A conversation with the Peruvian photographer Musuk Nolte, whose dreamlike new book is the latest in a rich and truly original body of work that explodes the boundaries between documentary and art photography.
Musuk Nolte has spent his career exploring the space between geography and dream, reality and myth. Born in Mexico City and raised in Lima, Nolte moves fluidly between documentary and art photography to confront urgent social issues—environmental depredation, cultural memory, the tension between personal and collective identity. Beyond his award-winning photographic work, Nolte is the founder of KWY Ediciones, an acclaimed independent publishing house focused on long-form, Latin American photography narratives.
His latest project, The Belongings of the Air, is a dreamlike visual essay rooted in his experiences with ayahuasca and over a decade of photographing the Amazonian world. We spoke not long after Nolte reconned the Lima leg of our inaugural League of Travelers journey through Peru about his beginnings, his newest book, a years-long project on water in Peru, and how a sense of political commitment threads through everything he does.
Roads & Kingdoms: You were born in Mexico, but raised in Peru. How did that shape your sense of place—and your work?
Musuk Nolte: I’ve lived in Lima almost my whole life. I feel more Peruvian than Mexican, although in a way, I’m both. My mother, who’s Peruvian, is an anthropologist. We traveled a lot when I was a child—through the Amazon, the Andes. But even more than that, our home was always full of people from different parts of Peru, different cultures. It felt like the world was coming to us, like a journey happening inside the house all the time. Meals, music, languages—it was constant. That had a big influence on me.
Roads & Kingdoms: It awakened your curiosity and made you want to go out and explore?
Musuk Nolte: There’s curiosity, but it’s also an awareness of political problems, knowing people who come from different places and being aware of the issues affecting them. I would say that I feel commitment to document what’s going on in my country. There are indigenous communities facing situations that are endangering their culture. They have to migrate. There are traditions that are no longer in practice, so that’s also an important idea for me, documenting things that are changing so fast that must be recorded.
Roads & Kingdoms: Did your mother’s work in anthropology influence your path into photography?
Musuk Nolte: Absolutely. She gave me a different way of understanding the world early on. Though at first I wanted to be a musician, photography found me when I was 16. I started working at a newspaper a couple years later, documenting cultural stories and political issues. But I never set out with a conviction that I wanted to be a photographer. It was something that emerged naturally.
Roads & Kingdoms: Your work often seems to swing between journalism, art, and political testimony. How do you navigate those different currents?
Musuk Nolte: For me, the political is always there. It’s part of being someone. But I was drawn to photography more from an artistic perspective, thinking about image-making in more conceptual ways. What I enjoy most is work that is rooted in reality but steps slightly outside it—where documentary merges with imagination, with dreams. That’s where I feel most connected to the work.
Roads & Kingdoms: Your new book, The Belongings of the Air, is very much in that space. How did it come together?
Musuk Nolte: It’s a book about my experiences with ayahuasca—one when I was five years old, and another about fifteen years later in the Amazonian jungle, when I was starting my photography career. Those experiences make a bridge of memory. And over the last decade, I’ve been building a visual essay that connects those memories to the Amazonian environment. So this is a testimony about my experience, but it’s also an interpretation of the Amazonian relation with the visions, reality, and myths around ayahuasca. Most of the images were taken while I was working on other documentary projects—wildlife trafficking, community life—and then later woven together with reflections, dreams, and visions. Some of the images use prisms or lighting tricks to decompose the reality a little bit. I wanted the sequence to feel like stepping into a dream, but with documentary roots.
Roads & Kingdoms: There’s so much global conversation—and misunderstanding—around ayahuasca. How did you think about that in making this work?
Musuk Nolte: It’s complicated. On one hand, I have talked with many people that are not from Peru or even from South America that have tried ayahuasca and there are some situations and visions that are common, like the presence of the animal, the transmutation between animals and human, the strong presence of a mother, a symbolic mother, and a lot of people have seen a river in Amazonia even being in, I dunno, Iran, anywhere. But I also purposefully wanted to avoid reference to this hyper-colorful psychedelic art, influenced by people like Pablo Amaringo, one of the most important and interesting painters on the topic. I wanted to work in black and white, which I think allowed me to have more resources to represent the thing.
Roads & Kingdoms: Beyond your own photography, you’ve also built a platform for other artists through your publishing house, KWY Ediciones. How did that come about?
Musuk Nolte: We started KWY about ten years ago because we wanted to publish books, and there weren’t many options for photographers in Latin America. It’s not a business—it’s more like a cooperative. We focus on long-term documentary projects, often by photographers who have a deep commitment to their communities. Probably the thing that crosses all our projects is identity in tension with violence related with the political social issues that we face. Most of the photographers use a lot of metaphoric and symbolic ways of representing the stories that they’re trying to tell. I wanted to collaborate with people that I care about and I like. So probably you can see visual coincidences that feel almost like a statement. You can see we are thinking the same way somehow. Different stories, different contexts, but visually it’s an approach of trying to build something like a collective identity.
Roads & Kingdoms: You’re also working on a long-term project about water in Peru. Can you tell us about that?
Musuk Nolte: Yes, it’s called The Geography of Water. It started during COVID-19, when we were being told, “wash your hands”—but in Lima, which is one of the largest desert cities in the world, many people don’t have running water. I began documenting water scarcity, but the project grew. The idea is to tell different stories at different geographical altitudes. Water became a metaphor for how everything is connected: mining in the Andes, droughts in the Amazon, pollution from the cities. It’s a way to understand the impact of human actions across geography, across communities. Last year was one of the most severe draughts in history and this year will probably be even harder. I’m still working on it—it will take years.
Roads & Kingdoms: Can you explain the idea of water as a metaphor? What do you mean by that?
Musuk Nolte: It’s a metaphor for how everything is connected and the impact you can have on a community that is really far from you. Water moves between territories, between altitudes. And even though people in the city may not care about what’s happening in the country, their lives depend on it. So I think it’s a good metaphor for how humans relate with environment, with nature. The control of water will be a really important issue soon.
Roads & Kingdoms: It evokes this dystopian future scenario of water wars or whatever could be waiting for us.
Musuk Nolte: A few years ago water start to be traded on Wall Street.
Roads & Kingdoms: Have you learned things through this project that really surprised you?
Musuk Nolte: What’s clear to me now is that everything’s connected, and water is the source that connect everything. I know about some really hard situations for communities, mainly in the Andean region and now in the Amazonian. For many people, the rivers are the roads. So now some communities are isolated and can’t get food, because the rivers are too low. For some people, water is something that you drink. For others, water is something that allows you to move, to fish, to farm. Then you have the fires and the impact of the fires in the Amazon Basin. When I decide to have a steak, it has an impact on how the Amazonia is burning out. So for me, the big insight is just how closely we are all connected.
Find out more about Musuk Nolte’s work here and follow his latest projects on Instagram @musukn.
