Carmen Mojica Martinez (b. 1956) is a photographer whose lens bears witness to the soul of the South Bronx and the layered realities of New York City. Mojica’s work is recognized her work as an urgent and poetic act of preservation—an archive of resilience, beauty, and the unvarnished truths embedded in everyday life. For nearly five decades, Martinez has approached photography as both documentation and devotion, returning again and again to the streets that shaped her identity, even after leaving the Bronx in the early 1990s.

Martinez’s images operate at the threshold of intimacy and distance, capturing strangers who, through her lens, become carriers of collective memory. Her photographs reject spectacle; instead, they render the quiet strength and enduring humanity of communities often overlooked or misrepresented. In framing these fleeting moments, Martinez constructs a visual language rooted in care—a resistance against erasure and a call for visibility.

Her practice is deeply autobiographical, yet expansive. From her early analog work to her current exploration of digital media, Martinez charts the evolving landscapes of the Bronx while reflecting on systemic inequities that persist across generations. She speaks candidly about the dissonance between institutional narratives and lived realities, questioning why major cultural spaces—those situated in the very neighborhoods they claim to serve—so rarely champion artists like herself. This critical awareness runs parallel to her unwavering commitment to documenting what she calls “the culture of carelessness” that surrounds urban neglect: broken elevators, streets strewn with trash, the daily indignities endured by residents. Through her photographs, these conditions are neither romanticized nor reduced to despair; rather, they are contextualized within a continuum of struggle, survival, and transformation.

Martinez’s recent inclusion in Seis del Sur—a historically male collective that chronicles Latino life in the Bronx—marks a pivotal recognition of her contributions. Yet her work resists the lure of institutional validation, remaining grounded in the conviction that representation begins within the community itself. Her images resonate with the pulse of migration, cultural hybridity, and generational continuity, mirroring the shifting demographics of the South Bronx while tracing its enduring spirit.

In an era of rapid gentrification, Martinez poses difficult questions: Can neighborhoods improve without erasing their histories? How do we cultivate collective responsibility amid systemic neglect? These inquiries infuse her work with a profound ethical dimension. With age, she reflects, vision may blur, but it also deepens. And so she continues—camera in hand, eyes sharpened by memory and hope—creating photographs that insist on visibility, dignity, and the radical necessity of care.