The work submitted is from a larger body of work entitled Espectáculos Que (Con)Muevan or Moving Spectacles. These families are itinerant performers whose lives and struggles moved me. The entire body of work consists of 70 images made in Peru in 2010.
I visited small family circuses on the extreme outskirts of Lima during the day and photographed them (120 film, using a Hasselblad and Rollei).
The family circuses have always been nomadic for two principal reasons. They need to change venues every ten days or so to obtain the needed number of entries to the circus. Secondly, the Serenazgo, municipal security workers, come at night and tear down their tents and ruin what they have built. The municipalities fear that the circuses might lay claim to the land, and thus have ruled their presence as illegal.
Many of the families in my photographs are children and grandchildren of circus performers and were born into this word of itinerant artists. I visited six different circuses in toto in three districts, San Juan de Lurigancho, Comas y El Agustino.
Liese A Ricketts, Chicago, 2012
