PRUDENCIO, Ignacio. La Calle Abierta Como un Sueno Hacia Culaquier Azar.

(Lima, Peru): KWY Ediciones, 2019. First edition. Softcover. 19.7cm by 14.7cm. A striking and highly personal exploration of Lima by the Bolivian photographer Ignacio Prudencio. Made after the photographer’s arrival in the Peruvian capital, the work is the product of a series of dérives through the city, allowing chance encounters, wandering, and observation to shape both the photographs and their sequencing. Moving between portraiture and urban landscape, day and night, the book constructs a fragmented psychogeography of Lima in which workers, streets, objects, and architectural details become components of a shifting and elusive urban identity. Borrowing its title from a line by Jorge Luis Borges, the book eschews documentary description in favour of ambiguity and association. Grainy, high-contrast photographs of anonymous figures, abandoned objects, religious statuary, and peripheral urban spaces are sequenced in a deliberately disjunctive manner, evoking the instability of memory and the experience of becoming lost within an unfamiliar city. Prudencio has described the pronounced grain of the images as a visual analogue for the dust that permeates Lima, one of the world’s largest desert cities. A very good copy in sewn wrappers. Published in an edition of 300 copies.