A conversation with Paz Vallejo

Paz Vallejo is a visual artist based in Europe working across photography and moving image. Her practice lives in the emotional and symbolic, shaped by dream logic, atmosphere, and the quiet tension between what is seen and what is sensed. Her clients include Vogue, Rolling Stone, Bulgari, and COS. Her ancestry reaches back to Iquitos.

Your work has always explored dreamlike and liminal states. What did the Amazon awaken in you?

I have always been drawn to these themes. Since childhood I have felt a deep affinity with spirituality, with occultism, magic, and the world of dreams. I imagine worlds and situations that don’t exist in this dimension yet, but that feel real to me on another plane. I am also extremely sensitive. Places pass through me. They change me.

On my father’s side, my family is from Iquitos. My grandmother was born there and moved to Lima when she was little. On my mother’s side, my great-grandmother was a medium. So through both lines of my ancestry, I have always felt deeply connected to the rainforest and the mysteries inside it.

The Amazon wasn’t only a physical territory. It was an activation. There is something in the atmosphere, something that hides, and from time to time decides to reveal itself. It’s hard to explain without sounding mystical, but it feels as if everything vibrates at another frequency. If you stop and listen, really listen, you begin to understand it.

Being there made me feel like a small child discovering the world for the first time, with that mix of wonder, fear, and fascination. The jungle doesn’t only look at you. You feel it looking back. And in that exchange, the visible and invisible stop being opposites and become part of the same flow, like the river.

Animals appear constantly in my dreams, and therefore in my work. Being in the Amazon brought me back to my dreams, like déjà vu, then let me make them physical, immortalize those moments through photography. And later, speaking with the shaman we met through Delfin about the symbolism and mythology behind the animals I had dreamed and then encountered in real life.

Traveling by river implies a different sense of time. Slow, enveloping, almost circular. How did that cadence affect the way you photographed?

At first it was hard. I am impatient by nature. When I arrived, the rain intimidated me. Cameras and torrential rain don’t mix. In the Amazon you are at the mercy of Mother Nature: it pours as if the world is ending, and an hour later there is radiant sun.

It took me a couple of days to fall into that rhythm because I arrived with an agenda. But once I surrendered to the experience, I entered the rhythm the Amazon sets, and everything aligned. I learned to feel affection for an overcast sky, and it made me appreciate the clear moments even more. Those contrasts made the experience more intense.

Did the forest force you to let go of compositional control and allow it to set the image’s rhythm?

Completely. In the Amazon you realize very quickly that you are nothing and everything at the same time. The territory is so vast, and Mother Nature is so palpable and powerful. You can’t impose total control over the image. Mysteries and beings reveal themselves in their own time. You just have to be willing to observe and listen.

The light changes constantly. Sounds alert you to presences that may arrive, but then you might not see them. So much stays hidden, and that is beautiful too. I had to learn to wait calmly and watch. I understood that here, you don’t force the image. You discover it.

Delfin offers an intimate experience: low occupancy, silence, closeness to the environment. How did that scale influence your creative process?

It was wonderful. My trip was very intimate. I only shared the cruise with my assistant and one foreign couple. We connected deeply and still keep in touch. Low occupancy helped create the feeling of a journey made to measure. A very special calm appeared. That intimacy lets you slow down. Creatively, having that space mattered. I could alternate intense exploration with moments of safe rest.

In the Amazon, the forest feels like it has its own agency. How does the relationship between the human and the environment shift there?

In my work there is often a tension between the human and the environment. Here, I felt the human completely lose its centrality. No single figure dominates the frame. That makes the tension dissolve. It no longer feels like opposition. It feels like fusion.

Something I took with me was entering conversations about Amazonian worldviews where the hierarchy of species dissolves. Humans, flora, and fauna exist on the same level, with the same importance. Nothing is more or less. Behind each plant, mountain, animal, river, even a precious stone, there is a soul or invisible being. Some communities call them Maninkari, holding the wisdom behind the animated or inanimate.

I haven’t tried to illustrate this in my work yet, but hearing and understanding it helped me perceive the jungle as a full subject, an active entity with its own agency. That new way of seeing transformed my images. The landscape was no longer a landscape. It became the complete protagonist. It eclipsed us with its depth and beauty.

