This book is, above all, the story of a man who will rather transit on the outskirts, paraphrasing the poet, in the outside walls of the world. For the hero of this book, the sheep are already too many: we outsiders watch reality form the outside and analyze it. Swimming against the tide is a clash of titans. But from pain emerge beauty, new worlds; phantasmal, dark, strobing, healing, questioning, iridescent dimensions; raw, colored structures that lull both saints and pagans, as the sea when it mineralizes the human who goes into it, walking on the sand with tempestuous steps, or with the sun on their chest.

This book is, above all, the story of a man who would rather register the soul of a people in the verge of disappearing, or of being reborn. I am at war with the obvious, said the legendary US coloristic photographer William Eggleston; and the author of this book makes that evident concept his in his photos, that take us deep in the magical maws of Lobitos, town enclosed within itself.

In Lobitos, doors open and close on their own: the wind wriggles as if it were the spirit of the luxury that lived there at the beginning of the 20th Century, in the middle of the dessert: social clubs, pinewood houses, a church, a market, a sophisticated desalinization plant, 250 petroleum wells and the first movie theater in South America. A marvel of the industrial period developed when Lobitos Oilfields Limited started operating there in 1905, near Km 1147 of the Panamericana Norte highway, in a hidden district of the province of Talara (next to the sea), in the department of Piura. Nowadays, among its residents, a legend lives, about a Queen of England who visited it and walked on a red carpet so long that it joined the pier and the church of the first industrial petroleum camp in the world.

Lobitos. The beach that whistles. Lobitos. A separate town. Wild and coruscating nature that laughs in the face of those who attempted to tame it, no matter how many petroleum entrepreneurs and military who cemented it, timbered it and filled it with infrastructures, exploiting everything once and once again; it never stopped expressing itself. Nature in its rocks, in its sea, in its sky; in its mysterious mountains that metaphysically mutate, joyous in their impermanence. Santiago Bustamante Mujica responded to this gesture, uncovered his Hasselblad X1D and discovered the secrets of Lobitos walking among its entrails, or ride across its aura on a mototaxi, always towards the peripheral. And so begins the story of the man who converses with the ghosts of the salty city, he who exchanges hearts like a fish in the water. This is how the book titled Lobitos came into being.

In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: work written more than five decades ago by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (product of direct reflection on the French May), the authors mention the vanishing line as an act of resistance and affirmation; a vanishing line allows a metamorphosis within a system, to be somebody else, to rebel against the dogmatic, to be a schizo in pursuit of action; and that is something the system fears as much as the un-territorialization, that proposes a sort of ontological anarchy.

Santiago Bustamante Mujica’s vanishing lines started showing even before discovering photography. He remembers: “My first act of rebellion was to drop out of Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, after completing Estudios Generales Letras (two years of humanities studies), specifically after one week in the faculty of Economics; I told myself it was not for me; I had to break away from the family pressure for transfering to Universidad de Lima and joining the Faculty of Communications; it was a radical change; there, I discovered photography.”

He started with abstracts in black and white, deeply influenced by two world photography masters, North Americans Aaron Siskind and Minor White; the chiaroscuros, the strong contrasts in his photos expressed a dissociation that our artist started experimenting inside, and that was reinforced by the strong political discussions he witnessed at home. For seven years, he exclusively produced black and white photography until he became, thanks to a small lab he assembled in his garage, what North Americans call a Master black & white printer. Afterwards, in New York, from scratch, he started exacerbating color; a practice that captivated him for life to the point of also becoming a both analog and digital Master color printer.

According to Santiago’s words, “three intense years” were those he lived in New York. Thanks to the fact that he studied a master’s degree in Visual Arts (MFA), with a major in Photography and Related Media in the School of Visual Arts (SVA), he met many famous photographers, such as Martin Parr and Alex Webb. The latter was his thesis counselor, together with another world-known photographer: Stephen Shore, pioneer in color experimentation, with whom in 2001 he made a tour as part of an image hunt in mysterious Peruvian territories, such as Nazca and Cusco; an initiation voyage that would consolidate their professor-disciple relation. Shore, we must add, was a protagonist photographer in The Factory of Andy Warhol. Santiago points out: “I also had the great honor of conversing with people of the standing of my idol Robert Frank, with William Eggleston –an important North American photographer who is well known for achieving the recognition of color photography as a form of expression worthy of being exhibited in art galleries-, at the opening of his exhibition in Chelsea.”

An event worth highlighting, given its importance in the evolution of our artist’s work, took place precisely in New York. In his first class with Stephen Shore, at SVA, Santiago was impressed by the work of Germans Bernd & Hilla Becher –known for their series of images of industrial buildings and structures- that he showed his students. The architecture the German couple of photographers, as well as Shore, present in perfect framing, imposes on the landscape because it transforms it into an often apocalyptic, futurist, expectant, desolate and even extraterrestrial one. Bustamante specifies: “It was then when I shot my first nocturnes in color in marginal neighborhoods close to Manhattan, like Queens, for example, where I lived.

We have already mentioned the admiration of our artist for chiaroscuro; but the nocturnes Santiago refers to –Suburban Spaces (New York City, 2001)–, as well as those he produced some time later in California –Industria (California, 2004)– bring out his favorite line of work –or escape– that would consolidate the character of his photographs: the immense importance of the Chromatic, as well as weakness for what the Peruvian expressionist painter Enrique Polanco called The asthetics of abandonment (when he wrote about Santiago’s photos in the book titled Nocturnos limeños published by Fondo Editorial de la Universidad de Lima –where our artist works as a professor– in October 2018) in reference to the decadent marginal architecture. These aspects of his creation are of course, also present in Lobitos.

But it is exactly in his past photographic excursions that we can unsnarl the present of his work. Santiago specified he moved to New York to teach in a community college; and for producing the series of nocturnes titled “Industria” he used a plate camera. In “Industria” photos of immense factories that work by night are seen, lit with almost outer space colors, which make them seem like gigantic monsters in the middle of darkness, emanating smoke of diverse colors; obviously, there is an allusion to the environmental issue, Santiago says. And the thing is, politics, activism contrary to the system will always pierce through his creations, sometimes hidden; sometimes gaudy, as it happened mostly at the beginning, when he plowed through the waves of photojournalism.

During one of his returns to Lima, in 2002, he came across an immense protest against the visit of Bush to Peru. He took hundreds of photos of that demonstration, that had Confederación General de Trabajadores del Perú (CGTP), as protagonists at the San Martín Square; he registered US flags with the swastika superimposed, with skulls instead of stars; he