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Mexico City
We Latin Americans have been exposed to Mexican culture since we were children. We have listened to their music, we have watched their movies and their soap operas (their telenovelas, as they are now almost universally known, even in English), we have created poor imitations of their rich cuisines, we have applauded their great singers and actors and praised their artists, and we have embraced them as our own. This apparent familiarity has led us to think that we know a country that actually remains a mystery.
I arrived in Mexico City over a decade ago with the intention of making my home there. On my first day of work at a well-known publishing house, my colleagues greeted me with a small sugar calavera, that skull seen everywhere on the Day of the Dead, with my name on it. “You, too, are going to die; don’t take yourself too seriously,” they told me, their smiles crackling with irony. At the company’s front door, they were all working on a large altar to the dead, covered with flowers, fruits of all kinds, images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and smiling calaveras with the names of the dead on them, and the names of the living, too. During this festival to those who have passed over, the country takes on the air of celebration, of fiesta. Skeletons laugh, fall in love, sing, dance, cook many-colored dishes, and recite odes to the living. The underworld mingles with this one, and the inhabitants of both celebrate passion, excess. Mexico City—“the DF” (Distrito Federal), as everyone calls it—is excess.
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Yolanda Andrade is an exquisite observer of Mexico City; she is today one of the most complex interpreters of popular culture. Her work gives life to the fictional qualities of the urban experience.
A story through images. It begins with the arrival. Two pilots see the tops of volcanoes barely poking through the clouds. Below is a city that once stood on a lake and now swims with people.
Lourdes Grobet spent three decades photographing Mexico’s wildly popular professional wrestling, documenting the lives of the fighters inside and outside the ring. The excesses, roughness, and fragility of this sport are captured by her lens.
An intimate and revealing conversation with Rodrigo Moya, one of the most important photographers in Latin America, a man who made his craft a beautiful and perfect statement of humility.
Janet Jarman, an award winning American photographer based in Mexico, and Mario Bellatín, one of Latin America’s most important experimental writers, collaborate on this essay about anguish and solitude in the big city.
Eniac Martínez shows his vision of Mexico City, comprised of a series of images shot during the production of the movie Vivir Mata (Living Kills). A conversation with a creator who makes experimentation a method and work a destination.
For six years Daniela Edburg created photographs of women killed or almost killed by consumer goods. The result is Glamorous Death: a cheerful series with a blithely pop attitude.
Monda Photo, Mexico’s most respected photography collective, brings us an essay about the controversial Santa Muerte religious sect in the Tepito barrio, accompanied by an insightful article by Laura Emilia Pacheco.
The women’s prison is more than the place where society hides its errors. The prison warehouses hundreds of stories of abandonment, abuse, and unconditional love; stories echoed by woman after woman.
Over several years, Federico Gama documented the lives of cholos in Mexico City, a community descended from the Chicanos which embodies, like no other, the cross cultural fusion that distinguishes North America.
What does it mean to be a woman? Moya Goded’s career has, in part, been a search for an answer. She looked not among virgins or maternal figures, but among the broken exponents of a gender that is accustomed to enduring.
Rather than documenting underworlds or the marginalized, he decided to turn his lens on an unexplored territory for photography: the well-to-do. An essay that recounts the daily life of a group of friends in Mexico City
In his series Urban Archeology, Ernesto Ramírez sheds light upon everything that Mexico city produces, abandons, and rejects. The crushed cans, the broken corners, and the chipped murals create a nostalgic scenery.
From mountains, planes, and rooftops, Pablo López Luz has diligently photographed the overwhelming and chaotic growth of Mexico City. The result is “Terrazzo,” a revealing work—close and distant at the same time.
Mexico City faces tremendous water challenges—overexploitation of groundwater, poor water quality, subsidence, flooding, inadequate wastewater treatment, and health concerns about the reuse of wastewater in agriculture.
