Nacho Lopez, Mexican Photographer (Visible Evidence)

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Nacho López, Mexican Photographer

VISIBLE EVIDENCE

Edited by Michael Renov, Faye Ginsburg, and Jane Gaines Volume 14

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John Mraz Nacho López, Mexican Photographer

Volume 13

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Jean Rouch Ciné-Ethnography

Volume 12

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James M. Moran There’s No Place Like Home Video

Volume 11

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Jeffrey Ruoff “An American Family”: A Televised Life

Volume 10

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Beverly R. Singer Wiping the War Paint off the Lens: Native American Film and Video

Volume 9

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Alexandra Juhasz, editor Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video

Volume 8

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Douglas Kellner and Dan Streible, editors Emile de Antonio: A Reader

Volume 7

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Patricia R. Zimmermann States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies

Volume 6

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Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov, editors Collecting Visible Evidence

Volume 5

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Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, editors Feminism and Documentary

Volume 4

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Michelle Citron Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions

Volume 3

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Andrea Liss Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust

Volume 2

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Toby Miller Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media

Volume 1

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Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs, editors Between the Sheets, In the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary

visible evidence, volume 14

Nacho López, Mexican Photographer John Mraz

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis — London

Part of chapter 2 was published in an earlier form as “Today, Tomorrow, and Always: The Golden Age of the Illustrated Magazines in Mexico, 1937–1960,” in Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940, edited by Gilbert M. Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 116–58. Some material in this book originally appeared in a much earlier form in “Nacho López: Photojournalist of the 1950s,” History of Photography 20, no. 3 (autumn 1996), published by Taylor and Francis.

Copyright 2003 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota Photographs by Nacho López copyright conaculta–inah–sinafo—Fototeca Nacional. Reprinted with permission.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu

A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Eli, of course.

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Contents

List of Photographs . . ix Preface . . xiii Author’s Note . . xvii 1. Documenting Mexico . . 1 2. Photojournalism and Photoessays during the 1950s . . 23 3. Photoessays by Nacho López . . 65 Indians 65 Prison 72 Church 79 From the Archive 82 Down but Not Out 91 Celebrities 102 Many Mexicos 107 Nacho López Directs 117 Hell Is for the Humble 127 Mexico City 150 4. Thinking about Documentary . . 163

Notes . . 193 Select Bibliography . . 239 Index

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List of Photographs

1. Nacho López, Pool players, Mexico City, 1954 2. Enrique Díaz, Senator Ezequiel Padilla caught in the act of eating, 1938 3. Anonymous, President Miguel Alemán and Daniel Morales, Mexico City, 1950 4. Julio Mayo, Mother grieving over her dead son, Mexico City, 1952 5. Anonymous, Cabaret dancer, Paris, 1953 6. Nacho López, Women seated at family graves, Janitizio, Morelia, 1950 7. Nacho López, Women seated in front of offerings for the dead, Janitizio, Morelia, 1950 8. Nacho López, Burial, Villa de Ayala, Morelos, 1952 9. Nacho López, Hands with cigarettes under cell door, Lecumberri penitentiary, Mexico City, 1950 10. Nacho López, Woman prisoner and clotheslines, Lecumberri penitentiary, Mexico City, 1950 11. Nacho López, Little girl in the Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City, 1950 12. Nacho López, Women worshiping in the Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City, 1950 13. Nacho López, People kneeling in the Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City, 1950 14. Nacho López, Father and daughter kneeling in the Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City, 1950 15. Nacho López, Woman fulfilling a vow by crawling on her knees to the Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City, 1950 ix

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16. Nacho López, Boy selling religious images, Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City, 1950 17. Nacho López, Boy reading in the street, Mexico City, ca. 1950 18. Nacho López, Man reading torn newspaper, Mexico City, 1949 19. Nacho López, Child peering out window, Venezuela (?), 1948 20. Nacho López, Girl laughing, Mexico City, ca. 1950 21. Nacho López, Family in shack, Río de la Piedad, Mexico City, 1951 22. Nacho López, Couple walking in front of shacks and open sewer, Río de la Piedad, Mexico City, 1951 23. Nacho López, Children with mouse, Río de la Piedad, Mexico City, 1951 24. Nacho López, Boy playing with “toy” found in garbage, Río de la Piedad, Mexico City, 1951 25. Nacho López, Girl peering into house, Río de la Piedad, Mexico City, 1951 26. Nacho López, Girl seated with book, Río de la Piedad, Mexico City, 1951 27. Nacho López, Newsboy, Mexico City, 1951 28. Nacho López, Campesino with PRI propaganda in hat, Puebla, 1951 29. Nacho López, Market carrier, Mexico City, 1951 30. Nacho López, Mannequin and shoppers at market, Mexico City, 1951 31. Nacho López, Construction workers, Latin American Tower, Mexico City, 1951 32. Faustino Mayo, Construction worker, Latin American Tower, Mexico City, 1951 33. Nacho López, Children in a carpa theater, Mexico City, 1952 34. Nacho López, Beautiful woman walking down street, Mexico City, 1953 35. Nacho López, Beautiful woman in market with other women, Mexico City, 1953 36. Nacho López, Man drinking next to mannequin, Mexico City, 1953 37. Nacho López, Man with mannequin in crowd, Mexico City, 1953 38. Nacho López, Men in cantina, Mexico City, 1953 39. Nacho López, Man and women in delegación, Mexico City, 1954 40. Nacho López, Battered woman and child in delegación, Mexico City, 1954 41. Nacho López, Man and woman in delegación, Mexico City, 1954 42. Nacho López, Man and police in delegación, Mexico City, 1954 43. Nacho López, Woman in cell, Mexico City, ca. 1950 44. Nacho López, “Pachuco” or “gigolo” in delegación, Mexico City, 1954 45. Nacho López, Woman covering face in delegación, Mexico City, 1954

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46. Nacho López, Man seated in delegación, Mexico City, 1954 47. Nacho López, Young woman and police in delegación, Mexico City, 1954 48. Nacho López, Policeman sleeping in delegación, Mexico City, 1954 49. Nacho López, Battered woman and child in delegación, Mexico City, 1954 50. Nacho López, Woman standing before book in delegación, Mexico City, 1954 51. Nacho López, “Pachuco” or “gigolo” protesting in delegación, Mexico City, 1954 52. Nacho López, Man protesting in delegación, Mexico City, 1954 53. Nacho López, Middle-class man in delegación, Mexico City, 1954 54. Nacho López, Boy crying, Mexico City, 1955 55. Nacho López, Street sweeper, Mexico City, ca. 1955 56. Nacho López, Boys fighting, Mexico City, ca. 1955 57. Nacho López, Children holding hands, Mexico City, ca. 1955 58. Nacho López, Man grabbed by police during the repression of the Henriquista movement, Mexico City, 1952 59. Nacho López, Man pulling pig to market tied to a cart, Mexico City, ca. 1955 60. Nacho López, Women in supermarket, Mexico City, ca. 1955 61. Nacho López, Couple being photographed, Villa de Guadalupe, Mexico City, 1950

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Preface

This book began as an extended conversation with Eleazar López Zamora, director of the Fototeca of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) from 1980 to 1996. He introduced me to the work of Ignacio (Nacho) López Bocanegra (1923–86) and, as just one expression of his efforts to stimulate research on Mexican photography, invited me to write this book (a quite different version of which was published in Spanish in 1999). In league with Víctor Hugo Valencia, then director of the national system of Fototecas, López Zamora helped me kickstart the project by inviting me to give courses at the INAH Fototeca in 1994 on the history of Mexican photojournalism and on Nacho López. Interaction with those who attended the courses, largely researchers and technicians of the Fototeca, led to the establishment of a seminar in photography that continues to meet, roaming back and forth between Mexico City and Pachuca, home of the INAH Fototeca. Without demanding colleagues, we neither learn nor grow, and I am grateful to the seminar members for their comments and criticisms throughout the years: Juan Carlos Valdéz, Pati Massé, Nacho Gutiérrez, Juan Antonio Molina, Rebeca Monroy, Margarita Morfín, Ariel Arnal, Paula Barra, Eleazar López Zamora, and Gina Rodríguez. I am also indebted to the observations of occasional participants in the seminar: Alejandro Castellanos, Rosa Casanova, Mariana Figarella, and Paolo Gasparini. I have been able to write this book largely because of the incredible working conditions created by Alfonso Vélez Pliego, founder of the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades of the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, and Roberto Vélez Pliego, current director of this earthly paradise of transcultural academia. The fact that I have been introduced at U.S. and European universities as “the guy who has the job everybody wants” summarizes the perfect situation created by Alfonso, Roberto, and others, such as Agustín Grajales, Rosa Montes, and the xiii

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librarian whose unceasing efforts have created an amazing hemeroteca, Masae Sugawara. A number of other people have been instrumental in helping this project to fruition. Lucero Binnqüist, widow of Nacho López, and their daughter, Citlalli López Binnqüist, assisted this project at every step, permitting me access to the Archivo Documental de la Familia López Binnqüist (ADFLB) and answering my many questions. Rodrigo Moya and Poncho Muñoz, old friends of Nacho López, also provided much information. Interviews and conversations with photojournalists have helped me understand this guild better, and I am particularly grateful to Daniel Mendoza, Guillermo Castrejón, Pedro Valtierra, Francisco Mata Rosas, Elsa Medina, Marco Antonio Cruz, and Andrés Garay. Armando Bartra, outstanding and committed scholar of Mexican culture, was generous with both his materials and his opinions, as has been my friend and collaborator in different projects, Jaime Vélez Storey. Pedro Meyer took time from his own work and his duties as founder and director of Zonezero to engage in conversations about digital imagery. Rosa Casanova, current director of the national system of Fototecas, and Juan Carlos Valdéz, director of the INAH Fototeca, made special efforts to obtain the excellent reproductions that appear here. Lengthy stays at U.S. and European universities have made this a better book than it would have been otherwise. José María Caparrós-Lera organized my invitation as a sabbatical fellow of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science in the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Barcelona in 1992–93, and in 1996 Marysa Navarro facilitated an invitation to Dartmouth College for a short but fruitful stay. The period I spent during 1997 in Linacre College, Oxford University, was particularly important. There, leisurely discussions with Mike Weaver and Annie Hammond over dinner tables and with coffee in the Linacre College Common Room after surprisingly good lunches helped me immeasurably in thinking about photography. Mike’s old-fashioned methodology of looking carefully is more capable of unearthing the latent meanings in a photograph than any theory I’ve run across. Finally, spending the academic year 2000–2001 at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies of Duke University provided the opportunity to develop research on directed photography and digitalized imagery. The extraordinary hospitality of the center’s associate director, Natalie Hartman, was determinant in making the year as pleasant as it was crucial to this book, and the staff of the Duke University Library, in particular Lee Sorenson, Hortensia Calvo, and Deborah Jakubs, provided noteworthy and enthusiastic counseling. The Library of the University of North Carolina was also useful, especially because of Teresa Chapa’s amiable assistance. Friends also contributed to make this an even more interesting project. Sam Abrams convinced me of the book’s worth at a time I really had my doubts, and the mainstays of my life—Chuck and Lisa Churchill, and Janey Place and Michael

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Hiles—have been there throughout. Wil Pansters offered a useful critique in his review and presentation of the book in Spanish. Seth Fein, Ariel Arnal, and Jim Faris have provided incisive, biting, and funny commentary. Eric Zolov and Gil Joseph gave me needed feedback on my analysis of the illustrated magazines. Pati Mendoza, director of the fabulous Centro de la Imagen from its inception in 1994 until 2002, has been a constant source of stimulation and information. Roberto Hinestrosa’s invitations to speak in Tijuana, and our interminable conversations while visiting, inspired me to rethink many issues, among them how to orient this text toward a U.S. public. Rebeca Monroy, the person I call when I really need to know something about the history of Mexican photojournalism, has been there to answer my questions. A fellow gringo émigré who shares an interest in the visual, Scott Robinson passed along great tips about photography and related topics. Paul Vanderwood has been a constant inspiration and sounding board for me during the past thirty years. Barbara Brümm took the initiative to send material at a very difficult time in her life. And many other amigos aided me throughout this long journey: Indra Olavarrieta, David La France, Omelina Araiza, Gonzalo Rocha, and Lucero González. Finally, as has been the case with all my work since 1980, this text originated in the intellectual and affective atmosphere of my relationship with Eli Bartra, who questioned and criticized all. Many of the ideas expressed here are a product of our daily convivencia. Dedicating this book to her doesn’t even really begin to pay off all I owe her, but it’s a step in the right direction.

