Adela legarreta rivas images of nature
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.
Untitled, (Adela Legarreta Rivas is struck by a white Datsun on Avenida Chapultepec, Mexico City, 29 April )
By Vladimir Gintoff, ASX NYC, March
In an age of unparalleled media saturation, the diversity of ways we experience tragedy, real, imagined, or virtual, have risen exponentially.
Royalty free images of nature Instead, his voracious visual appetite encompassed the spectacle of all human life, including viscerally shocking instances of accidents, murders and the terrible tragic scenes that were the normal daily occurrences in the great and vibrant modern metropolis that was New York city. The photographs and accompanying captions are excerpted from Tragedies of Enrique Metinides , a retrospective newly published by Aperture. Lake Xochimilco, Mexico City, Weegee understood the world of newspapers, and what they were looking for in terms of photography.Enrique Metinides (b. Mexico City, ) was a media photographer for over fifty years. Working for Mexico’s infamous nota roja crime magazines, he chronicled the gore and grist of life, and has often been called the Mexican Weegee. The exhibit at Aperture Gallery, Tragedies of Enrique Metinides, is a dossier of planes, trains, cars and trucks, shown crashed, crumpled, submerged, and on-fire.
There are broken limbs, gunshot wounds, electrocutions, drownings and suicides, among other unfortunate events.
Aperture’s exhibition is a selection of choice images. It is the first time Metinides has curated his own work. Many of the photographs are accompanied by captions, explaining narratives and providing commentary by the artist. The presentation is a collaboration with the curator and documentary filmmaker, Trisha Ziff, who worked with Metinides for six years to develop the project.
It was first shown at Rencontres d’Arles Photography Festival in France in , where discussion with Aperture began about a book and a New York exhibition.
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.
Our willingness to spectate originates in our relentless curiosity, which is the foundational element of our media obsessed culture.
We view catastrophes from estranged distances, and are intrigued by nightmares that are not our own. Susan Sontag remarks in On Photography, “Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.” Metinides’ has noted the influence of cinema in his work, where compositional elements are consistently used to heighten the significance of events.
Adela legarreta rivas images of nature photography Nickolas Muray — Frida Kahlo, Invited by a friend to visit, Hungarian-born Nickolas Muray traveled to Mexico, where he was introduced to the artist Frida Kahlo, a woman he would never forget. He operated at the centre of what was then the undisputed greatest metropolis in the world, deftly recording it with his Speed Graphic camera and the harsh blue flash bulbs that give his pictures their inflected sense of chiaroscuro. He reminds us that everything forms part of the temporal architecture of daily existence—a complex and often confusing picture of life as the seconds tick by. Highly influenced by Mexican modernist master Manuel Alvarez Bravo whom she assisted in the seventies, her work focuses primarily on the Indigenous cultures of Mexico that still prevail.These aesthetic decisions skew and infect the realities that are being depicted with a greater immediacy and an enhanced poignancy.
A woman contemplating suicide on the 27th floor ledge of the modernist Torre Latinoamericana, could be a deleted scene from a Hitchcock film. A cinematic narrative is formed in two-photographs of a drowned man on the edge of a pool surrounded by onlookers, and a grainier image below showing his lifeless body still under water.
In Metinides’ photographs, the diversity of tragedy seems too strange to be anything but plots that are formed in the minds and budgets of Hollywood studios.
Col. Doctores. Niños heroes, Mexico City, (This woman did not have money for a coffin for her child who had been killed.)
It is alarming to realize that an image of the collapsed Regis Hotel in Mexico City, downed by a earthquake, is a spectacular chronicle of chance.
Google images of nature: Thus started a romance that continued for a decade and a friendship that lasted the rest of their lives. Each of them recorded remarkable aspects of their lives and times in their own inimitable way, leaving indelible footprints on the photographic canon. This way of working has proven to be inspirational for subsequent generations of biographical photographers who use the medium to explore the beauty and strangeness of their own lives. Should these terrible moments not remain private?
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film Amores Perros, also set in Mexico, has eerie similarities to Metinides’ photographs and to the coincidence of documentary photography. The film begins with a car chase and horrific accident. Subsequently, we jump to the past and navigate through the circumstances that will prompt the opening sequence.
Metinidies’ photograph of journalist Adela Legarreta Rivas, lifeless and contorted with her face against a pole, has haunting similarities to Iñárritu’s film.
Captions compliment our understanding of the photographs, and their implied narratives. We learn that a woman carrying a small white coffin down the street, is a mother carrying her’s son casket after the sympathy of others paid for what she herself could not afford.
The scope of tragedy is wide-ranging, and circumstances are not always plagued by grief. An image of a boy with striking wide-eyes is shown looking cheerfully at a collection of small toys in his hospital bed.
Adela legarreta rivas images of nature Death and also sex are both ostensibly private moments. As with so many others by Metinides in my collection, his art, if I can call it that, is a catalogue of death and suffering in all its random, often absurd everydayness. His obsessive documenting of his day-by-day journey through the complex and rich tapestry of Japan, in particular his home city of Tokyo, entrances me at every page of his work I see. Whether it be scenes from the street, food, sex, bondage, the underbelly of Shinjuku in its 70s heyday, or simply his passionate and enduring love for his city, his images have garnered him local rock-star status—he can do no wrong.He was abandoned and then hit by car eight-weeks earlier, breaking both his legs, but is shown fully-recovered and soon to be discharged.
While speaking about the project, Trisha Ziff discouraged thinking about these ills as being exclusive to or more common in Mexico. Instead one should focus on the randomness and fragility of our society.
Tragedies can happen anywhere. Metinides’ images are unique in their ability to capture critical moments.
Adela legarreta rivas images of nature paintings He was a photographer so attuned to the goings-on in New York, that he seemed to intuit events before their unfolding. Adela Legarreta Rivas was a Mexican journalist. Araki clearly understands this and resolutely refuses to allow these unique, small moments he illuminates through his lens to escape unrecorded and ultimately unpublished. He showed me a medley of films of huge fires, accidents and arson.Here, Roland Barthes’ fabled punctum yields a punch instead of a prick. Tragedies of Enrique Metinides is an evocation of the photographer’s interest in depicting tragedy and satisfies our media conditioned appetite for this type of imagery. In the caption for a rather straight-forward image of a car crash, Metinides responds to the throngs of onlookers with, “People love drama, and like to look at accidents.
They love gossip, being nosy, interfering. That’s why there is always an audience for these dramas, these spetaculos [sic]!”
Tragedies of Enrique Metinides.
Photographs by Enrique Metinides.
Edited and with introduction by Trisha Ziff.
Aperture,
Vladimir Gintoff graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in with degrees in Photography and Art History.
(All rights reserved. Text Vladimir Gintoff and ASX, Images © Enrique Metindies, Courtesy Aperturer Foundation and berlin)
Posted in Exhibitions, Reviews - All and tagged Aperture Foundation, Death, Enrique Metinides, Exhibition Review, Mexico, Mexico City, Vladimir Gintoff.