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Through powerful and evocative images, five photographers who developed a considerable part of their oeuvre in Mexico, contribute keys to a real and metaphorical representation of the Mexican culture, society and situation in the face of modernity. Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Héctor García, Edward Weston, Fritz Henle and Gerardo Suter have explored the documentary field as well as allegorical and personal themes in their photographic dossiers of the Mexican. The interpretations of Mexico presented in this show ranged from master Álvarez Bravo´s classical photographs, which portray the political and social climate of Post-Revolutionary Mexico, to Gerardo Suter´s enigmatic landscapes and dramatic compositions of naked figures wearing masks and other accessories.
The 34 images exhibited also revealed parallels between the life and work of these photographers. For example, during his sojourn in Mexico, Weston found new bearings for his work, since it was at the suggestion of his wife, Tina Modotti, a photographer like himself that he came to know Álvarez Bravo, who had a strong impact on the work he was developing at that time. Modotti and Weston arrived in Mexico in 1923, at the dawning of a period of rich artistic creativity known as the “Mexican Renaissance”, characterized in the field of photography by a modernist aesthetics that left an indelible mark on the subsequent generations of photographers. One of these photographers was García, who studied with Álvarez Bravo and whose photographs have served to define the history of his country. The exhibition also included Henle, a German who visited Mexico for the first time in 1936 and who, impressed by the paradoxical reality of a country with millenary cultures and a revolutionary way of entering into modernism, began to plan the execution of a photographic essay. The photographer fell in love with the wild Mexican landscapes and the beauty of indigenous peoples and their traditional lifestyles. The Argentine artist Suter, who has lived in Mexico since the 1970s, showed black and white photographs featuring details of naked bodies, intimate framings developed through a careful work of light and shadows that highlight even the minutest pores and wrinkles of the skin..
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