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Author’s Note

What follows is an examination of the photography of Nacho López, Mexico’s Eugene Smith, who fused social commitment with aesthetic power in the photoessays he created for illustrated magazines during the 1950s. Like Smith, López was a photojournalist, a position that generally allows little input into the cropping of images or the titles given them. The common myth that photographers compose in the viewfinder is particularly irrelevant to photojournalists. Knowing they will have little or nothing to say about their published images, photojournalists create photos that are designed to be cropped: were they to take really tight photos, they may not produce what editors want, and their material will not be used and the articles will not be illustrated. Further, their work usually involves photographing events as they occur, and under all sorts of difficulties, so the notion of being able to compose exactly the image that will be printed is simply inapplicable. The result is significant differences between pictures published in the media and those produced by the photographer. For example, López’s images were cropped much more tightly by the magazines’ editors than by him, and his aesthetic intentions should be judged instead by the images published in works that counted on his participation or photographs he made for exhibitions. In this book, I have cropped López’s photos according to what I perceive to have been his vision of the final print, based on examples of images he edited for books and exhibits. As a photojournalist, López did not title his photographs, even when they appeared in exhibits or books. When his pictures were published in the illustrated magazines, they were always accompanied by headlines (which appeared above the images) and cutlines (which appeared below). These were written by López or by the magazines’ staffs, and reference is made to them throughout the book as part of the comparative analysis of image and text. xvii

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1. Documenting Mexico

The undeniable existence of the apparently invisible, the dignity of the evidently insignificant, and the quest for an aesthetic to render their testimonies—these were the focus of Nacho López, who photographed the daily life of the downtrodden for illustrated magazines during the 1950s.1 Picture magazines were a dominant form of visual culture throughout the Western world from the 1930s to the mid-1950s, and López worked for Mexico’s leading weeklies—Hoy, Mañana, and Siempre! (Today, Tomorrow, and Always)—the equivalents of Life and Look in the United States, Picture Post in Great Britain, the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung in Germany, and Vu in France. Combining social commitment with aesthetic expression, Nacho López was recognized as an exceptional image maker from the moment he entered the magazine pages, and he is today considered Mexico’s most influential documentary and journalistic photographer.2 His role in “representing invisibility” is twofold. On the one hand, within Mexico, he placed in evidence the hidden underside of the country’s “miraculous” modernization. On the other, his photojournalist imagery brings before foreign eyes a reality rarely seen behind the picturesque facade that is almost always presented as the essence of Mexicanness (mexicanidad). Envisioning Mexicanidad

Mexico may be one of the most photographed countries in the world. A myriad of cultures strikingly different from those of the developed world, and geography stunning in its variety—all within easy reach from the United States—has made it a natural object of the camera’s lens. Daguerreotypes began to be made there in 1840, one year after their invention in Europe, and the world’s first photographic images of war were taken in the course of the U.S. invasion (1846–48) that dismembered 1

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Mexico. During the Porfiriato, the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz that created a modern state between 1876 and 1910, important photographers such as William Henry Jackson utilized its inherent beauty to promote tourism and attract foreign investment. The revolution of 1910–17 was a magnet for photojournalists from everywhere, and pictures of the first great social cataclysm to be extensively documented in film and photographs made Mexico known to a worldwide audience. The cultural effervescence that flowered (as they often seem to in the wake of revolutionary triumphs) lured unquiet intellectuals and artists during the 1920s and 1930s, including photographers who are today considered among the medium’s elite: Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Paul Strand, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The ensuing years have seen the presence of photojournalists such as Robert Capa, Abbas, and Sebastião Salgado, to mention only the most prominent. As exemplified in the preceding paragraph, when we think of Mexico and photography, we probably remember the foreigners who seem to have had the upper hand in representing the country. An archetypical encapsulation of privileging the vision of others is the slick Mexico through Foreign Eyes, edited by Carole Naggar and Fred Ritchin.3 But how does Mexico look through Mexican eyes? Mexican photography is little known in the United States, because publishers there generally favor representations produced by those who come from outside of Mexico. Excluding Mexicans from the photographic portrayal of their nation is egregious, and meaningful. The dominant media of the metropolis prefers to construct its picture of the colonized “others,” who are packaged as spectacles, and portrayed as exotic creatures engaged in quaint rituals and inexplicable behavior. Although there are exceptional instances when the others are the enemy, and their cultural strangeness is demonized, the tone for treating the non-Euramerican world has been set by magazines such as National Geographic: “The people of the third and fourth worlds are portrayed as exotic; they are idealized; they are naturalized and taken out of all but a single historical narrative; and they are sexualized.” 4 The circulating visual discourse about Mexico produced by foreign photographers has often (though certainly not always) fallen into the temptation of reproducing its superficial exoticism. Adding an element of pathos to the beauty emphasized in the National Geographic style, documentarists seem to love swinging between sexy sublimity and nostalgic yearnings, something illustrated recently by “The Visual Celebrations and Laments” of David Burckhalter’s La Vida Norteña.5 The cover photo encapsulates the book’s stereotypical approach: a cowboy in a large white hat hugs a pretty little thing in a party dress; both smile salaciously for the camera while his horse waits calmly behind. The photo’s title, Cowboy Love, underlines the libidinous picturesqueness, and offers one pole of Burckhalter’s duality. The book’s first image provides the opposite extreme: an old couple stares sadly into the camera, holding a portrait of themselves when they were young, a pale copy of the sort of thing that made Sebastião Salgado famous for his work Other Americas. 6 The

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text insists that Burckhalter has spent the last twenty-five years photographing Sonora, but there is little in the imagery to substantiate that claim. The culture is often seen from a distance, offering little evidence of the rapport that would customarily accompany such an extended relationship. When close-ups are employed, they fall into the quickly exhausted formula of “celebrations and laments”: children grin for the camera, the aged look pensive and sad. Not coincidentally, the Mexican photographers whose “documentary” images appear in the United States are almost invariably those who have found their country’s innate exoticism an easy target, as the contemporary examples of Flor Garduño or Graciela Iturbide demonstrate.7 These photographers carry on the tradition of the picturesque (pintoresquismo), though they avoid now outmoded characterizations such as the charro and China Poblana, which have been discarded along with the impossibly monumental cactus and clouds from earlier epochs.8 Such old standbys have been replaced by the figure of woman in a new strategy to articulate national identity. Garduño’s and Iturbide’s decision to make women the discursive center in their reconfiguration of mexicanidad is a tactic that could be interpreted as an exploration their own gender issues, or attributed to their simply having stumbled upon a ready-made market. Flor Garduño is the Mexican most given to the stereotypical representation of her culture. Her method of portrayal is embodied in a story recounted in Mexico City photography circles. It is said that Mariana Yampolsky, confused by the clothing worn by an individual in one of Garduño’s photos, asked her to which indigenous group the fellow belonged.9 Garduño reportedly replied, “Oh Mariana, you’re so naive. I just grabbed those old rags out of my closet and dressed him up in them.”10 Garduño’s imagery confirms the suspicion that the story is true. For example, La mujer que sueña (The dreaming woman, 1991) presents us with an Indian lying on a petate, the traditional mattress woven out of flat reeds that provides aesthetic texture, which she shares with two iguanas whose feet and mouths are bound.11 Garduño has carried on the tradition of using Indian women (indígenas) as a source of soft-core porn, posing her with blouse open so that her breasts are on view. However, the woman is wrapped in a native skirt, which functions to provide indigenous dress as well as to cover the rest of her body, for full frontal nudity would reduce Garduño’s clientele. This image would appear to “borrow” from two classic Mexican photographs: Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s famous La buena fama durmiendo (The good reputation sleeping, 1939), an elaborately composed photo of a slumbering nude that André Breton commissioned for a surrealist exhibit in Paris, and Graciela Iturbide’s well-known Nuestra Señora de las iguanas (Our Lady of the iguanas, 1979).12 Graciela Iturbide’s photo of a woman with iguanas on her head initiated the picturesque relationship of women and these exotic animals, which have evidently become stock creatures in representing indígenas.13 It is probably unfair to place

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Iturbide, who makes complex and sophisticated imagery, in the same camp as Flor Garduño, for the latter is all too obviously motivated by immediate commercial concerns. Nonetheless, much of Iturbide’s photography revolves around exotic themes, and I believe that is why foreign audiences find her work so attractive.14 Although it is often reproduced outside its original context, Our Lady of the Iguanas is actually part of a documentary project on the city of Juchitán, Oaxaca. Iturbide and the renowned Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska collaborated to produce the book Juchitán of the Woman, a paean to a mythical matriarchal society incarnated in images such as Juchitecas dancing together.15 Iturbide later ratcheted her peculiar idealization of rural Mexico up another level, to what I would call the “grotesquepicturesque,” for her work In the Name of the Father, which represents the traditional slaughter of goats brought down from the Oaxacan highlands by Mixtec shepherds at the end of the rainy season. In documenting this ghastly ritual, her focus is largely on dead goats in piles or lying next to sleeping babies, invariably shot on top of textured petates.16 Iturbide is a wonderful photographer when she chooses to photograph her own culture, as in Mujer de cera (Woman of wax, 1972), or when she ventures into the cultural blending so typical of today: in Mujer ángel (Woman angel, 1980) an Indian woman in traditional clothing runs into the distance carrying a portable radio in one of her outstretched hands. Unfortunately, if you wish to sell to foreign audiences (including agencies such as the Guggenheim Foundation, from whom Iturbide has received a grant), you must give them the Mexico they want to see. Exotic portrayals of Mexico did not begin with Iturbide and Garduño. During the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps the foremost proponent of pintoresquismo was Bernice Kolko, whose imagery is set in the countryside, and peopled by Indians dressed in stereotypical raiment, often accompanied by folk art. Although I find Kolko’s imagery insufferably picturesque, it was admired by Mexican intellectuals of the caliber of Rosario Castellanos and Antonio Rodríguez, and it was published in books edited by important cultural institutions.17 From the 1940s on, films fed eagerly into the enticements of exoticism, and the cinematography of Gabriel Figueroa— influenced by the Eisensteinian excesses of ¡Que viva México!—was replete with women wrapped in rebozos (traditional shawls), alongside stoic campesinos (peasants) who appear to rise out of the maguey cactus below and descend from the billowing clouds above.18 During the heyday of the illustrated magazines, the “dean” of Mexican photojournalism, Enrique Díaz, regularly furnished images of smiling villagers, delighted with their luck of living in the impoverished countryside.19 The battle lines over how to represent Mexico had been drawn during the cultural flowering of the 1920s. Contributors to the magazine Helios, which was published by the Association of Mexican Photographers, largely articulated the picturesque side of the coin. The leading light of this group was Hugo Brehme, a German who immigrated to Mexico in 1908.20 Brehme’s position in the controversy is en-

