There is a thread that runs through countries, family stories, everyday gestures and memories sedimented over time. In Mestizo, the new limited-edition photobook published by Eyeshot, that thread becomes image, body, identity. Michael Robinson Chávez, a California-based photographer of Peruvian descent and Pulitzer Prize winner, builds a narrative that is both reportage and self-portrait, a homecoming that uses black and white as an emotional rather than merely aesthetic language.

The project stems from more than twenty-five years of work and from the need to question what it means to belong to multiple worlds. It is no surprise that Mestizo took first place in the Series Category of the Eyeshot Open Call 2025, selected from more than 20,000 projects submitted from all over the globe. It is a body of work that does not simply document Peru: it inhabits it. It looks at it from within, from the perspective of someone who recognizes in other people’s gaze a fragment of their own story.

The photographs move through villages, markets, crowded buses, processions, street corners and those suspended moments that define everyday life. They are images that hold dignity, contradiction, nostalgia, humor, and that melancholy vitality that belongs to places where past and present coexist relentlessly. Chávez portrays Peru as an emotional map, where the search for one’s roots becomes a way of understanding the world.

In his work as a photojournalist, which has led him to document conflicts, migrations, climate change and social fragilities in more than seventy countries, Chávez has always placed the humanity of the moment first. In Mestizo, this attention becomes even more intimate: every portrait is an encounter, every scene a confession shared between photographer and subject. It is the power of mestizaje, the fusion of identities and traditions that has shaped the Peruvian character and that here becomes narrative material.

The publication, available only until December 31 in a limited print run, is produced entirely in Italy: 128 pages, hard cover, printed on certified paper, each copy hand-numbered and digitally signed. An object designed for collectors and photography enthusiasts, but above all for those who look for books capable of leaving a mark.

In the words of editor Marco Savarese, Mestizo is “a return to the origins, a secret dialogue between cultures and identities that continue to question us.” This is the heart of the project: a personal journey that becomes universal, a visual story in which memory and the present are constantly brushing against one another, never ceasing to ask who we are.