephens and Catherwood’s expeditions for The Catherwood Project. Some of Katz’s images test the accuracy of Catherwood’s and reveal how the colonial explorer romanticized these monuments. Others show Katz’s hand holding the published images, drawing attention to his presence as an act of recuperation of history.
Gallery label from 2022