Nicolas Torres - Chicha Dreams

54 pages
Photos by Nicolas Torres
24 x 17 cm
Language: English
Softcover
Publisher: Dashwood Books
First edition of 500 copies
2014

Chicha Dreams is the first book of the Peruvian photographer Nicolás Torres. A hybrid of peasant folk music and psychedelic rock, Chicha music is popular in the impoverished urban neighborhoods of Peru. But Chicha is not only music, it is also a syncretic and irreverent aesthetic, a subversive and joyful way of life. In the mid-eighties Nicolas Torres began photographing wild Chicha parties, attended by working-class people in the Carretera Central, an area of shantytowns on the outskirts of Lima, creating an invaluable record of intimate moments and popular joy.

The English foreword by Alfredo Villar, the prominent Peruvian art historian, curator and critic, offers an insight into both Nicolás Torres life and the Chicha social and cultural phenomena.