Chicha Dreams

Chicha Dreams is the first book of the Peruvian photographer Nicolás Torres, compiling informal portraits made across three decades of photographing chicha parties in the shantytowns outside Lima.

Chicha is a hybrid of peasant folk music and psychedelic rock popular in Peru's working-class urban neighborhoods, carrying with it a syncretic, irreverent aesthetic and a way of life as much as a sound. Torres, who worked as a bricklayer in the poor neighborhood of Cajamarquilla outside Lima, bought a camera in the late 1970s and began photographing birthdays, weddings, concerts and chicha parties for the people around him; by the mid-1980s he had become the primary photographer for promoters organizing the parties, building an archive of nearly 60,000 negatives largely unseen outside his own community. Published by Dashwood Books in a first edition of 54 pages, the book gathers a selection of these late-night portraits with an introduction by the Peruvian art historian and curator Alfredo Villar, who discovered the archive while researching chicha culture.

Torres's work sits outside the conventions of both documentary and fine-art photography, made from within the community it depicts rather than as an outside observer's record, and Chicha Dreams was his introduction to an international audience for photography that had previously circulated only among the people it portrayed.