mexican vanguardia photography/ PHOTOICON MAGAZINE

This months issue of photoicon magazine features 26 vanguardia photographers from mexico, including myself. it is a good and extensive coverage on what photography is all about in mexico.

the editors note:


By SANTIAGO GARCÉS VILLANUEVA
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR


In our previous issue, Made in Scandinavia, we came into contact with a world where photography is mostly a consequence of the profound study of a concept together with the techniques that translate it into images. In contrast, this issue is dedicated to radically different photographic languages. Rather than a collective artistic effort, we will look at the multiple expressions of photography in a country where extreme contrasts are the rule.

To get a better understanding of the general composition of this issue, it’s worth mentioning that Mexico is going through very complicated times, marked by the violence of drug wars and the extreme poverty in which a large part of the population lives. Paradoxically, some of the world’s wealthiest individuals have made fortunes out of this same society.

In spite of all this, such a context seems to be a source of inspiration: Mexican photography is worthy of the international recognition, but it also plays, in its more conventional form, a central role in everyday life.

Today, it’s extremely difficult to talk about Mexican photography in general, but it’s even more difficult to describe it in detail. This medium forms part of an infinite number of ways of life, each with their corresponding forms of expression, which cannot be easily catalogued and which, like the worst type of virus, are continually mutating.

Just like the inhabitants of this multitudinous country, photography is constantly adopting different personalities and moods, sometimes suggestive, incomprehensible and sometimes simply bipolar.

The line between fiction and reality is a fine and tortuous one. To see this, one only has to compare the portraits of quinceañeras – sweet sixteen-like 15-year olds – in palaces that they will probably never visit, with the princesses photographed by Daniela Rosell in her Rich and Famous series in palaces they will probably never leave.

It’s precisely this fine, sinuous line between reality and fiction that seems to have always existed in Mexico and is more defined every day, which we trace in this issue through the sincere images of local photographers and the surprised and curious views of foreign photographers.