Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2019 från Aperture

Alinka Echeverría During a 2015 research residency at the Musee Nicephore Niepce—a French museum devoted to Joseph-Nicephore Niepce, who is often credited as the inventor of photography—Mexican British artist Alinka Echeverria employed an intersectional feminist lens to recontextualize the museum’s colonial archives. With a background in social anthropology, she studies historical representations of women in photography, using collage to liberate and reframe these images. Echeverria’s upcoming show at the Musee des beaux-arts de Montreal, Simulacres, revisits her work on Niepce to pose critical conversations between archival images of women and vases from the museum’s collection. “Alinka’s work not only addresses questions of the feminine but also the question of the ‘other’ as objects of colonial study,” says Maria Wills Londono, curator of the exhibition. “She works in collages—tearing images, taking…

While Mexico City has been intermittently a progressive and modern city with a cosmopolitan culture, it has been equally notorious for state-, military-, and narcotic-related violence and corruption, along with sharp class distinctions. On September 19, 1985, one of the country’s most devastating earthquakes occurred in the city. Hundreds of buildings fell, and thousands of lives were lost. Whole neighborhoods in the center lay abandoned, and distrust in the government was rampant, a condition that was exacerbated in the years that followed, as in 1994, when Mexico entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada, widely considered at the time to be serving only the elite. Against this backdrop, however, something of a renaissance took place in the 1990s, with sudden attention being paid…

There are cities that embrace change with a particular enthusiasm: quick to wipe out traces of anything that feels even remotely out-of-date, constantly refurbishing, rebuilding, and reinventing themselves. Other cities seem burdened by history or nostalgia, permanently stuck in the frame of the past. Mexico City can’t make up its mind. We are quick to adopt the new but never let go of the old. Whatever lands in Mexico City never leaves: bebop and boleros, perms and plastic stretchy hair bands, pachucos and cholas, Formica counters and leatherette stools, German street organs and candied apples, gold teeth and Sunday picnics, peach-colored wallpaper and bright-blue eye shadow, hand lettering and feathered crowns, shiny polyester slacks and zebra prints, plastic flowers and fiberglass chairs, printed holograms and cock fights, Datsuns and Galaxies,…

In Mexico, the journalism industry began to take shape toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Even so, it was not until the 1930s that the first editorial offering was made available to the general public to better meet their tastes and economic means. As a result of this shift, Mexican print journalism became an active part of the country’s social life and an established source of employment. At the cutting edge of this expansion were illustrated publications, especially comic books and magazines, featuring topics ranging from general interest to specialized titles covering performance, sports, and crime. At the time, neither the national population’s high rate of illiteracy nor their lack of education, for the most part, hindered the ability of daily and…

Maya Goded and Mayra Martell are two Mexico City–based photographers who chronicle the stories of families whose daughters have been murdered or disappeared in Ciudad Juárez. Martell has worked her whole life—first in Juárez, her hometown, and then across Latin America—on the identities and vestiges of young women who are absent, yet present in the places they used to inhabit. She has also documented those affected by other forms of violence, such as the mothers of people murdered by the Colombian Army or the everyday nature of drug culture in Sinaloa. In turn, Goded’s work has been, as she describes it herself, “exploring the subjects of female sexuality, prostitution, and gender violence in a society in which the role of women is narrowly defined and femininity is shrouded in myths…

In the spring of 1981, the exhibition Libros fotográficos de autores latinoamericanos (Photographic books by Latin American authors) opened in Mexico City. Part of a colloquium focused on photography in Latin America that carried the subtitle Hecho en Latino América (Made in Latin America), the show included approximately two hundred books, most placed on tables so the public could examine them—and, if they wanted, buy them. The exhibition had been in the works for years, at least since 1976, when the Mexican magazine Artes visuales published an article on photographic books written by curator and editor Maria Cristina Orive twenty years earlier. In the 1970s, a consensus was emerging about the significance of these publications in Latin America. In photobooks, images become the text: they are a form of visual…

“Mexico City, as we all know, is a small town of fourteen million,” Roberto Bolano wrote in The Savage Detectives, set in the 1970s and one of the great novels about the sprawling capital. As in Bolano’s day, the city continues to host a thriving and cosmopolitan cultural scene. And photographers remind us that the city’s history reaches back much earlier than its founding in 1325. Pablo Lopez Luz considers the geography here in geological time by tracing the uses of rock that remains from the eruption of volcanoes around two millennia ago. The flow of stone “provides a means for meditation on the ancient origins of Mexico City and its amazing persistence,” writer Alvaro Enrigue observes. “An almost-seven-hundred-year-old town that has gone through innumerable invasions, earthquakes, bombings, and floods,…

