Mexico City

Cucurrucucu: Considering the Crime

“Perhaps it is a fantasy that one could wield power over the representation of death by its abstracted nature? Is this not a dangerous game to play god over the image of death?”

Indexing the Execrable: Stefan Ruiz’s Mexican Crime Photographs

“Here he has collected thieves and murderers, but mostly thieves. Los Ladrones. Sticky fingers”. Mexican Crime Photographs from the archive of Stefan Ruiz With dry and flaking fingers, the man combs over the contents of a shoe box full of rusty paperclips and tattered and some odorous pieces of paper featuring young men, so many […]

Susana Vargas and the “Red Page” Transgender Sensationalism of “Mujercitos” in Mexican Tabloid Culture

“Daddy, do you have a Cigarette for me, I think Maybe is getting late Maybe time is running out You know, I knew somebody once Rifled through his drawers I wasn’t that suspicious, but… You know these things They happen But… muñeca Do you have a towel? See those people gather round Baby, do […]

101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides at Aperture (2013)

Untitled, (Adela Legarreta Rivas is struck by a white Datsun on Avenida Chapultepec, Mexico City, 29 April 1979) Despite their often gruesome content, it is fascinating and often too easy to look at Metinides’ pictures. In the same way that many of the photographs depict audiences amidst tragedy, we too become spectators of the event. […]

PJ ROUNTREE: “HOT, DAILY DEATH AND SEX” (2012)

El Grafico 28,051, November 29, 2010 Hot, Daily Death and Sex Text by Paul Loomis, ASX, May 2012 I had been living in Mexico City for only two months when I encountered artist P.J. Rountree’s collection of El Grafico covers. He collects various visual textures from the urban environment, manipulating some and archiving others as […]

Agustin Victor Casasola: “Mexico City”

Agustín Víctor Casasola (1874–1928) was a Mexican photographer and partial founder of the Mexican Association of Press Photographers. Born in Mexico City, Casasola apprenticed as a typesetter and later became a reporter for El Imparicial, which was one of the official newspapers of the Díaz government. With innovations and improvements in photography and printing […]

An Interview with Enrique Metinides: Death, Gore and Crying at Night

“So I got used to seeing dead people—and more dead people—and I took their pictures. And we would go to where the dead person was, and since the authorities then the reporter do his work, we would go right inside the houses where the crime had occurred, on the street, in the factory, in a […]