Enchantments of Jarana: A Reflexive Approach to Documentary Photography and Criolla Music in Lima

This article examines the relationship between documentary photography and criollo music practices in Lima, proposing the photo essay as an analytical tool for understanding the jarana as a living urban practice shaped by collective interaction, performance, and shared musical practices. Drawing on visual anthropology, performance studies, and image theory, photography is approached not only as a means of documentation, but also as a form of knowledge production about popular culture. The research takes La Catedral del Criollismo — a community-based musical space located in the district of Breña — as its ethnographic core, where musical practice organizes affective ties, intergenerational participation, and ritualized forms of interaction. Building from this fieldwork, the article analyzes two photo essays developed across different criollo spaces in Lima — El jardín de los autores. Dulce veneno del valse (2015) and A la limeña. Encanto de jarana (2017) — in order to explore the performative and relational dimensions of contemporary criollismo in the Peruvian capital. Rather than understanding photography as a merely representational device, the article argues that the photo essay enables a slower and more attentive reading of musical performance, revealing gestures, hierarchies, and forms of collective interaction that often become diluted within digital circulation. In this sense, the study proposes the photo essay as a methodological contribution to the study of urban popular culture in Latin American contexts, shifting the focus from heritage-based understandings of criollismo toward its everyday forms of social interaction and cultural continuity.

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