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capsulated in the title of the book he edited in Spanish, German, and English, Picturesque Mexico (México pintoresco).21 Mexican photographers such as Rafael Carrillo and Luis Márquez joined Brehme in believing that the bucolic idylls they made were the proper way to represent their country. Their vision, and the degree to which it was oriented toward giving readers outside Mexico what they expected, can be appreciated in the way Luis Márquez responded when asked if there was a “Mexican School of Photography”: “Mexico is an absolutely photogenic country: its archaeological ruins, its colonial monuments, and its peculiar landscape are the foundation of the photography that has developed here. Showing its diversity, the monumental and the typical, has made Mexico known in foreign lands.”22 The photographic struggle against exoticism’s appeal was embodied, at least initially, in Edward Weston and Tina Modotti.23 When the couple left the United States for Mexico in 1923, Weston’s colleagues assumed he was going in search of fresh material; but, though he was aware the new country would offer certain opportunities, he had no intention of falling into that temptation. Headed to Mexico on a ship, he fussed, “I become irritated by the repeated exclamation, ‘Oh, you will find marvelous things to photograph in Mexico.’ On the contrary, I feel a battle ahead to avoid being swept away by the picturesque, the romantic.”24 During his stay from 1923 to 1926, Weston followed his intuition: refusing to idealize the differences he encountered, he demystified the native population in images such as the Pissing Indian (1924), focused on jumbled corridors of poor urban housing where drying clothes and discarded objects created scenes far from picturesque (Casa de vecindad II, 1926), and photographed objects that would normally be rendered in a way to emphasize the exotic—for example, a straw sombrero and leather sandals (Hat and Shoes, 1926)—with a formal power that drained away any such effect.25 So, when Weston left Mexico in 1926, he could reflect, with a sense of satisfaction, “I might call my work in Mexico a fight to avoid its natural picturesqueness.”26 Tina Modotti was Weston’s “apprentice,” and she shared his attitudes about how Mexico ought to be photographed.27 When she was about to be expelled from the country as a “pernicious alien” in 1930, she decided to have a retrospective exhibit, stating, “I owe it to the country to show what can be done, without recurring to colonial churches and charros and chinas poblanas, and similar trash most photographers have indulged in.”28 As a communist, Modotti must necessarily have felt that Mexico had to be defined historically, rather than essentially; mexicanidad would be determined by the outcome of postrevolutionary struggles over the directions that society and culture would take, not by picturesque photographers’ essentialist constructions of cactus, clouds, and quiescent campesinos. Hence, she called attention to the contradictions between the letter of the new Constitution of 1917 and the real state of things in Mexico, documenting a poor girl standing in a dilapidated setting with a battered water bucket in her hand. Published in El Machete, the Mexican Communist Party newspaper, the photo’s headline referred ironically

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to “The Protection for Children,” while the cutline inveighed, “There are millions of girls like this in Mexico. They labor strenuously at jobs inappropriate for their age, for twelve to fifteen hours a day, almost always just for food. And what food! Nonetheless, the Constitution . . .”29 In this image, a traditional clay pot, which would have exoticized poverty, sits discarded on the ground while the girl grasps a metal bucket. Rejecting the picturesque option by showing the girl with the newer water container, Modotti insisted on representing Mexico as a country modernizing itself.30 The first Mexican photographer to take a militantly antipicturesque stance was Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who achieved international recognition for work that probably reached creative heights from the 1920s through the 1940s, a period during which he perfected a sophisticated approach to representing his culture.31 Conscious of Mexico’s extraordinary cultural variety, and the way that has been rendered in stereotypes, Álvarez Bravo swims counter to the stream of established clichés. In developing strategies to go against the grain, he recognized the particular difficulties presented by working in the photographic medium. A photograph is analogical; the only way to say “no” with imagery is to show what one is criticizing; for example, showing a cigarette with a line drawn through it represents “no smoking.” In order to say “not picturesque,” Álvarez Bravo had to display what we would assume to be pintoresco, and then cut back against the expectations awakened by the stereotypical elements, in order to take the image in the opposite, critical direction. Roger Bartra has postulated that irony is one of the most useful tools in decodifying and recodifying signs of cultural identity, for it is a tactic capable of representing something distinct from, and even contradictory to, what one appears to be depicting.32 In this sense, we might consider Álvarez Bravo to be the supreme ironist of Mexican photography.33 Consider what I would argue is the greatest Indianist photograph, Señor de Papantla (1934).34 Indians are almost always exotic in Indianist photography; it is evidently their very nature, and this image by Álvarez Bravo seems to contain all the necessary elements to make it picturesque: white peasant clothing, bare feet, and adobe walls, as well as a sombrero and bag, both made of reeds. But, having awakened our anticipation of the exotic, Álvarez Bravo cuts back against it with an artistry that rejects the facile. The man refuses to dignify the camera by returning its look. We often think that it is through returning the camera’s gaze that people most effectively manifest their capacity to be subjects, negating the camera’s tendency to reduce them to objects. But here Álvarez Bravo gives us another turn of the screw by presenting an Indian who, in looking away, seems to say disparagingly: “Take all the pictures you want, outsider. Who cares what you do?” Turning away from facile “Orientalism,” Álvarez Bravo reveals Mexico in the daily life activities of the humble (humildes).35 His imagery is a modest, seemingly transparent portrayal of individuals whom he appears to have “found” within their

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natural habitats, rather than to have “created” through the conspicuous visual rhetoric of Sebastião Salgado, for instance. A very understated aesthetic that avoids overt expressivity, Álvarez Bravo’s is an all but invisible technique designed to capture anonymous people in ordinary activities, where they are neither romanticized nor sentimentalized. A perfect instance is La mamá del bolero y el bolero (The mother of the shoeshine boy and the shoeshine boy), an exquisite photo from the 1950s in which a mother visits her son to bring him lunch, and eats with him while he rests from his task of shining shoes. Another would be Los agachados (The bent men, 1934), an image of men seated with their backs to us at the counter of a local comedor (luncheonette), the shadow of the roll-up door placing them in the shade from the middle of their backs up. Here there are intimations of social criticism: the way in which the men are bent over could be an index of their subjugation, the chains that are wound through the rungs of the chairs to keep them from being stolen could be metaphors for the tethers that fix us to our workplaces.36 Álvarez Bravo’s redemption of common folk and their daily subsistence has had a tremendous influence on Mexican photographers, and on their search for national identity. Nacho López and Héctor García studied together under Álvarez Bravo in the 1940s, and their work in photojournalism continues his focus on daily life activities, though with more of a critical bite.37 García embodies contradictions characteristic of the “perfect dictatorship” within which Mexicans lived under the seventy-year rule of the official party, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional [Institutional Revolutionary Party]): he produced many flattering images while working for President Luis Echeverría during the 1970s, but was one of the first photojournalists to explicitly critique the country’s powerful.38 In a 1946 photograph, Nuestra Señora Sociedad (Our Lady society), he poked fun at the wealthy, showing their foibles in an image where a tuxedo-suited man raises the toes of his shoes to free the long train of the woman’s fancy dress on which he has trod. García also authored one of the few photos in which the sharp class distinctions characteristic of Mexico are made manifest: it is September 15, the eve of Mexican Independence Day, and people are strolling near the central plaza (Zócalo), where the yearly “Cry of Independence” (Grito de independencia) will take place at midnight. In the foreground is a poor campesino couple, loaded down with bundles of goods they hope to sell in order to eke out their precarious existence. Behind them comes a very different twosome, elegantly dressed in evening clothes. The title García placed on the image speaks eloquently about the unfair distribution of resources (and the muted protest against it): Cada quien su ‘grito’ (Each with their own cry, 1965). The anti-pintoresquismo of Héctor García and Nacho López was to some extent inherited from Álvarez Bravo, but photographers who came from outside the country, the Hermanos Mayo, also adopted this stance. Since 1939, this collective of photojournalists has played a pivotal role in redefining Mexico’s graphic reportage, but their story began during the Spanish civil war. There, the five “brothers”—

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Francisco (Paco), Faustino, Julio, Cándido, and Pablo—started using the nom de guerre by which they have been known in Mexico, where their collaboration in some forty publications, and an archive of some five million negatives, has made them the most prolific photojournalists in the history of Latin America.39 There is much imagery of daily life activities among this extraordinary number of negatives, and it is difficult to say whether their productivity reflects a historical vision of documenting the country of their refuge, an interest in accumulating images that could then be sold for illustrative purposes—something greatly facilitated by working in a collective—and/or a largely intuitive construction of their way of seeing Mexico. Whatever the reason might be—and I suspect it is a mix of all three—the most important contribution of the Mayo to the definition of mexicanidad is their development of a photographic discourse that insists that identity is formed in the dialectical process of people making something out of what their situation is making of them. One example is that of autoworkers on an assembly line in a Ford factory in Hermosillo during 1952. We see workers converted into simply another inanimate element of the assembly line, trapped in a situation that reduces them to the level of the machines they make and those with which they work, a faithful reflection of labor in modern factories. Everything that surrounds the workers functions to make them into parts of the machine, to submerge them in the “inevitable laws” of industrialism. However, though the Mayo Brothers have articulately depicted the “force of circumstances,” they also photographed the laborer’s face that appears in the midst of the machines and stares back at the camera, portraying him in a way that honors the human spirit capable of confronting such a reductive process, and resisting it. I would argue that critical photojournalism of daily life activities is the photography that searches most deeply and inquires most diligently into the issue of Mexican identity. Manuel Álvarez Bravo redefined this exploration by rejecting exoticism; Nacho López, Héctor García, and the Hermanos Mayo later contributed a critical perspective. Today, Mexico’s New Photojournalists have carried this forward in a unique documentary project that situates the question of identity within plural, transcultural worlds in the constant process of creation, rather than accepting it as some sort of an essence that one “naturally” expresses.40 The New Photojournalists, moreover, live in a culture where the pursuit of lo mexicano has a vitiated quality, having been utilized by the PRI for so many years as a way of covering up the great differences of class, gender, ethnicity, and region in Mexico, all bound up in appallingly unequal relations of power.41 There are, in fact, similarities between the homogenizing official discourse of mexicanidad and an exoticism that reduces cultural plurality to picturesque trappings so interchangeable that they can be pulled, as Flor Garduño is evidently wont to do, from one’s own Mexico City closet. Exoticism—whether practiced by foreigners or by picturesque photogra-

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phers from Mexico—essentially repeats the limited repertoire of representation allowed for non-Euramerican subjects.42 In focusing on a constantly transforming daily life, photojournalism provides a vision of Mexico rarely seen outside the country. As Fredric Jameson outlined in discussing the dialectic of colonial objectification: “To make other people over into things by way of the Look thus becomes the primal source of a domination and a subjection which can only be overcome by looking back or ‘returning the gaze’: in Fanon’s terms, by the latter’s therapeutic violence.”43 Nacho López, Photojournalist

Mexican photojournalists have rarely received the attention they deserve beyond the boundaries of their nation.44 If we think about Mexican photojournalism, what probably comes to mind are the poignant images of the 1910–17 revolution that form part of the Casasola Archive.45 This collection grew out of the imagery assembled for the graphic news agency established by Agustín Víctor Casasola and his brother Miguel in 1912; it was constantly expanded by Agustín’s offspring, the most noteworthy being Gustavo and Ismael Casasola. Analyzing the imagery produced by the Casasolas in terms of authorial intent is problematic, because Agustín Víctor and his relatives were as much collectionists as photographers; the work of more than 480 photographers can be found in the Casasola Archive.46 The images of the Casasola Archive are indelibly imprinted in Mexican minds, thanks to the voluminous, photo-saturated series Historia gráfica de la Revolución Mexicana and Seis siglos de historia gráfica de México, which have been published and steadily reprinted since the 1920s, often by the Gustavo Casasola Press. Hence, the Casasolas should probably be seen in the same light as someone like Matthew Brady, the entrepreneur of U.S. Civil War imagery. Further, the Casasola Agency was tied to the different regimes in power, and is often marked by officialism, as was that of Enrique Díaz, the leading Mexican photojournalist from the early 1930s to 1950.47 The Hermanos Mayo are the immediate predecessors of Nacho López in their concern for the working class. However, their aesthetic intentions were much constrained by commitments to provide countless images to more than forty periodicals, above all, newspapers. As Cándido Mayo remarked, “A photojournalist can and ought to be an artist as well as a reporter, if he works in magazines. However, if he is working for newspapers, sometimes the urgency of rapidly succeeding events obliges him to leave to one side the concern with lights, shadows, and angles.”48 Nacho López represents a watershed in Mexican photojournalism. Fusing social commitment with formal exploration, he is part of a very select company of great photographers, including Tina Modotti, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Paolo Gasparini, Sebastião Salgado, and the photographer whom he most admired and resembles, W. Eugene Smith. López’s decision to work in magazines

