"Now this publication is available in English as Mexican Suite. Olivier Debroise and Stella de Sa Rego have revised this edition to include more current material and explanatory notes for an audience less familiar with Mexican history. They have also eliminated some of the general history of photography and added more of the early history of photography in Mexico, as well as many new, previously unpublished images. The book is organized both chronologically and thematically, which allows viewer/readers to follow the evolution of major photographic genres and styles. Debroise also examines the role of photography in the development of modern Mexico and the influence of prominent foreign photographers such as Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
The Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 is among the world’s most visually documented revolutions. Coinciding with the birth of filmmaking and the increased mobility offered by the reflex camera, it received extraordinary coverage by photographers and cineastes—commercial and amateur, national and international. Many images of the Revolution remain iconic to this day—Francisco Villa galloping toward the camera; Villa lolling in the presidential chair next to Emiliano Zapata; and Zapata standing stolidly in charro raiment with a carbine in one hand and the other hand on a sword, to mention only a few. But the identities of those who created the thousands of extant images of the Mexican Revolution, and what their purposes were, remain a huge puzzle because photographers constantly plagiarized each other’s images. In this pathfinding book, acclaimed photography historian John Mraz carries out a monumental analysis of photographs produced during the Mexican Revolution, focusing primarily on those made by Mexicans, in order to discover who took the images and why, to what ends, with what intentions, and for whom. He explores how photographers expressed their commitments visually, what aesthetic strategies they employed, and which identifications and identities they forged. Mraz demonstrates that, contrary to the myth that Agustín Víctor Casasola was “the photographer of the Revolution,” there were many who covered the long civil war, including women. He shows that specific photographers can even be linked to the contending forces and reveals a pattern of commitment that has been little commented upon in previous studies (and completely unexplored in the photography of other revolutions).
Hugo Brehme created an idyllic vision of Mexico that influenced photography, film, and literature for a hundred years. His beautifully composed, timeless images of lo mexicano—cacti and pyramids, Indian children and marketplaces, colonial buildings and snow-capped volcanoes and peaks—were widely distributed and acclaimed both in Mexico and internationally. Noted critic Olivier Debroise characterized Brehme as "both the first modern photographer of Mexico and the last representative of its old guard and of a certain nineteenth-century vision." Working in Mexico from 1905 until his death in 1954, he was an early mentor to Mexico's most famous photographer, Manuel álvarez Bravo, and a significant influence on Golden Age filmmakers Gabriel Figueroa and Emilio "El Indio" Fernández. Brehme-esque imagery even appears in the work of American filmmaker John Ford and Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. Timeless Mexico presents an outstanding selection of Hugo Brehme's photographs, ranging from imagery of the Mexican Revolution to scenic landscapes, colonial architecture, and the everyday life of indigenous peoples. Susan Toomey Frost, who has collected Brehme's photography for many years, provides an illuminating introduction to his life and work. She also describes his practice of printing and distributing his photographs as collectible postcards—a practice that, together with publication in countless books, magazines, and tourist brochures, gave Brehme's work the wide circulation that made his images of Mexico iconic. Art historian Stella de Sá Rego authoritatively discusses Brehme's place in the history of Mexican photography, especially within Pictorialism, as she reveals how a man from Eisenach, Germany, came to create an enduring visual mythology of the essence of Mexico.
Three decades after its foundation the National Photo Library is published the first large catalog of its collection. The volumeprovides an overview of the art of photography in Mexico and showcases one of the most important Latin American collections,irreplaceable testimony of more than 130 years of social history, political, cultural, artistic, scientific and economic life. Includes brief descriptions and large samples of funds Fototecamost interesting: the Mexican past and their indigenous heritage,the pioneer photographers of the nineteenth century, theCasasola collection, the photographs of Guillermo Kahlo's colonial architecture, records of Modotti, Brehme, Lopez andmany more. This book, bound in cloth and with the title stampedin gold letters, is a useful compendium to several researchers, as well as an endless source of delight for lovers of photography.
"Paul Strand in Mexico" tells the story of the photographer's journeys through Mexico in the early 1930s. In search of a fresh start, Strand traveled to Mexico City in late 1932 at the invitation of Carlos Chavez, the eminent Mexican composer and conductor. The work he created during this key period reflects a time of intense productivity, creative renewal, and the evolution of Strand's foundational idea of the "collective portrait," in which he depicted a region through photographs of individuals, still lifes and studies of architecture and religious subjects. The first publication to chronicle this pivotal time in Strand's career (1932-34), "Paul Strand in Mexico "demonstrates how, through his photographic studies and work in film, Strand deepened his involvement with Mexican art, society, and revolutionary politics. Shedding new light on this little-known chapter of Strand's life, a scholarly analysis by James Krippner (Associate Professor of History at Haverford College, Pennsylvania) brings together primary research from distinguished archives and institutions in both Mexico and the United States, and Mexican photo-historian Alfonso Morales contributes an essay contextualizing this remarkable body of work within the canon of Mexican photography and film of the 1930s. Additionally, the appendix serves as the catalogue raisonne of Strand's entire photographic output in Mexico. The culmination of Strand's time in Mexico was his collaboration with Emilio Gomez Muriel and Academy Award-winning director Fred Zinnemann on the groundbreaking film, "Redes" ("The Wave") (1936). A remastered DVD version of the film is included with this essential volume. Paul Strand (1890-1976) is one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. As a youth, he studied under Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, going on to draw acclaim from such illustrious sources as Alfred Stieglitz. After World War II, Strand traveled around the world--from New England to Ghana to France to the Outer Hebrides--to photograph, and in the process created a dynamic and significant body of work.
Agustín Victor Casasola photographed everyone of consequence in Mexico at the time of the revolution, from Francisco (Pancho) Villa, Emiliano Zapata and the exiled Russian leader Leon Trotsky to artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. For this splendid collection of Casasola's work, the noted American author Pete Hamill has written a rich essay on the photographer and the Mexico he pictured so well.
In Looking for Mexico, a leading historian of visual culture, John Mraz, provides a panoramic view of Mexico’s modern visual culture from the U.S. invasion of 1847 to the present. Along the way, he illuminates the powerful role of photographs, films, illustrated magazines, and image-filled history books in the construction of national identity, showing how Mexicans have both made themselves and been made with the webs of significance spun by modern media. Central to Mraz’s book is photography, which was distributed widely throughout Mexico in the form of cartes-de-visite, postcards, and illustrated magazines. Mraz analyzes the work of a broad range of photographers, including Guillermo Kahlo, Winfield Scott, Hugo Brehme, Agustín Víctor Casasola, Tina Modotti, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Héctor García, Pedro Meyer, and the New Photojournalists. He also examines representations of Mexico’s past in the country’s influential picture histories: popular, large-format, multivolume series replete with thousands of photographs and an assortment of texts. Turning to film, Mraz compares portrayals of the Mexican Revolution by Fernando de Fuentes to the later movies of Emilio Fernández and Gabriel Figueroa. He considers major stars of Golden Age cinema as gender archetypes for mexicanidad, juxtaposing the charros (hacienda cowboys) embodied by Pedro Infante, Pedro Armendáriz, and Jorge Negrete with the effacing women: the mother, Indian, and shrew as played by Sara García, Dolores del Río, and María Félix. Mraz also analyzes the leading comedians of the Mexican screen, representations of the 1968 student revolt, and depictions of Frida Kahlo in films made by Paul Leduc and Julie Taymor. Filled with more than fifty illustrations, Looking for Mexico is an exuberant plunge into Mexico’s national identity, its visual culture, and the connections between the two.
