Carlos Jiménez Cahua - Ciudad de los Reyes

I became aware of the work of Carlos Jiménez Cahua via the Exposure Compensation blog quite a long time ago. Carlos, Peruvian by blood and birth, has grown up in the US. In 2007 he returned to his country of origin on a Princeton fellowship to photograph the landscape of Lima's pueblos jóvenes. These peripheral sections of the capital are populated by newly arrived migrants in search of economic opportunity and live in improvised dwellings made mostly from rudimentary materials. He explains:

"Lima is a desert, but despite this, it has one of the largest populations of any city, and it's growing too rapidly, so much so that people are forced to make their home anywhere they can (...) in areas that were previously completely undeveloped. Yet because it's a desert, there where they develop, there is no removal of trees or brush, they make their home upon the raw earth itself."




"In places like the United States, when man assumes his archetypal role as builder, he acts as sculptor, taking the raw form, the earth, and shaping it to his needs, nearly unrecognizable in its final state. The earth is his clay and he the sculptor. For the people of Lima, their relationship with the earth is fundamentally different. They don't sculpt the land; the earth remains visible if not nearly unaltered despite their development."



"Whereas the people of developed nations affect the form and therefore identity of the land, the people of Lima quite literally merely scratch the surface—their relationship to the ground is not one of dominance, but of acquiescence. It is only in two dimensions that they can affect the land. They conform to the surface."



Carlos has recently put on his first solo show at Anastasia-Photo, a New York gallery that specializes in Documentary Photography and Photojournalism.

www.carlosjimenezcahua.com