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.

John Cohen (1932-2019) war Fotograf, Filmproduzent, und Gründungsmitglied der New Lost City Ramblers. Nach seinem Master-Abschluss der Universität Yale war Cohen an den Künstlerkreisen New Yorks der späten 1950er sowie der frühen 1960er beteiligt und arbeitete mit Robert Frank an dessen Film Pull My Daisy (1959). Er hat zahlreiche Bücher und Filme veröffentlicht und produzierte Aufnahmen traditioneller amerikanischer Musiker, darunter Dillard Chandler und Roscoe Holcomb. Bei Steidl sind Cohens Bücher Past Present Peru (2010), The High and Lonesome Sound (2012), Here and Gone (2014), Cheap rents ... and de Kooning (2016) und Look up to the Moon (2019) erschienen.