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was no doubt conditioned by the fact that they offered him more possibilities to express himself aesthetically, as well as the time to explore his themes. Moreover, they enabled him to develop the photoessay form, and he was the first Mexican photojournalist to really expand the notion of being an author beyond that of taking pictures, for at times he wrote the texts to accompany the photographs. Although he was evidently subject to editorial control, the magazines may also have been the place where his political commitments encountered the least censure. His career as a photojournalist was short, but López’s influence has been decisive. When young, he studied with several photographers, among them Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and then taught photographic technique at the University of Venezuela for a short time before entering photojournalism. His decision to work in this medium was conditioned by his belief that photography is fundamentally documentary, and ought to be testimonial—though the fact that the illustrated magazines were one of the few markets for photographic imagery during the 1950s must have been a consideration as well. However, Nacho was an unquiet and highly creative individual. Always interested in directing scenes, he soon found the magazines too restrictive, and he left them to explore the world of film. He worked in documentary cinema and made award-winning commercials for some ten years, finally directing a short film, Los hombres cultos (The educated men), in 1972, which received some recognition about the time he decided to abandon cinema. Although he never returned to photojournalism, he continued to exhibit his photography; during the 1960s he was active in collective expositions of “Los Interioristas,” a group of Mexican artists characterized by their rejection of “good taste” and their call for “socially oriented art.”49 In the 1970s, López returned full-time to photography. Contracted by the National Indigenist Institute (Instituto Nacional Indigenista), he made images of Indian communities that are still exhibited outside Mexico by the Secretariat of Foreign Relations.50 During the 1980s, he taught photography at the National University of Mexico (UNAM—Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and the University of Veracruz (Universidad Veracruzana). His legacy as the maestro (master teacher) of many of the New Photojournalists demonstrates his importance, for they represent contemporary Mexico’s most vital photography.51 The leading school of photojournalism is named after him, as are two of the more important galleries for photographic exhibits. The centrality of Nacho López in Latin American photography was demonstrated by the fact that a book of his images, Yo, el ciudadano (I, the citizen), was the first published in the prestigious series Río de luz (River of light). The respected U.S. journal of photography Aperture described Río de luz as “one of the most important collections of Latin American photography ever compiled.”52 And the power of his imagery is such that the prominent magazine Artes de México dedicated a double issue to his pictures of Mexico City.53

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The number of books composed of photographs by Nacho López is a tribute to his recognition in Mexico.54 However, the aesthetic force of his photography is such that these books have always presented his images as isolated works of art, situated within the universalizing, eternalizing paradigm of art history, and endowed with the “aura” that Walter Benjamin had argued would “wither in the age of mechanical reproduction.”55 This is clearly contradictory to the nature of photojournalism—and perhaps to photography itself—for, if this medium is an art, it is an “art of the particular” par excellence.56 A trace of a visible reality that necessarily existed, a photograph has a unique relationship to the object it is representing; in semiotic theory, it is an “index” as well as an “icon.”57 In contrast to prior publications of López’s imagery (and the vast majority of books that reproduce photographs), what I offer here is a contextualist analysis that turns around the most important photoessays published by this photographer in the illustrated magazines. Only through returning his images to the places for which they were made can we begin to understand the meanings they had within the culture from which they sprang, as well as appreciate fully the contributions of López to the development of Mexican photography. He himself, one of the few photojournalists who have reflected on their craft (in Mexico or elsewhere), understood that photographs must be analyzed within the discursive networks of which they form part: “The truth is that the critics have been taken by surprise by photography’s vigorous presence, they have been left behind because they haven’t studied it in its social context.”58 The royal road toward the rescue of photographs’ meanings is the reconstruction of the venues in which they have appeared. As Alan Sekula has argued, “The photograph, as it stands alone, presents merely the possibility of meaning. Only by its embeddedness in a concrete discourse situation can the photograph yield a clear semantic outcome.”59 This attempt to situate photographs in the contexts where they have appeared has marked the most important studies of the last few years in the United States. Before, the work of photographers and photojournalists such as Matthew Brady, Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, and W. Eugene Smith was presented as art in the form of individual and isolated photographs, often accompanied by acritical and congratulatory texts. Today, analyses such as those by Sally Stein, James Curtis, James Guimond, Maren Stange, Peter Hales, and Glenn Willumson (among others) have fundamentally changed the study of many U.S. photographers, permitting us to understand the meanings of their imagery that have been generated by the particular discourses within which they have been inserted.60 Returning the work of Nacho López to the magazines in which it originally appeared will permit us to develop the relationship between his photography and the meanings it was given when published. In the first place, I compare the photographs he took with those that were selected by the magazines’ editors for publication, a

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contrast that tells us something about the difference between his vision and that of the magazines.61 This analysis of published images includes other facets of the question as well: how the original images were cropped for publication, and where the photos were placed in the magazines—in which pages (odd or even), what positions they occupied on those pages, and the size they were given.62 The relation between the images and words, whether they are the cutlines or the texts, is also considered. In around half of the photoessays here analyzed, López was the author of the texts and cutlines, as well as the photos. On other occasions, journalists of some stature, such as Carlos Argüelles or Antonio Ibarra, wrote the texts.63 Moreover, I compare López’s photoessays to those of other photojournalists who have dealt with similar themes. Finally, in the last chapter, I go beyond the immediate and demonstrable differences between López’s perspective and that of the magazines to construct an interface between his theories and his practice. Few photojournalists have had the interest or the capacity to reflect on their work, so this comparison is revealing. Through this structure of confronting perspectives I hope to better understand how the situation of being a photojournalist affected Nacho López’s photography. López’s most powerful photoessays focus on Mexico’s poor and unprotected. It is for that reason that the critic Antonio Rodríguez described his imagery as the “glorification of the insignificant.”64 Rodríguez chose the word glorification to indicate that López was interested in portraying the poor as subjects, social actors in the world, rather than as objects, inert victims of their circumstances.65 Good intentions notwithstanding, one question that must be asked about López’s imagery—as with all photography that denounces—is whether and to what extent his photos of the downtrodden might be said to constitute victim photography: “a double act of subjugation: first, in the social world that has produced its victims; second, in the regime of the image, produced within and for the system that engenders the conditions it then represents.”66 Certainly, López’s photos were intended to be consumed by a very different world than those from which they were often taken. The middle-class readers of the illustrated magazines were distant from the poor, the prisoners, and the Indians who peopled some of his finer photoessays. But, if the relation between the photographed and their audience is important, it is not definitive. Rather, the issue of victim photography revolves essentially around the question of what he tried to do with what the mass media, and his historical moment, were doing to him and his photography. To what degree could his narratives of the dispossessed be said to attempt to disrupt the systems within which they were inscribed? To what extent did they fall into well-seasoned clichés about the “worthy poor”? Certainly, Nacho was aware of the different ways in which the social classes were portrayed in the media: “When the world of aristocracy is photographed with attitudes of little or no respect, the mass media—which is linked to economic power—avoids publishing

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them. The lumpenproletariat is publishable; the ‘well-off ’ only appear in accordance with the interests that are interwoven with those they have instrumentalized.”67 Nacho López was conscious of the fact that his work was mediated and conditioned—perhaps even determined—by the restrictions of photojournalism. All creative activity takes place within certain constraints. Nonetheless, it is customary to judge art in terms of intentionality; that is, we generally conceive of artists as individuals who work in circumstances that permit them a great deal of freedom, and we consequently judge their art in terms of the degree to which they are able to realize their intentions. The situation of photojournalists is somewhat different; they are a particular blend of artist, artisan, and worker. Although self-expression is an important element in their work, they are almost always limited to photographing that to which they are assigned. Further, they often have little or no say about the ways in which their work is utilized—which images are chosen for publication from among those they have taken, how they are cropped, where they are placed, the relation of the captions to the photos, and the subsequent uses to which they are put. We might argue that the better photojournalists combine the creativity and technical skills of the artist and the artisan, all the while working within an alienated situation comparable to that of the industrial worker. As David Levi Strauss wrote about the work of Richard Cross and John Hoagland, distinguished U.S. photojournalists killed in El Salvador, “They did not own the pictures they made any more than a worker in a munitions factory owns the weapons he makes while employed.”68 Largely because of his decision to work in magazines, Nacho López presents us with a variation on this theme. He himself acknowledged the great degree of freedom that he enjoyed, stating that his old friend in Mañana, Esteban Cajiga, gave him “absolute liberty in the choice of themes and the format of my articles . . . even to the extent of sticking my nose into supervising the negatives and the offset impressions.”69 It is clear that he often had the freedom to choose what and how he would photograph, rarely operating under the constraints imposed by the necessity of “covering” a news story, an organized propaganda event, or a society activity. In contrast to photojournalists such as the Hermanos Mayo, it would seem that López was often able to select what he wished to report on, and that it almost always took the form of “feature stories” rather than news coverage. Further, it appears that he could work rather intensely for short periods of time on specific stories, rather than having to produce images on a daily or even weekly basis, year after year. He was immediately and widely recognized as the Mexican photojournalist with the greatest interest in developing a personal aesthetic.70 Further, his expressive imagery was coupled with an interest in unusual themes, as well as in giving unexpected turns to conventional stories. It is often difficult to classify his better photoessays within the panorama offered by this epoch. For example, no other photojournalist cast an ironic eye at people reading in the street, or joined them in

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drinking their aperitivo, or looked into the world of newspaper vendors, as did Nacho López with “La calle lee” (The street reads), “México acostumbra echarse una copa a las dos de la tarde” (Mexico is accustomed to having a drink at two in the afternoon), and “Filósofos de la noticia” (Philosophers of the news). Even when he worked on themes well worn by graphic reporters, his treatment gave them a new twist. For example, in his photoessay on the yearly pilgrimage to the shrine of Mexico’s preeminent religious idol, the Virgin of Guadalupe, he emphasized quotidian experiences such as eating and drinking, as well as photographing the spiritual aspect that fellow photojournalists portrayed. His inventiveness led him to generate narrative forms previously unexplored in Mexican photojournalism. He was the first, and really the only, photographer to compose photoessays by writing the texts as well as taking the pictures, something that makes him exceptional not only in Mexico but throughout the world.71 One of the strategies he employed in developing this form was that of constructing photoessays out of his archive. “Yo también he sido niño bueno . . .” (I’ve been a good kid too) is a wrenching photoessay about poor children at Christmastime who, despite having behaved well all year, will receive no gifts. López probably proposed the theme to Mañana’s editors, and then created the photoessay by writing a moving exposition accompanied with archival images of children taken in previous years, in places as far away as Venezuela. Another tactic was to “direct” scenes designed to provoke reactions.72 In one, he had a beautiful model, with a wasp-like waist, walk along a main street in Mexico City while he photographed the piropos (compliments) that she prompted. It appears that no other photojournalist produced illustrated essays of these types, perhaps because they lacked sufficiently powerful images, or because they found it difficult to write a narration coherent enough to convince the editors to give them that opportunity. Nacho’s originality and aesthetic power were vital in making him the photographer he was, but it is the infusing of expressivity with social content that made him exceptional. From the very beginning, and with few concessions, he swam against the period’s adulation for the rich, the powerful, and the celebrities. He sympathized with the helpless, and focused on prisoners, slum inhabitants, poor children, illiterates, and the marginal. What interested him was “the transcendent among the intranscendent, which we find in many scenes from daily life.”73 When he produced photoessays on popular celebrations, he gave them his particular touch. For example, in portraying the Night of the Magi, he focused on the lost illusions of youth.74 This was a very different approach to this holiday than that always taken in the illustrated magazines, which, in emphasizing the presents distributed by the First Lady, simply found another way of glorifying Mexico’s ruling class. The illustrated magazines were a veritable mirror of Alemanismo, the dominant ideology of this period, named for its architect, President Miguel Alemán (1946–52). It was Alemán who transformed the course of Mexican history by replacing

