Past Present Peru combines photographs, textiles, music and film in an ambitious book object. The photographs are for Cohen a "fragmented collection of visual insights, a record of deepening awareness" that depicts the diversity of Peruvian life including religious festivals, potato farming, and the recent introduction of hydroelectricity. The textiles, reproduced in luscious colour, embody pre-Columbian craft traditions more than 5,000 years old. Cohen began recording music in Peru in 1964, using a portable tape recorder to capture performances wherever he could: at festivals, in villagers' homes, even waiting at a bus stop. Cohen's films are about "a sense of things that weren't expressed in words", and are themselves a unique historical record.



The unifying thread between the different media of Past Present Peru is Cohen's own writing - anecdotal, precise, historically informed - words that capture the past and present of Peru, and anticipate its future.