LIMA PERU

October 22, 2009 5:45 PM

CARLOS JIMÉNEZ CAHUA : "This young Peruvian photographer, now based in New York, returned to Lima to document the city’s unchecked sprawl into the desert, where flimsy plywood houses huddle together, as if for warmth. Jiménez Cahua takes the long view, typically framing broad landscape vistas from an omniscient, elevated perspective, so teeming neighborhoods appear unpopulated, toy-like." NYer (alt view)
posted by vronsky (11 comments total)

We took a bus through there on the way to Pisco. That's what I remember it being like... bleak, barren, waterless and terrifying.

One thing I don't think these photos show is the writing on mountainsides... I think they do it the same way as the Nazca lines, by moving rocks to expose lighter soil.

I couldn't tell if these were apartments or tombs for a minute, until I noticed a man for scale. They have rebar sticking up from the top, like so much of the architecture in Peru - planning to build higher later.
posted by fleetmouse at 6:16 PM on October 22, 2009

Yeah, I also remember seeing this landscape on a bus on my way from Lima to Pisco. Definitely one of the strangest, seemingly most inhospitable places to live. Beautiful photographs.
posted by billysumday at 6:18 PM on October 22, 2009

When I read this "unchecked sprawl into the desert," I thought "he can't mean that literally." I was wrong.
posted by oddman at 6:33 PM on October 22, 2009

I remember seeing this place in my nightmares.
posted by stbalbach at 6:34 PM on October 22, 2009

What a bleak existence. I did like the sculpture with the uprooted tree...seems to fit, somehow.
posted by maxwelton at 6:47 PM on October 22, 2009

His work is beautiful. I love how the buildings look sprinkled onto the desert, it's very disorienting at first.

So much great photography posts here lately!
posted by rottytooth at 7:09 PM on October 22, 2009

It looks the future.
posted by doctor_negative at 7:09 PM on October 22, 2009

like the future
posted by doctor_negative at 7:10 PM on October 22, 2009

It's not very often that an artist statement really improves photographs. Be sure to read it.
posted by The Devil Tesla at 7:56 PM on October 22, 2009

Great post, thanks.
posted by Benjamin Nushmutt at 7:58 PM on October 22, 2009

I agree Devil Tesla. The last sentence is perfect -- "In the US, and in most places, I feel like I am in a city, region, or nation—those intangible creations of people. But in Lima, I felt not like I was in a city, in Peru, or even South America, but atop the Earth herself."

I love Peru :)
posted by vronsky at 9:07 PM on October 22, 2009