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Cardenismo—the class-conscious and anti-imperialist pluralism of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) that was the culmination of the Mexican Revolution—with the governing conception that is still dominant within the Mexican state. As I write these words, Mexico is still under the threat of a return of the PRI’s dictatorship, though recent events indicate that change is in the air: the election of 2000 for president was won by Vicente Fox of the PAN (Partido de Acción Nacional, a right-wing party), and Mexico City has been governed by the leftist Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) since 1997. During the 1950s, Mexican journalism (and photojournalism) was essentially a handmaiden of the state, tied to it by a policy of pan o palo (the carrot or the stick), in which those publications that conformed were rewarded with “chains of gold,” while those who dissented were destroyed. Within the magazines’ discourse, the nation was essentially conceived in terms of the president in power.75 His activities and “private life” were displayed incessantly: they were the subject covered most by the magazines, and around one-quarter of all the illustrated articles dealt with some facet of the president; moreover, there were entire issues dedicated to him, subsidized by public monies. The presidentialism of the magazines was accompanied by an ardent veneration for the well-off and powerful, among whom these publications added a new component to the social scene, the celebrities. With the lower classes, the magazines were much less indulgent. Usually the working class was ignored: the form of depicting labor was generally that of “industrialist photography,” in which machines and structures dominated the images from which workers were excluded. Nevertheless, when needed by the government, these publications were capable of leveling extended criticisms of labor leaders, particularly those that appeared to have an interest in fomenting any independence from the state. Campesinos and Indians were presented as picturesque, and images of barebreasted indígenas provided the publications with a form of soft-corn pornography. Graphic reporters participated actively in adulating the president, the rich, and the celebrities, but Nacho López took a different path. During this period, he never followed the president on one of his innumerable tours, never visited him to make a family portrait, and never composed graphic poems to his grandeur.76 Among the photoessays of López that approximate the habitual unctuousness displayed toward official figures, there is one on the inauguration of Rafael Ávila Camacho as governor of Puebla and another on the wedding of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua; there is, as well, an article featuring images of Miguel Alemán, though the photos were not credited to him. Given the fact that he collaborated in more than forty-four photoessays, the percentage of “officialist” contributions is minimal. The conflation of presidentialism (and the official apparatus) with nationalism during the period of Miguel Alemán was absolute. “National Unity” became the governing concept after 1940, replacing the openness characteristic of Lázaro Cárdenas’s regime. Carlos Monsiváis has defined the spirit of Alemanismo in this

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way: “Nothing of a ‘pluralist country’ or of ‘cultural diversity,’ Mexico is one.”77 Intellectuals dedicated themselves to the task of defining “Mexico and Mexicanness” (México y lo mexicano). But, for the mass media, the nation was embodied in the president, and mexicanidad was congealed in his person. The ideology of Alemanism constantly reduced the space allowed for divergences from the dominant current, resulting in a rigid chauvinism that excluded any deviations. Distant from presidentialism, Nacho López proposed an alternative to the period’s uniformity in photoessays that define the national character through the pluralism of the many Mexicos he portrayed. These essays are about what I would describe as “worlds apart”; obviously, they were worlds apart from those of the magazines’ middle-class readers, but they were also remote from the homogeneous vision constructed by Alemanism. The worlds captured by López were those of the poor, the caged, the dispossessed, those who live from dangerous and unusual work . . . those who were invisible in Alemán’s universe. And they were presented as worlds, not marginal existences. Snaggletoothed pool players in tatters live in “their world of adventures.” They are failures in the larger orb, but their animated and dynamic expressions show that they have constructed their own “fabulous world of triumphs and defeats,” their victors and their vanquished (Photo 1). Genres of Photojournalism

Nacho López’s explorations of Mexico’s underside were a result of the autonomy he had within the illustrated magazines, and the freedom he felt to develop the photoessay form. The unique situation that he enjoyed is perhaps more appropriately defined as that of a photoessayist rather than as a press photographer or a graphic reporter. We are accustomed to put all photographers who work for the press in the same bag, one we often define with the generic term photojournalist, that is, a photographer who works for periodical publications, be they magazines or newspapers.78 Nonetheless, in spite of the fact that López never differentiated in his writings between the different forms this work can take, it is clear that there are important variations between them. We can neither fully understand López’s photographic project nor appreciate his particular contributions if we fail to take into account the type of journalism to which he dedicated himself. Nacho López took his photos for illustrated magazines, not for newspapers. A graphic reporter who works for the daily press is tied to the necessity of having to provide information encapsulated in one image. Photojournalists who publish in illustrated magazines are further away from the news of live events, and are often engaged in photographing feature stories; they take a large number of photos, with the idea that they will form part of more developed narratives made up of multiple images. The most important question to ask in determining the differences between the various types of photojournalists is that related to authorial control: who has the

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1. Nacho López, Pool players, Mexico City, 1954. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 375082.

power over the authorship of an illustrated article, the photographer or the editors? Such control is manifested in different ways during the three stages of production: the “conception,” the “realization,” and the “editing.” In other words: To what degree is the photographer the source of the original conception for the article? What control does he or she have over the photographic act? What power does he or she have in relation to the editing of the article? We could construct a heuristic hierarchy in order to delineate the differences between the various types of image makers for periodical publications, by describing the gamut from those with less control to those with more autonomy, in the following order: press photographer, photojournalist, photoessayist.79 I am here describing functions and not persons, because the photographers change their roles according to the concrete situations in which they find themselves. Hence, according to this hierarchy, the Hermanos Mayo functioned as press photographers when they worked for newspapers, as photojournalists when they composed their magazine

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articles on themes of interest to them—for example, the daily life of the poor—and as photoessayists in the very few opportunities they had to develop this form. Thus, this hierarchy does not assign values to the different roles, but instead uses these categories as a way of indicating the great variety of ways in which photographers function within newspapers and magazines, and which of these functions offer the most autonomy. According to this schema, “press photographers” almost always work in daily newspapers, and have little to say about the conception of a story, because it is most probable that they have been assigned to cover events. Their degree of authorship is determined by the event itself, by the amount of film they have been given, by the pressure of time imposed by other events they have to cover that same day, and by the limitations set for publication that have been established in their workplace, and which they have internalized as self-censorship (to a greater or lesser degree). They have no say in the editing of their imagery. In Mexico (and everywhere else), the great majority of photographers in periodical publications function as press photographers, though there can be great differences among the newspapers.80 “Photojournalists” are distinguished from “press photographers” by the fact that they usually work for magazines; this allows them to dedicate more time to a story, to take and publish more images, and to construct a narrative with several photos. Phillip Jones Griffiths, a member of Magnum, believes that these categories began to take shape during the 1930s: The terminology in photography is almost entirely based on fragile egos. If you were a Fleet Street photographer [British press reporter] in the 1930s, the last thing you ever wanted to do was be confused with someone who did weddings or bar mitzvahs. . . . And in turn, the guy that starts working for Picture Post magazine who goes to Africa for three months to do a story on the wind change in Africa is pretty anxious not to be confused with a press photographer, especially because press photographers for the most part [were considered to] have a very limited vocabulary and big ears and wore strange hats with “Press” stuck in the band. So, he was anxious to call himself something different, so he called himself a photojournalist.81

By definition, “photojournalists” would have more control than “press photographers” over the conceptualization of a project, and may be the originators of the idea for the story. In the realization stage, they would also have more autonomy, given the fact that their film would be less limited, and the question about what they could or could not publish would have been discussed in an explicit way, in which they may have had some input. They would probably have little to say about the editing of the story, but their possibilities of intervening would still be greater than those of the press photographers.

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Photoessayists would have the greatest degree of authorial control among those photographers who work in periodical publications. The conception of the essay sometimes originates with these individuals (though usually not as often as they would like). When they are engaged in the photographic act, they are looking for ways to express the ideas they take to the experience, as well as that which they learn from the situation they are covering. Finally, they can have a certain degree of influence in the final editing of the article, although these are rare cases and, as in the famous struggles between W. Eugene Smith and Life magazine, the photographers almost always lose in a battle with the editors. Distinguishing between a reportage and an essay is fundamental in differentiating a “photoessayist” from other kinds of graphic journalists. Reportage involves covering a news event or, at the very least, a “live” event. Thus, in very general terms, we could say that reportage has its source in the world, in reality. An essay, on the contrary, tends to originate in the photographer’s mind, and in the interest in exploring an idea that existed prior to realizing the photographic act. An essay can be about something “live,” but it is distinguished from reportage by the extent to which the photographer’s ideas have preeminence over the communication of information about an event. Utilizing the directorial mode results in a particularly exaggerated form of the photoessay, with the staging of scenes and the directing of subjects, but the degree of control will always be greater in an essay than in reportage, and this will have a relation to the question of authorship. Nacho López was a particularly creative photoessayist, working in a situation that granted him exceptional autonomy, and allowed him to develop a wide variety of approaches. Those articles demonstrating the most personal control would be what he misleadingly called “reportage,” composed as they are of photos taken from López’s archive. A variation is that of the directed scenes, where López used models as “catalysts” to provoke reactions among people in the street. A more traditional form would be that represented by “Sólo los humildes van al infierno” (Only the humble go to hell), a reportage that demonstrates clear authorship but with little directorial intervention, owing to the fact that López had to interact with the “humble” and the police in the delegaciones (police stations). López almost never published a photographic reportage about “hard news” in Mexico—though the fact that he put the downtrodden in the magazines’ pages made them “news” in some way—and it has perhaps been an error to consider his work photographic reportage, as has often been the case in exhibits and books.82 Héctor García characterized the problem of the photojournalist as that of “the dog with two sandwiches.” Trapped between the demands of information and aesthetics, photojournalists can miss the news while looking for the angle or light they desire (and vice versa).83 Tina Modotti commented on this dilemma: “I know the material found on the streets is rich and wonderful, but my experience is that the

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way I am accustomed to work, slowly planning my composition, etc. is not suited for such work. By the time I have the composition or the expression right, the picture is gone.”84 It could well be that Nacho López was cut from the same cloth as Modotti. Although he asserted that photojournalism was his “true passion”—and he was deeply committed to what he perceived to be its sociopolitical role—his talent may not have lain in the field of “hard news.”85 Seeing him in this light may permit us to understand various enigmas in his work: for example, why López never took any images of the miners’ “Hunger March” during 1951 or of the 1968 student movement, a watershed of modern Mexican history. It may also explain why his images of the 1958–59 strikes, of which at least 126 negatives exist, have markedly less power than those taken by the Hermanos Mayo, Héctor García, or Enrique Bordes Mangel. Although one image of the 1952 Henriquista repression is interesting, in general he does not appear to have had the gift of being a reporter. Within the work that will be studied here, this explanation clears up some rather curious decisions, such as having brought in a boy from clearly different circumstances to pose in the photoessay “Una vez fuimos seres humanos,” or that of using two images of the same woman in “Sólo los humildes van al infierno.” Nacho López must have been aware of his predilection for essay rather than reportage. If not, it would be difficult to explain his decision not to cover historical events, given the fact that he did not suffer the same restrictions to which important immigrant photojournalists were subject, such as the Hermanos Mayo or Walter Reuter. As a Mexican, López was no doubt less hampered by censorship than were foreigners and, by extension, he should have suffered less self-censorship, the greatest problem of Mexican journalists. For example, the Hermanos Mayo appear to have been the first “democratizing” photojournalists in Mexican mass publications; they participated in critical magazines such as Tricolor and Más, as well as being founders of the independent newspaper El Día. Nevertheless, they were always conscious of their status as foreigners in the country. Despite the fact that he had been nationalized, Faustino Mayo stated, “I always look for the political element in the image, but I don’t stick my nose in politics because I’m Spanish and I shouldn’t.”86 Walter Reuter’s case is similar. In his native land, Germany, he worked in AIZ (Die Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung [Workers illustrated news]), the most important worker and anti-Nazi magazine in the country, where he knew the great artist of photomontage John Heartfield.87 After fleeing from the Nazis, he was a photojournalist in the Spanish civil war before arriving in Mexico. In spite of antifascist antecedents—and his affirmation that he always felt free to do the reportages that he wished to in Mexico—he insists assertively that he never had produced, and never will, a critical article on this country: “Never, never, never.”88 He feels that the Mexican government saved his life; had it not been for the visa that he was given during the regime of Lázaro Cárdenas, he most likely would have died.

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However, if Nacho López decided to dedicate himself to photoessays rather than reportage, that decision should not be judged in an evaluative way. It is simply one camp within the many possibilities offered by photojournalism. If he was not a graphic reporter in the style of Robert Capa, he was a great photoessayist cut in the pattern of Eugene Smith. He walked a fine line between reality and creativity, because he never fell into a heavy-handed symbolism that would have destroyed his delicate metaphors about the lives of Mexico’s downtrodden.

