This rare group of photographs, showing both rural and city Bolivian life, was originally part of the Gardner Collection of photographs at Harvard University. In her article, 'The Gardner Collection of Photographs' (History of Photography, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 1991, pp. 17-22), Heather Ross Munro articulates the formation and dissemination of the Gardner collection, a substantial group of photos housed in the Geology Department of Harvard University, that was initially funded in 1892 by Harvard graduate George Gardner. By 1916, the collection reached around 7,500 landscape and geological photographs from around the world, including a number of mammoth plate views by Carleton Watkins. But by the 1960s, slides, illustrated textbooks, and field work supplanted the need for the collection. In 1962, the archive was offered to the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, who selected 350 photos. Harvard kept around 1000 themselves, mostly Massachusetts scenes, and discarded the rest.

This present group was acquired by the previous owner while studying as a geology student at Harvard in the 60s. He had been informed that the collection was getting tossed and saved what he could, choosing these photographs because he “preferred the ones with people.”