Jan Mulder is the Centro de la Imagen de Lima founder and president. Today, the school is one of the most important partners of the ENSP and led the way to a renewed partnership with Latin America. Looking at the images in his collection provides a fascinating insight into the zeitgeist from an unexpected position in the globe, normally considered peripheral to the horizon drawn by latter-day guidelines that have modelled an international photographic taste during the last decade. Aesthetically stark and intensely personal, this photography collection from Lima is more like a polyglot handbook that responds to the need of seeing oneself firmly ensconced on the map, ‘from deepest, darkest Peru’ and travelling far and wide the world over, taking risks and rising up to the challenge of both loving the local and committing oneself to the excite- ment of new, open skies. It is a young collection that started very early in this century and actually sprung from Jan and Sylvia Mulder’s contemporary visual arts collection, in which painting, sculpture and prints in different techniques are all significantly represented. Jan Mulder actually studied photojournalism at Boston University, in the USA, before embarking in international business in the mid-seventies and devoting himself to various and demanding family concerns. His interest in the work of outstanding contemporary Latin American photographers, and within this group, Peruvian contemporary practitioners of the art, can be said to have arisen from an all-encompassing consideration of the destiny of this area of the world. It signifies hope in its future calling, one that will surely result in a potent presence in the global perspective. Ideals have been re-cast in a new approach to the develop- ment in this part of the Americas, and his perception marks his under- standing of the photographic works in his collection: it highlights regional issues while recognizing subjects at stake in a larger international scope.

Jorge Villacorta, curator of the exhibition