altitude attitude

Through my lens as a Taiwanese-British woman, altitude attitude follows Andean women of Peru — from highland fields to Lake Titicaca — whose ancient wisdom of land, loom and barter lives on, untouched by AI, side by side with the modern world.

altitude attitude is a document of the women I met across the Peruvian Andes in August and September 2026, from the highland fields around Cusco and the Sacred Valley to the floating reed islands of Lake Titicaca.

At almost 4,000 metres, their days are built from skills that no machine has learned. They wash alpaca yarn by hand in a basin, dye it with plants, and spin and weave it into the same patterns their ancestors wore — without textbooks, because all the weaving wisdom lives in their minds. Potatoes are laid out on stone to freeze and dry in the thin air. Herds of llamas and alpacas are walked across golden pampa, and on Titicaca lake, entire homes are rebuilt from totora reed, layer by layer, as the old ones sink.

In a way, things here are frozen in time. A woman in a layered pollera and bowler hat sells fruit juice under colonial arches; another barters her harvest in a market where cash is only one of several currencies. Murals, motorbikes and mobile phones sit beside braids and bright mantas, and it is the modern things that look out of place.

I came to this landscape as an outsider — a Taiwanese-British woman raised between Asia and Europe, with a background in textile design. In an age when so much of what we make is generated, these images are a record of knowledge that still lives in bodies, soil, water and technique. The title is their posture: the quiet, the mystery and the warmth of people who have always lived at altitude.