There's a lesson buried in the story of Irving Penn's Cuzco project, and it's one that every photographer working today would do well to absorb. It has nothing to do with technique, equipment, or artistic vision. It's simpler than that: when the assignment ends, keep shooting.
Penn arrived in Lima, Peru in December 1948 on a fashion job for Vogue. Standard brief, standard destination. But instead of catching the next flight home, he kept going; boarding a small plane to Cuzco, the ancient Inca capital sitting at an elevation of 3,400 metres in the Andes.