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2. Photojournalism and Photoessays during the 1950s

The 1950s

The decade during which Nacho López published in the illustrated magazines has been one of the shadow regions of modern Mexican history.1 The 1950s were not a cataclysmic era, such as the epoch of 1910–20, when the Mexican Revolution was the first movement of the twentieth century that appeared to create the possibility of profound socioeconomic and political transformations. Nor did the 1950s seem to be characterized by the larger-than-life people and events of the 1920s, when the revolutionary caudillos Álvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles propelled a nation-building effort to centralize and secularize Mexican society, engaging in the Cristero War and presiding over a renaissance of muralism. Neither have the 1950s offered the attraction of the 1930s, when the regime of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) carried out radical reforms that seemed to coalesce the revolutionary fervor: nationalizing oil, redistributing massive tracts of land to communal farms (ejidos), creating worker’s administrations in major industries, attempting to introduce a form of socialist education, undertaking literacy campaigns, opening hundreds of new rural schools, and administering the cultural effervescence in the plastic arts, cinema, and journalism. Maybe the mundane appearance of the 1950s has been the reason few were moved to study them, or perhaps they look too uncomfortably like Mexico’s present. Whatever the explanation, a somewhat unique political arrangement—a reactionary, though “revolutionary,” party dictatorship effected through presidential absolutism—begins in 1940 and could arguably be said to continue until the year 2000. Alan Knight asserts that during the 1940s and 1950s, “The regime acquired its distinctive contemporary characteristics: presidential preeminence, the political 23

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monopoly of the official party, the deft manipulation of mass organizations, the dilution of class and ideological differences in the solvent of nationalism.”2 Hence, understanding the post-1940 period is as important to knowing today’s Mexico, as it is fundamental in contextualizing Nacho López’s photography. The general lines of the mutation from revolutionary impulse to presidentialist autocracy can be drawn in broad strokes. The turn to the right that began under Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–46) was institutionalized by his successor, Miguel Alemán (1946–52), and followed by Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952–58) and successive presidents. Given the central role that Miguel Alemán played in this process, we can encapsulate the period’s ideology with the name of its principal architect— Alemanismo—and define it as a counterrevolution against the programs of Lázaro Cárdenas and his regime of Cardenismo. Programs designed to address the need for a more just distribution were discarded, and replaced with efforts to increase production: government expenditures shifted from social projects to economic incentives, priority was given to the country’s industrialization and to the development of export agriculture, an iron-like control of the labor movement was implemented, agrarian reform was essentially ended, the private sector gained power, corruption became widespread, and dependence on the United States was increased, with Mexico becoming an unconditional ally in the Cold War. In effect, Alemanismo is the abandonment of the Cardenist project, and might well be described as the classical Thermidorean reaction; it is certainly the definitive end of the Mexican Revolution in all but rhetorical terms. This sudden transformation had important ramifications for Nacho López. Born in 1923, López had spent his formative years in Cardenista schools, which attacked religious superstitions, while stressing social consciousness, collective learning, and cooperative labor.3 The curriculum for Mexican history portrayed workers and campesinos as the makers of a revolution that had yet to do them justice, and it impelled teachers and their student workers to resist their oppression, and press for democracy. Inspired as a youth by the lofty aims of socialist education and the great art produced by the revolutionary culture, López found himself as an adult trapped in gray-suited, moneygrubbing Alemanismo. In a 1976 lecture at the Museo de Arte Moderno, he reflected on the great influence that Cardenista schooling had on him: “The socialist education that I received as an adolescent during Cárdenas’s regime left profound traces on my soul. We sang ‘The Internationale,’ and knew that ‘The bourgeoisie is insatiable and cruel’; at the cry of ‘Arise, hungry victim!’ we battled in our dreams against the capitalist system.”4 The most significant ideological shift in the reaction against Cardenismo was the establishment of “National Unity” as the heart of the new politics. The pluralism— the differences of class and divergences of ideology—that had marked Cardenism were replaced by an insistence on uniformity. The campaign rhetoric of Manuel Ávila Camacho centered on an imaginary national consensus, creating “a thor-

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oughly populist appeal in which differences of creed and class were submerged in a glutinous national unity.”5 After winning the elections—evidently as a result of massive fraud—Ávila Camacho defined a path for Mexican politics that has endured to the present. As José C. Valadés noted: From the first days of his presidency, General Ávila Camacho made clear that the principal theme of his plan for governing would be that of proposing and realizing national unity; and although the proposition contained neither a principal idea nor a ruling doctrine, national unity was understood to mean the contrary of what General Cárdenas had attempted to bring about.6

World War II was ostensibly the reason for wanting the country unified. Mexico broke relations with the Axis after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and entered into the war with the 1942 sinking of Mexican ships by German submarines. After the war ended, the motive for continuing with such singleness of purpose was transformed: armed action was replaced by a “revolutionary” campaign to industrialize. The official left—for example, that embodied in the figure of the great labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano—was demonized, and people shrank from being called leftists as if they were fleeing from the plague itself.7 The class struggle that had characterized Cardenismo was neutralized. In one of the clearest instances of this transmutation, the powerful central coalition of unions, the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM, Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos), changed its slogan from “For a classless society” to “For the emancipation of Mexico.” The new motto was nonsensically meaningful: From whom was Mexico to be liberated? An enemy was needed, and the new opponent against which Mexicans had to unite was communism, which replaced fascism as the evil foe requiring (poor) Mexicans to put aside class differences and join as one in the international struggle. Mexico followed the United States into the Cold War, and anticommunism became an official doctrine.8 The presidents were at the fore of national unity. Mexico had a tradition of strong presidents, and Cárdenas had been instrumental in centralizing political power. However, it seems that presidentialism—the unbridled adulation for and unconditional collaboration with the Supreme Chief—really begins under Miguel Alemán.9 Together with Ávila Camacho, Alemán had created the PRI in 1946, with the intention of distancing the new policies from the PRM programs of Cárdenas.10 Because of the authority he acquired as founder, Alemán reversed the usual relation of candidate and party: instead of running on the party’s program, Alemán made the PRI accept his plans for governing.11 Moreover, Alemán’s cabinet was not the coalition of heterogeneous forces that Ávila Camacho’s had been, but a homogeneous and personal instrument created to serve the new president.12 Entrepreneurs and industrialists were welcomed in government as they had

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never been before, though their presence was played down publicly.13 In fact, one could say that Alemán’s “was the sexenio [six-year presidential term] in which the close cooperation, and sometimes symbiosis, of political power and the national bourgeoisie was formalized and legitimated.”14 The primordial goals of Alemanismo, economic development and industrialization, corresponded principally to private initiative, and the government did everything possible to ensure its participation in the new program. There were great investments in infrastructure: for example, irrigation and electrification projects, as well as the construction of dams and highways (although road construction served more to link Mexican producers with U.S. markets than to promote internal communication). These undertakings were financed with public funds, but the entrepreneurs paid few taxes. Mexico had one of the lowest tax rates in Latin America for corporations, and the state gave business “enormous facilities, which included tax exemptions, subsidies, credits, reductions of bureaucratic procedures, and frank complicity in many cases.”15 Moreover, benefits for the moneymakers included those provided under the table. Economic development offered great opportunities for corruption, and Alemán’s “insatiable interest in material acquisition” set the stage for a wide range of practices, including bribery, direct looting, kickbacks, and payoffs.16 Corruption was tolerated and institutionalized, a sharp difference from the ethos of Cardenismo, when officials were motivated to set aside personal enrichment and work for the public good.17 In a climate that so favored the wealthy, a society developed in which opulence and conspicuous consumption replaced the Cardenista culture of proletarian moderation.18 The only freedom conceivable was economic prosperity, and the rich built extravagant homes in Lomas de Chapultepec and summerhouses in Acapulco, joined “country clubs,” drank their “highballs” with whiskey, wore jewels and mink coats—or dressed in the “California style”—and appeared in society pages that had acquired “great importance.”19 Modernity came to mean eating hamburgers and hot dogs, drinking bottled soft drinks, buying at Sears, Roebuck, and driving around in the newest model off the Detroit assembly line.20 It was a period of explosive urban growth, above all in Mexico City, and the urban middle class became one of the political and economic bases of Alemanismo. Expanding more rapidly than either the rich or the poor, the middle class acquired a political arm, the CNOP (Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Populares), which supplanted the worker’s organization (the CTM) as the PRI’s central pillar. Many of the readers of the popular illustrated magazines in which Nacho López collaborated came from this new class. Those favored by Alemanismo did not forget the less fortunate, for whom they offered charity teas. However, perhaps the place where the dispossessed were most clearly allocated a presence in the new society was on movie screens, where their reality was obfuscated in films that romanticized poverty, and depoliticized workingclass culture. The best example of this genre was the supersuccessful trilogy direct-

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ed by Ismael Rodríguez: Nosotros los pobres (We the poor, 1947), Ustedes los ricos (You the rich, 1948), and Pepe el toro (Pepe the bull, 1952), which inaugurated the formula of low-budget productions placed in urban settings, preferably in workingclass neighborhoods.21 The customary energy and charisma of Pedro Infante made these populist melodramas attractive, but he was unable to save them from the picturesque individualism with which Rodríguez saturated them. The poor are portrayed as popular types, mired in an inevitable condition; however, they are curiously happier than the rich, despite living in heartrending material want and suffering horrible misfortunes. Hence, even the most elementary class consciousness is irrelevant to this cinema’s cheerfully exotic downtrodden, and at times they seem to owe their only loyalty to the wealthy, who have been unfairly excluded from the earthly paradise of indigence. Cinematographic mystification was useful, but the government assured its developmental project by using official unions to curb the Cardenista working class. In 1947, the obsequiousness of the labor leaders toward the president was articulated by the CTM’s recently elected secretary-general, Fernando Amilpa, who told Alemán: “We don’t wish to be your government’s favorites, we want to be friends. We aspire to be the most sincere collaborators of your politics.”22 The CTM was the key to controlling the labor movement, and any attempt to break with its dominion led to the army’s intervention in order to protect the entrepreneurs’ advantages. The state was intent on dominating the working class because it was absolutely necessary to its project and, to a great extent, the left accepted the priority given to industrialization.23 This was reflected in the accentuated decline of strikes but, in case the army was not sufficient to assure the sought-after “social peace,” Alemán’s creation by decree of a federal police (Dirección Federal de Seguridad) provided a new weapon.24 The need to get close to the president, and as far as possible from communism, made protests take on strangely oblique forms. Hence, the few critiques that were made of the situation displaced the blame for the regime’s failures onto the president’s collaborators, while reaffirming their commitment to Alemanismo. For example, a large demonstration took place in reaction to the 1948 devaluation of the peso, and against the high cost of living and unemployment; there, protesters carried posters that read, “Throw the Señor President’s bad collaborators out of government,” and “We’re not communists, we were and are Alemanistas. We back the president in his energetic measures against the bad collaborators and those who create hunger.”25 The dominion that the state exercised over the labor movement was facilitated by the isolation and weakening of the left in the atmosphere of the Cold War, which provided reactionaries with the instrument to convert into card-carrying Stalinists any who were not fervently and constantly declaring themselves to be anticommunists. Religion was fundamental to this process, and the archbishop of

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Puebla expressed clearly the Manichaeism of the era: “Today more than ever the words of Jesus Christ apply: He who is not with me, is against me.”26 Vicente Lombardo Toledano was expelled from the PRI and the CTM, thus removing a vitally critical element within the official apparatus. The Mexican Communist Party (PCM, Partido Comunista Mexicano) essentially destroyed itself with purges of militants and the “desertion of thousands” as a result of the crises caused by its open collaboration with the Mexican government, as well as by Stalinism.27 The PCM’s failure to provide an alternative was characterized by its adoption of the line “Unity at any cost,” and by the fact that only in 1949 did it finally stop considering Alemán’s government to be “progressive.” Aside from the process of urbanization and industrial development, perhaps the most important aspect of this period is the extreme dependence that was established in relation to the United States. With the closing of European markets because of the war, Mexico tied its economy entirely to its northern neighbor. As Tzvi Medin describes: The United States became . . . the almost exclusive buyer of Mexican primary products and the almost exclusive provider of manufactured goods, machinery, and the vehicles necessary for agriculture, industry, services, and public works. The United States was also the provider of primary products for the manufacturing industry, durable articles of use and consumption, prepared foods, and so on.28