And there was also a very concrete perceptual element: green. Green has the most tonal variations the human eye can perceive. Being surrounded by that saturation for so many days sharpened my gaze. I began noticing nuances that would have passed me by before, turning colour into a sensory experience.

Water is a constant protagonist in your visual language: mirror, border, depth, reflection. How does the river dialogue with that?

Water, for me, is everything. Purification, teaching, and mystery at once. It teaches you about yourself because it reflects us, but it also hides. We have no idea what truly exists beneath the surface.

As a child I was somewhat obsessed with creating images and duplicating them into mirrors. There is something about symmetry that gave me deep visual pleasure, maybe the idea that an image could contain another inside itself and become whole. Seeing that happen naturally when the water was calm felt like entering another dimension.

The river materializes something I have always been drawn to: the coexistence of a reality and a projection. A reflection isn’t exactly the same as what it reflects. It’s inverted, perhaps more unstable. That instability is what I want to explore. That is where optical illusions happen, what I call portals.

I dream often of water: rivers, waterfalls, the sea. Maybe that is why the river feels like a natural space where the conscious and unconscious can meet and mix.

The Amazon has a unique soundscape: insects, birds, humid silence. Did that acoustic atmosphere influence when you chose to shoot?

Completely, especially during excursions when we were searching for animals. Our guide Juan Carlos was wonderful. I grew very fond of him. He taught us so much about how to respect and move through the environment.

Each time he anticipated an approaching bird or animal, it was almost always exactly the species he said it would be. The audio cue was what made us stop and wait. That practice changed my rhythm. Instead of actively hunting for an element, I had to remain attentive, eyes open, in silence, until something revealed itself among branches or inside the water.

Was there an encounter with naturalists or crew that made you reconsider the artist’s role as an outside observer?

Yes. The Amazon forces you to realize you arrive as a visitor to a territory local communities know like the palm of their hand. They inhabit the space deeply. Conversations with Juan Carlos Palomino and the crew helped me understand there are many ways of seeing beyond an artistic gaze. They recognize signals, rhythms, and presences that, for me as a visitor, went completely unnoticed.

It really lowers the artist’s ego. You enter a more receptive state and you begin to listen. It pushed me to look with more humility and to absorb that knowledge and sensitivity belong to the people who live in that territory.

Was there a specific instant that felt like a revelation?

The last sunset I saw there was unbelievable. It looked like an explosion. The colours were expansive, constantly changing. I would turn for a second to look at the opposite colours from where the sun was setting, turn back, and everything had changed. It became more intense, more red. I felt only gratitude for being able to witness it.

Another moment that will always stay with me: we were in a kayak and a baby pink river dolphin jumped less than a metre away.

If you had to describe the Amazon not as a landscape but as an emotional state, what would it be?

Awe. A mix of wonder and reverence, maximum admiration, contemplation, and constant curiosity. It’s a feeling where you become very small before something immense. It forces you to be completely present. Everything amazes: the light, the lack of it, the sounds, the weather changes, the life that appears and the life that hides. It’s a constant state of discovery. It is always one step ahead of you, keeping you in fascination and mystery.

What stays with you from the river now that you have returned?

The river taught me to stay open to surprises and change. Sometimes we move so fast through life and our own objectives that we forget we can’t control anything, only how we act and respond to what comes. What remains most in me is this: to be more attentive, more available, and more willing to let things reveal themselves at their own rhythm.

The Amazon is often narrated through spectacle. How should this territory be told today?

It doesn’t need exaggeration or spectacle. It should be allowed to be what it is. We simply need to give it the importance it deserves. See it as a space holding immense wisdom. As the home of countless tribes and native communities with their own customs, culture, and dialects, their own ways of understanding the world. It is also home to half the world’s flora.

We should move away from the idea of conquest, of consuming the landscape, and instead approach it through relationship. Meet it as an equal, with respect. The Amazon is not a stage. It is its own entity, a living and complex territory with its own rhythms and knowledge.

As an artist, my position is only one among thousands inside that weave. From there, I am more interested in suggesting and revealing small moments than in explaining, because in truth, I know very little. My ancestry comes from there, but I didn’t grow up there, and that also defines my position. I am more interested in opening questions than closing them.

Maybe that is enough. Maybe that is where it begins.