color photograph
2018
23 5/8 x 33 1/2
edition: 10
signed in pencil on verso
“Inon Sani” means “the jaguar man who illuminates everything.” That’s how the Peruvian photographer German Llerena, raised in Iquitos, the gateway to the Peruvian Amazon, decided to call himself. “I realize that I have been raised in a way where the body has been a very familiar thing since I was little,” he says. And also: “My mom, for example, slept with her tits out, my dad walked around the house in his underwear.”
Little by little he began to portray bodies. Especially men. Especially connecting with nature, which he thanks. Although he is out of his control and never knows if it will be cloudy or the sun will rise, he says it always ends up happening that nature plays in his favor. And it was thus, exploring small towns and bodies, between talks and teachers, that Inon discovered what he wanted to do: “I’m going to strip the jungle,” he promised.
I am from Iquitos, I was born here and I lived here until I was eighteen. It is a very small city and in art, not much was happening, so I decided to try what was happening in Lima. I started working in casting. We filmed and also took pictures of chibolos, we played with the cameras, we went out in the neighborhood. I do not appear in the photos, because I took them. My friends have kept the photos, we were 15 years old and when I see the photos it seems crazy to me because they look like the ones I take now.
In other words, unconsciously, too, because it has also been in a very organic way. When I left Lima I started looking for those kinds of jobs. I feel that the process has been very healing. I could sleep with my camera, I could be with it all the time I am with it because now I am in Iquitos. It’s all so cool that you never know what to find.
I talk a lot about my sexuality through my photos, I feel that there is something that makes me feel. There is always this little sexual impulse in what I portray, going a little bit beyond normal. Here in the jungle, it’s cool because it correlates with nature. I love those two languages together. Iquitos is in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, low jungle, tropic, the contrast with the city is enormous. Iquitos is something else, it is a city from the rubber era that has later expanded. It is little and big at the same time. There is no road, you have to get here by plane or by boat