Europe’s destruction, coupled with the ties established during the war, meant that the United States continued to be dominant in the postwar world: “U.S. capital took possession of the automobile assembly plants, spare parts, radios and televisions, agriculture machinery, cloth and synthetic fibers, medicines, processed foods.”29 Mary Kay Vaughan noted the effects on popular culture: “U.S. officials and entrepreneurs became far more engaged in the film industry, the promotion of tourism, and advertising for new consumer goods.”30 Mexico’s profound economic and technological dependency was reflected in increasingly frequent incorporation “of the English language as a guarantee of status.”31 It had, as well, its impact in popular culture; one of the more evident was the way in which Santa Claus, and his Christmas of 25 December, began to replace the Night of the Magi (Noche de los Reyes Magos, January 5) during Mexico City’s holiday season. Being Mexican

The wave of nationalist ideology that swept 1950s Mexico could be attributed to a variety of factors. To some extent, it must have been a reaction against, a symbolic compensation for, and a cover-up of the growing dependence on the United States. It may have derived from some of the same sources that produced contemporary

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U.S. explorations of “Americanism,” and it could also have been an imitation of them.32 It was certainly, in part, a search for identity occasioned by an unsettled situation in which a society found itself facing the strains of sudden urbanization, fueled by people leaving the familiarity of extended families and town life, of a dramatic effort to rapidly industrialize an artisan economy, and of a people still trying to deal with the aftermath of a major revolution. And, it was also, without question, the statist creation of an imagined national unity—beyond class, race, or gender—as a substitute for democratic pluralism. The more formal search into mexicanidad began with Samuel Ramos’s 1934 publication of Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico.33 After World War II, the philosophers of the Grupo Hiperión—headed by Leopoldo Zea, and including Joaquín Sánchez Macgregor, Jorge Portillo, Luis Villoro, and Ricardo Guerra, among others—organized roundtable discussions and polemical arguments around the question of “Mexican philosophy.” They also published the series “México y lo mexicano” (Mexico and that which is Mexican), which included books such as En torno a la filosofía mexicana (About Mexican philosophy) by José Gaos, Mito y magia del mexicano (Myth and magic of the Mexican) by Jorge Carrión, and Análisis del ser mexicano (Analysis of the Mexican being) by Emilio Uranga.34 Although he did not belong to the Hiperión, Octavio Paz made a major contribution to the debate in 1950 with his influential Labyrinth of Solitude.35 The intellectuals’ efforts were directed toward providing a properly rigorous base for discussing that which is peculiarly Mexican. Unfortunately, their conclusions were too often essentialist, formulating ahistorical legends that extrapolated Mexicans from the realities they were actually living, and that were defining them; consider, for example, how the “solitude” so articulately described by Octavio Paz is never related to the estrangement characteristic of the new urban environment.36 As Roger Bartra commented, “The myth of national character appears to have no history; it would seem as if the national values have fallen from the patriotic sky to join with a unifying substance in which the souls of all Mexicans bathe equally and forever.”37 Bartra argues convincingly that, whatever the fruits of the intellectuals’ search for a Mexican philosophy, one consequence has been a cultural phenomenon of great importance: the gestation of a modern myth based on the complex processes of mediation and legitimation that develop in a society upon the decline of the revolutionary forces that constituted it. It is the myth of the bent hero [héroe agachado] . . . . [who] represents campesinos without land, laborers without work, intellectuals without ideas, politicians without shame.38

For the government, mexicanidad was the ideological encapsulation of “National Unity.” A sentimental and picturesque chauvinism was imposed from above, replacing the popular, revolutionary, and anti-imperialist nationalism of Cardenismo.

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The new nationalism was utilized to eliminate any ideological, social, or political alternative, and was raised against any deviation: implicitly against Cardenist pluralism and explicitly against the socialism of Lombardo Toledano. This doctrine was based on the rejection of “exotic ideas.” Curiously, the philosophy that was evidently most foreign to Mexicans was Marxism, for the relationship of lo mexicano and anticommunism was constantly reiterated, above all in the mass media, where nationalist discourse was reconfigured “to support the rightest triumph within the state party that drew strength from the deepening Cold War.”39 In schools, patriotism was placed at the core of the new Alemanista curriculum that discarded class struggle, and “revolutionary morality” was embodied in the role of the government as fomenter of national pride about “authentic Mexicanness.”40 Mexicanidad was the cultural cement of the homogeneity imposed by Alemanismo. Cinema was one of the sites where the battle was fought out over what it meant to be Mexican. There was, of course, no lack of films touting machismo as the purest expression of the nation: in Soy puro mexicano (I’m pure Mexican, Emilio Fernández, 1942), Pedro Armendáriz single-handedly defeated all three Axis powers. However, another film, Primero soy mexicano (I’m Mexican first, Joaquín Pardavé, 1950), offers a more structural insight into the manufacture of nationality.41 This movie turns around the rupture between a father and son, and their subsequent reconciliation, which is also the son’s recovery of his Mexicanness. Having spent ten years studying medicine in the United States, Rafael (Luis Aguilar) returns home, where his father, Ambrosio (Joaquín Pardavé) has prepared a feast to welcome him. The main dish is mole, considered by important intellectuals of the 1950s such as Alfonso Reyes and Salvador Novo to be the culinary symbol of the mestizo Mexican nation.42 For Ambrosio, mole “was invented by divine inspiration,” but Rafael, estranged from his mexicanidad, prefers “ham and eggs.” The linking of food to nation is an obvious essentialism, and Rafael’s eventual reintegration is celebrated by eating chicharrón y chile verde until he has burned his mouth, as well as dressing in charro clothing, singing corridos, and, most important, returning to the great Mexican family as an obedient son. However, the mutual exclusivity that the narrative creates in relation to eating takes the question to a new level. The problem at the banquet is not only that Rafael prefers U.S. food to Mexican, but also that he is not hungry. He ate his “lunch” at midday, and so has no interest in partaking of Mexican sustenance when it is offered to him a few hours later at the traditional time of the comida. Hence, Primero soy mexicano establishes the fundamental opposition between the Mexican and the Other: you cannot be a member of two cultures at the same time because, if you have eaten of the non-Mexican, you cannot ingest the Mexican. The message of this film is not “I’m Mexican first,” but “I’m Mexican and nothing else.” The comedian Tin Tan created his character of the pachuco (zoot-suiter) precisely in reaction against such homogenization, and he explored the varieties emerging

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in a transcultural Mexico in somewhat the same spirit as Nacho López’s focus on “worlds apart.” The prime example is offered by this comic’s most accomplished work, El rey del barrio (The king of the barrio, Gilberto Martínez Solares, 1949), which historian Emilio García Riera described as “perhaps the best comedy produced in the entire history of Mexican cinema.”43 As the film opens, Tin Tan wakes up and says the English words with which it begins: “All aboard.” The pachuco is here a railroad worker who will take us on a delirious multipersonality tour, converting himself in turn into a “gangster” from Chicago, Illinoise, an Andalusian cantaor (El Niño de Pecho, the Baby at the Breast), a French painter (Gastón Touché), and an Italian opera maestro, before he returns to his “real” identity. At the film’s end, he is an engineer of an amusement park train, driving children around in circles, including his own family. Given the fundamental role of the family in sustaining Alemanista nationalism, one could be tempted to read this narrative as if Tin Tan had assumed the different characters in order to ridicule them, thus reaffirming mexicanidad. However, the actor’s comic power confers such energy and vitality in exploring alternative possibilities that, rather than ratifying chauvinism, its infinity of realities is an incitement to pluralism. During his trip, Tin Tan violates almost all the norms of his period. The family, bulwark of the nation, is ridiculed: the film is a desmadre, in which all the precepts of “decent” people are turned upside down; for example, hired to paint a house, Tin Tan and his cohorts destroy it, smearing the portraits and the piano with coats of color.44 In place of the family, the film proposes the social sustenance provided by personal relations in the proletarian barrio. Workers are not the docile and submissive adherents to Alemanista industrialization that they are in many Mexican films of this period. But neither are they romanticized. Rather, Tin Tan turns the dominant ideology on itself by parodying it. In the house-painting sequence, Tin Tan has been trying to knock out Marcelo, an undercover cop, so that they can rob the home. Marcelo is unaware that he is being hit and, thinking that his dizziness is a result of fatigue, asks Tin Tan if he can rest a bit. Tin Tan replies despectively: “That’s why Mexico is the way it is, with slackers like you.” Beaten down by Alemanismo, workers are nonetheless responsible for the country’s crisis. The upper class and the government are pilloried mercilessly in El rey del barrio. The juxtaposition of the rich and the poor is instructive. The underprivileged help one another, but live in constant anxiety of how to earn the money for food and medicines. The wealthy are fatuous and resentful; they have no other preoccupation than their endless cocktail parties. The state is presented essentially through Marcelo, the policeman. At Tin Tan’s birthday party, a drunken Marcelo gives him permission to steal. Tin Tan finds that ironic, because he had decided to follow the straight and narrow. But Marcelo insists: “No, no, no. Steal, steal and get rich. Money will make you decent and respectable. That’s the way things are here.” Tin Tan replies that this goes on everywhere, but Marcelo is not to be mollified; he

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insists: “Here, more.” Looking directly into the camera he points to the public and says, “Look at all the millionaire crooks running around loose.” Conscious of the dangers of making accusations of venality in a period so conspicuously marked by it, Tin Tan begs the audience to excuse Marcelo, as he is drunk. The insistence with which Tin Tan pleads indicates that those who would be offended are powerful personages, that is, President Alemán and his functionaries. The greatest Mexican film comedian, Tin Tan’s inventiveness, irreverence, and self-reflexivity were an important antidote to the narrow and exclusive nationalism of the 1950s. A photographic exhibit that Nacho López curated in the mid-1950s provides a glimpse into the very particular ways that lo mexicano could be defined, and the nefarious uses that were made of this construct, sometimes by members of the press itself. When Nacho López, Fotógrafo de México had been shown in November of 1955 at the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana in Mexico City, a gallery belonging to the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes), it was sponsored by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and does not appear to have provoked any controversy. López was probably the first photojournalist to stage an individual exhibit, though two collective expositions of press photographers, organized by Antonio Rodríguez in 1947 and 1952, had been antecedents.45 The Mexico City public was thus somewhat accustomed to seeing photojournalism in a space usually reserved for art, and many of the images in López’s exhibit had been published before in illustrated magazines. The surprise was all the greater, then, when this same exhibit produced a “storm in a teacup” about “denigrating Mexico,” a year later in Washington, D.C. López had combed his archive to create an exhibit that “presents human beings in the midst of their struggle to survive in a hostile society.”46 Asserting that “photography is a powerful arm for denouncing,” López felt that he “photographed the humble as beings full of dignity and self-esteem.” He contrasted his position with that of the “furtive photographer-hunter,” whose superficiality converted misery into “picturesque images.” Recognizing the problem of exoticism in portraying Mexico, and the ongoing process of “Americanization” that was becoming so pronounced among certain members of the new urban middle class, López argued: “The great challenge of our time consists in not making colonialist photography. I have attempted to denounce the subtle phenomena that imperialism utilizes to make us feel subordinated and inferior. A sector of the middle class seems particularly affected, but the humble are still capable of defending themselves.” He wrote that photographers must establish a communion with their subjects that would permit them to integrate themselves into the lives of workers and campesinos, and photograph them with understanding. The exhibit, Nacho López: Photographer of Mexico, was mounted in the Pan American Union, seat of the Organization of American States (OAS), and reactions were initially quite favorable. The Mexican ambassador to the United States,