Mexico’s relationship to photobooks is nearly as old as the country itself. Agustín Víctor Casasola’s never-completed Álbum histórico gráfico (Historical graphic album) sought to capture Mexico’s revolution in the early twentieth century. Since then, photobooks have continued to evolve alongside Mexico’s diverse and multicultural society. Perhaps the best embodiment of this spirit is Pablo Ortíz Monasterio, a photographer, editor, curator, and prolific collector. Ortíz Monasterio edited Río de Luz (River of light), a government-funded book series featuring monographs by Latin American photographers such as Pedro Meyer and Mariana Yampolsky. In 1994, along with his peers in the photography community, Ortíz Monasterio founded the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, where he has served as chief curator and editor of Luna Córnea, a magazine that promotes critical dialogue around photography.…

Walter Benjamin described Eugène Atget as a photographer who “always passed by the ‘great sights and so-called landmarks’” but instead was attentive to “a long row of boot lasts … or tables after people have finished eating and left, the dishes not yet cleared away.” We could go on: nor would he overlook a flowery carpet hanging from a window to dry under the sun, or a bakery display with piled-up bread forming peculiar geometric patterns. That is, Atget was the rare kind of photographer who was interested not in human beings, but rather in the traces they left in the world. An artist like Gabriel Orozco fits comfortably into this category. Instead of following in the steps of Mexican photographers dedicated, above all, to trying to penetrate “the country’s…

In 2003, Iñaki Bonillas inherited a collection from his Basque grandfather, José Rodríguez Plaza, who had arrived in Mexico as an exile from Spain decades earlier. J. R. Plaza had an expansive imagination. He photographed himself dressed up as various characters from American Westerns and made business cards for jobs he never held. The J. R. Plaza archive would become an enduring long-term project for Bonillas, one of Mexico’s most insightful artists when it comes to transforming the field of photography. His rigorous, decidedly experimental methodology encompasses photography, video, installation, site-specific interventions, and artist’s books. Bonillas, who in his youth worked as an “assistant to the assistant” in the photographer Carlos Somonte’s studio, has long been interested what he calls the “extra-photographic aspects of the medium.” In his deeply researched…

In 1972, in a commercial space in the Cacho neighborhood of Tijuana, my parents founded Venegas Fine Photography. Their studio offered novel services such as color photography made with a medium-format Hasselblad camera and, eventually, the delivery of a wedding album that chronicled the milestone event in its entirety. For all these innovations, my father’s brand became a form of identification for Tijuana’s nascent upper-middle class. Years before, my mother, Julia Edith, had encouraged my father, José Luis, to study photography by correspondence through the Famous Photographers School, where Alfred Eisenstaedt, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn taught. A key part of the school’s philosophy was that students pay for the course through their photographic work. My parents moved from Tijuana to Los Angeles in 1967, and José Luis began to…

For more than fifty years, Graciela Iturbide, recognized today as the greatest living photographer in Latin America, has envisioned the diversity of life in her native Mexico. Her lyrical, black-and-white images of street scenes in Mexico City, of Seri women in the Sonoran Desert, of political rallies in Juchitán, and of details inside Frida Kahlo’s bathroom are revered throughout the world. At the age of twenty-seven, aspiring to be a filmmaker, she enrolled in a university class with the maestro of modern Mexican photography, Manuel Álvarez Bravo. The experience was formative. “More than being my teacher of photography,” she recalls, “Don Manuel taught me about life.” Earlier this year, the editor and publisher Ramón Reverté visited Iturbide at her home in the Mexico City neighborhood of Coyoacán. One wall of…

Black square. Not the one Kazimir Malevich painted in the second decade of the past century, but the one British physician Robert Fludd included in his 1617 treatise, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia (Metaphysical, physical, and technical history of both the macrocosm and the microcosm). In the book’s fourth chapter, a square, not totally black due to the printing technique, has the inscription “Et sic in infinitum” (And so on until infinity) on each of its four sides. Fludd describes this illustration as showing, “in the form of an utterly black smoke,” the raw material of the universe “without dimension or form, without color or perception, neither still nor in movement.” This black square exceeds the limits of representation. Perhaps like Malevich’s, it presents…

In the early twentieth century, Alfred Stieglitz decried the insular production of amateur photo clubs in the United States, so the vitality of an international network of similar organizations over fifty years later might come as a surprise. And yet, in the years following World War II, one finds an extraordinary range of original creative production—perhaps nowhere more so than in metropolises across Latin America. In 2021, the Museum of Modern Art will open an exhibition featuring work from São Paulo’s Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB), Brazil’s preeminent amateur photo club, founded in 1939. To situate these achievements, it is useful to consider contemporary activity in Paris, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, the German city of Saarbrücken, and elsewhere, as photo clubs in these cities regularly exchanged the work of…

Many of Tania Franco Klein’s photographs depict female figures who seem lost in the vastness of an inhospitable landscape or in a moment of contemplation, the edges of the self contained within those of a geometrical interior. Her images are bathed in a warm cinematic light, boudoir red, and suffused with a Lynchian sense of menace—they resemble film stills taken midnarrative, though it’s unclear whether the climactic moment has yet taken place. For her newest series, Mercado de Sonora (2019), Franco Klein focuses her gaze for the first time, after many photographic projects abroad, on her native Mexico. In the past, she has often donned a wig and turned the camera on herself; in this body of work, her mother and grandmother become the models in an extended form of…