Awaiting the Rain
Photographs from Peru 1994-2005
A writer in Lima said once that Peru was “the most foreign country in the world”. At the time, in the early 1990s, this seemed plausible. Shining Path rebels were close to making good on their obscure prophesies of a nationwide apocalypse. The military pulled people off the streets, from the fields, out of the classroom and killed them. A great novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, was running for president, to be defeated by a minor academic of Japanese ancestry whom nobody had heard of weeks earlier. The currency had the value of confetti, suiting a country that seemed in the act of disappearing.
These photographs show that as the country survived, so did its essential character: its layers of reserve and casual mystery, its ability to abide contradictory truths, and a talent for nostalgia, melancholy, injustice, and groundless hope.
For more information please visit: Michael Robinson Chavez
