Carlos Jaramillo's South Central: A Neighborhood Pictured, Finally Seen

Carlos Jaramillo spent a full year, starting in 2020, looking for an ice cream man in South Central Los Angeles. That failed search became the engine of South Central (2024–ongoing), a series published in Aperture No. 264, "Stop Time," that turns a neighborhood routinely flattened into visual shorthand for urban decay into something quieter and harder to dismiss: a place in thoughtful repose.

The story starts with a borrowed studio. Jaramillo was staying with the painter Ozzie Juarez, who let him use his South Central space for interior photoshoots. But the work happened outdoors, on long walks. "It reminded me so much of where I grew up, the large immigrant communities, Latino families," Jaramillo said. "I just felt very much like home."

The roots run deeper than sentiment. Born in McAllen, Texas, Jaramillo spent a decade in New York after studying photography at the School of Visual Arts before returning west. His parents lived in South Central before he was born. "We have a lot of family photos of them around 86th and Broadway," he said. His mother was pregnant with him when the family, visiting relatives in Mexico, detoured to the nearest Texas border town so he could be born on American soil. They stayed. That accident of geography loops back, decades later, into the frame.

The ice cream man had a specific origin. At the Museum of Latin American Art, Jaramillo encountered Judy Baca's 1994 sculpture Raspados Mojados — a functional Mexican snow cone cart of the kind used by paleteros, painted with images of day laborers. The title invokes the slur "wetback." He wanted a response. "I was really in love with the sculpture," he said. "I couldn't get it out of my head. I really wanted to make a piece about paleteros in South Central. I spent a year trying to find someone to work with, and it wasn't working out. Finally, I said, I'm just going to walk around, and maybe I'll meet a paletero. Walking around, I fell in love with the place even more."

He never says whether he found one. The walks, though, hardened into method — something close to a dérive, the deliberate drift through urban space. What surfaced: roses threading through chain-link fence, yellow canna lilies over a painted iron gate, girls gossiping in clusters or sitting pensively on swings, the halo of late-afternoon sun behind a stop sign.

What separates this from the usual South Central picture?

The neighborhood gets mythologized through grit — orange gels, amplified grain, decline as a default setting. Jaramillo's light is open-ended instead. Residents stare directly into the lens. Sometimes they invite him inside their homes. That's trust, not access, and the distinction matters.

He works three medium-format cameras, choosing per situation. "I have a 645 that allows me to get close to flowers and details and textures," he said. "An RB67 is a clunkier camera, but it's good for photographing people in their homes." The deep depth of field acts like a rising tide, leveling every element onto one plane — no single subject outranked, no hierarchy of importance imposed from behind the tripod.

He resists the genre boundaries, too. "I don't really see a separation between documentary and portraiture," he explained. "I'm combining different types of photography, integrating landscape, architecture. I can get deeper and more intimate by adding all of these different approaches. It helps kind of build this narrative of the place."

A place often depicted, rarely seen

That's his stated aim: not to define South Central — a doomed project for any photographer — but to explore his own relationship with it, expanding the conceptual borders of a place that is, in his framing, often depicted but rarely seen. There's personal nostalgia in the return to his parents' old ground, admittedly. Yet the images keep renewing themselves against one another, each element standing alone without the whole collapsing into a thesis.

How long can it run? "It feels like a lifetime project," he said. "I could just keep shooting forever." With the series ongoing since 2024, and now anchored in Aperture's pages, that claim looks less like hyperbole than a schedule.