MEXICO

Alejandro “Luperca” Morales – El Retrato de Tu Ausencia

In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg set out to create a work in which erasure/negation would define the principal production method. Instead of building a drawing or painting up from aggregated layers, the artist made a conscious conceptual decision to work backward from the point of completed artwork back to a form of trace in which the […]

Susan Lipper Interview: Domesticated Land

“I was very motivated by Deborah’s Bright’s 1985 essay: Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men, which stressed the importance of differing subjective viewpoints from the established patriarchal vision”

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 […]

Jeffrey Silverthorne: Where Energy Goes @ Unseen

” The overlapping of basic subjects, the presentation of identities and where life/energy goes, is embedded in these content matters which superficially seem to be diverse but are really very intimately related. Life is a multi-faceted coin that we each need to turn in many ways”. Brad Feuerhelm, ASX, September 2015 BF: I have been […]

GRACIELA ITURBIDE

  Born in Mexico City in 1942, Iturbide did not begin as a still photographer. In 1969 she enrolled in film school at the Centro de Estudios Cinematográficos at the Universidad Nacional Autónama de México but was drawn to still photography when she met Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who was teaching there. He became her mentor […]

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. […]

Enrique Metinides – “Series” (2011)

 Enrique Metinides started shooting crime scenes in Mexico City and publishing photographs in local newspapers when he was 12 years old.   By Paul Loomis, ASX, January, 2013 Enrique Metinides started shooting crime scenes in Mexico City and publishing photographs in local newspapers when he was 12 years old. He is now in his 70s, […]

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 […]

ASX.TV: Enrique Metinides – “SERIES” (2011)

2011 Kominek Books, 24,5 x34,5 cm , 144 pages 100 images, color and b/w duotone. Series is an attempt to examine Enrique Metinides’ work from the perspective of cinematography, sequentially revealing facts that come together in a substantial way to form a common motif with continuity—thematic at least—between the various episodes of his oeuvre. This iconoclastic approach […]

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 […]

MAYA GODED: “Plaza de la Soledad” (Spanish)

Plaza de la Soledad By Josue Ramirez ¿Qué decir sobre el dolor, de la tristeza o la dureza plasmadas en estas fotografías de Maya Goded? Acaso decir “estética de la miseria” no es más que otro de los equívocos de nuestras maneras de nombrar el mundo, un error conceptual, una aberración designativa que evidencia nuestras […]