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Manuel Tello, inaugurated it together with Luis Quintanilla, the Mexican representative to the OAS, on 29 August 1956. Tello commented that López was a “marvelous example of those Mexican artists who dedicate themselves to reproduce the most real, and sometimes the most tragic, aspects of Mexico.”47 The OAS magazine Américas published an article on the exhibit, noting that the imagery was unconventional but, “like the anguished Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, López strives to express the hidden beauty of human beings in torment. . . . These men and women, filled with wisdom and humility as they engage in the trivia of daily life, face their hours of tragedy and triumph with a simple human dignity.”48 The magazine added that the exhibition “will subsequently go on tour throughout the United States.” López appeared to be sitting on top of the world. The OAS’s director of visual arts, José Gómez Sicre, wrote to López, saying, “You seem to have a very brilliant future before you,” and described the opportunities that were opening up: several magazines had expressed interest in publishing López’s photos— Life (in both Spanish and English) and Visión—moreover, the San Francisco Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum wanted the exhibit.49 Gómez Sicre concluded one letter, “It would appear that your reputation will reach the international level it has deserved for some time.” Despite the promising future that seemed to lie before Nacho López, he had not counted on the narrowness of the limits in defining mexicanidad, nor on the role journalists would play as self-appointed “watchdogs” to determine what was acceptable in representing the nation. It appears that a group of Mexico City reporters who were traveling in the United States saw the exhibit at the Pan American Union and were offended—“as Mexicans”—by what they believed were images that “denigrated Mexico.”50 Their nationalist fury was such that they questioned López’s right to be a citizen: “He says he’s Mexican, but he is not registered as such, and his true nationality is unknown.”51 They felt that López had “presented only the lowest aspects of our city’s life,” and although they recognized that there was certain “incoherence” in arguing that photos that had been displayed and published in Mexico should be censored in a foreign exposition, they nonetheless argued, “Dirty clothes shouldn’t be shown outside the home.”52 The journalists complained to Ambassador Manuel Tello, but he refused to intervene, asserting that the exhibited images were the least offensive of those proposed by López. The reporters then took their case to Luis Quintanilla. He may have been more vulnerable, or less diplomatic, because he agreed that the exhibit, “whatever its artistic merit, did not reflect the degree of civilization and progress that currently exists in our country and, hence, caused grave prejudice to the nation.”53 Quintanilla ordered some of the images retired from the exhibit, and must have brought pressure to bear upon Gómez Sicre because, in January of 1957, the OAS official informed López that “The unjust and malicious attack by a group of journalists that came to Washington has made me cancel all efforts to circulate the exhibit in the U.S.”

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Within Mexico, friends of López such as José Luis Cuevas, the famous lithographer, rallied around him. A young and promising anthropologist, Raúl Flores Guerrero, wrote an impassioned defense of photographic realism, the “most wounding and most human” of the arts.54 For Flores Guerrero, López “aspired only to leave the most truthful testimony, at once beautiful and dramatic, sublime and heartrending, of current reality, the most complete vision of all that constitutes the real Mexico.” In this battle over mexicanidad, Flores Guerrero concluded: “It is not the photographs of Nacho López that denigrate Mexico. What is denigrating is the attitude of Mexicans who do not have the capacity to appreciate the most transcendental art that has been produced in the country, whether that be the pictorial art of an Orozco or a Rivera, or the photographic art of ‘a certain Ignacio López.’” Notwithstanding the articulate pleadings of Flores Guerrero in favor of a national identity based on a realistic appraisal of the country’s situation, Nacho López’s first international efforts to employ photography’s indexical power to construct a critical representation of his country ran aground on the shoals of a nationalism designed to keep Mexicans in their place.55 The Press

The enthusiasm shown by Nacho López’s colleagues in denouncing him for “unMexican activities” was not exceptional, for the press played a fundamental role in maintaining the “social peace” of Alemanismo, thanks in large part to the infrastructure established by Cardenista literacy campaigns. Cárdenas’s government had created a world of new readers and, by “the mid-1930s, a vast number of newly literate working people began to visit newsstands.”56 Many had evidently learned from reading comics: “At the end of the 1930s and during the 1940s, millions of Mexicans who had not yet experienced the pleasures of the printed word lost their literary virginity while submerging themselves in the seductive pages of comic books.”57 The increase of readers, the growth of the middle class, and the development of new forms of communication such as comic books and illustrated magazines created a situation in which the press was an ever-increasing power in the country. However, during Alemanismo, journalism had “an accentuated conservative tone, when it wasn’t frankly reactionary.”58 This political position corresponded to its interests. An eminent Mexican journalist, Francisco Martínez de la Vega, described the general situation of the press in 1953: The magnates of the press are businessmen, publicity agents, industrialists. And they have a very peculiar, but very concrete, opinion that is expressed in wooing the cash box. Having surrendered themselves in body and soul to submission, they demand their chains of gold. We could say that in Mexico newspapers can be free. But

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the sad case is that, with very few exceptions, they seem determined to reject that freedom; the chains of gold are necessary so that the industry prospers, and balances are satisfactory. The general tone of our great press is that of a lamentable, persistent servility that makes it impossible to freely examine the country’s problems.59

The press was “always at the service of the Señor Presidente, whoever and however the Señor Presidente was.”60 There is a rather striking absence of any notion of the separation, and mutual checking, of powers. A division between the authority of executive and the role of the press was argued to be neither necessary, nor necessarily desirable, by Ignacio Lomelí Jáuregui, subdirector of the García Valseca publication chain, during a 1951 luncheon (that would soon become Press Freedom Day) organized by the periodicals’ directors to thank Alemán for the liberty of expression: “When the goal of the government, to serve the people, coincides with that of the press; when press and government keep vigil for the nation’s dignity, acts such as this occur. Government and press fulfill the common aspiration to serve Mexico.”61 The taboo against any portrayal that was not entirely complimentary was absolute: “It was always risky to say anything about the President of the Republic.”62 In fact, it appears that the relation with the president was above the country’s laws. That, at any rate, is the impression left by Fernando González Díaz Lombardo, director of Ovaciones, who asserted in 1958, “The mutual respect and cordial relations that exist between government and press can only be conceived when, overcoming the cold climate of the law, they establish bases of comprehension and similarity of fundamental proposals.”63 José Agustín has intelligently commented on the “empire of formalism” that so characterized Alemanismo.64 One way of camouflaging reality was to foment nationalism at the same time that an ever-greater dependency on the United States was being established; another was to subsidize films such as Ismael Rodríguez’s trilogy that romanticized the working class while the state carried out a systematic campaign to subdue it.65 In the press, this formalism was manifested in the creation of “Press Freedom Day” (Día de la Libertad de Prensa). A year after the press magnates had offered their 1951 luncheon to thank Alemán “for having made possible the freedom of press,” they established 7 June as the official day for unabashedly rendering homage to the president, who in return reaffirmed his support for them.66 The photojournalists quickly copied the directors, and institutionalized their day to lunch with the president as 15 January. They were rapidly followed by the periodical vendors, who had to have their annual banquet (April 25) with the president. In an irony that seems to have escaped Mexican journalists, the celebration of Press Freedom Days by thanking the president is the clearest indication that such liberty is nonexistent. Notwithstanding its ruse of journalistic liberty, this day of praise for the president

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also provided the journalistic entrepreneurs an opportunity to express their desires. They asked for protection against the “invasion of magazines printed outside Mexico that inhibit the development of Mexican publications,” and insisted on the necessity of a paper factory for newsprint.67 The articulation of these wishes makes it clear that the press’s acquiescence to the government was (and largely still is) not only a result of shared interests and ideology. The government can choose to protect Mexican publications from their foreign competitors, or leave them vulnerable. It can also use its power to pardon taxes, both domestic and for the importation of equipment, or subject publications to the hopelessly Byzantine and totally arbitrary tax system. Further, until recently it had control over paper supplies through its agency PIPSA (Producer and Importer of Paper [Productora e Importadora de Papel]). The possibility that the government would abuse this power seems to have exercised curiously little concern among Mexican editors; for example, PIPSA was described in 1938 as “another guarantee for the freedom of press.”68 However, the most important source of government control was (and is) realized through the use of public funds for publicity, as well as under-the-table handouts. The press is the place where government advertising provided (and still provides) self-praise for its policies and functionaries. Moreover, given the vast number of nationalized businesses—the lottery, the oil and telephone companies, the railroads and airlines, the banking and insurance industries—the government was (and may yet be) the country’s largest advertiser. Government payoffs, subsidies, and advertising were just a sophisticated form of bribery, a vice in which all were steeped, from the owners and editors in chief to the lowly press photographers.69 The process of institutionalization under Alemán included what is known as the embute or the chayote, and it became so common a feature of the Mexican scene that the prominent editor José Pagés Llergo declared, “In Mexican journalism it is more difficult to be honorable than to be a crook, because the problem of the journalist who wants to be honest is less that of refusing money of a dubious origin than in making sure they don’t literally shove it in his pockets.” 70 The regime’s interference in periodicals was not limited to placing favorable “news,” it also made sure that certain things were not published. For that reason, there are great lacunae in the press of this period, one example of which would be investigations of the evident venality during the presidencies of Ávila Camacho and Alemán. Ávila Camacho was largely a “silent partner” of his brother, the infamous Maximino, whose activities stunned “even the most jaded observers”; and the open immorality of Alemán’s regime was so notorious that when Ruiz Cortines entered office he proposed a legal reform on the responsibility of public functionaries to avoid illicit enrichment (just as Alemán had announced an anticorruption campaign at the start of his sexenio).71 Its conspicuousness notwithstanding, corruption is almost unmentioned in the press. This is surely but one example of what the journalist Roberto Blanco Moheno was referring to when he

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said, “Profits in journalism don’t come so much from what is published as from what is not published.”72 The ideological surrender of journalism to the regime was facilitated at all levels, though a particularly stark example was offered by the 1954 congress of the Mexican Journalists Association (Asociación Mexicana de Periodistas), which voted to enter the PRI collectively. The party answered in a way that demonstrated its enthusiasm, as well as the contradictions inherent in such an arrangement: By a happy coincidence, a group of Mexican journalists enter the PRI. With that, they demonstrate that there is no incompatibility between the civil activities of journalists within political parties and their function to tell the truth to the people. It is necessary to maintain without variance an independent journalism, which is the faithful reflection of democratic institutions.73

In their speeches celebrating Press Freedom Day, the directors of the media asserted that none of them could “complain of any repression,” because “Mexican journalists have no censors other than our own consciences.”74 However, perhaps it was their memories rather than their consciences that had been expurgated, because recent history offered at least two cases of censorship against very popular magazines: Rotofoto and Presente. The Illustrated Magazines

Although there were a number of illustrated magazines, Rotofoto, Hoy, Mañana, and Siempre! seem to have been the most important during the medium’s heyday, and they are those that are remembered today.75 Like their U.S. and European counterparts—Life, Picture Post, and Vu—they enjoyed significant popularity.76 The picture press, and all of the mass communication media, “represented the cutting edge of modernity”; for example, Hoy was touted as “the modern magazine that has been lacking in our country, with objective and fundamentally visual news.”77 The Mexican magazines were almost certainly bought by members of the new middle classes born of postrevolutionary economic development, and they were probably the readers of articles by important intellectuals, both foreign and Mexican. These included international figures—Thomas Mann, Leon Trotsky, Pio Baroja, André Gide, Gabriela Mistral, Arnold Toynbee—as well as Mexican thinkers: Samuel Ramos, José Vasconcelos, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, Alfonso Caso, José Revueltas, Salvador Novo, Carlos Fuentes, and Leopoldo Zea. However, what made these periodicals different from their predecessors was their visuality: photoreportages and photoessays acquired an autonomy previously unknown in Mexican publications, and the striking imagery of photographers such as Nacho López, the Hermanos Mayo, Ismael Casasola, and Héctor García was provided a space in

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which to appear. Around the middle of the 1950s, in a process that occurred throughout the world, illustrated magazines in Mexico were displaced by the arrival of television. José Pagés Llergo was the founder of almost all the important illustrated magazines, including Rotofoto, Hoy, Mañana, and Siempre!. The master editor of the Mexican picture press, his career manifests many of the contradictions present in an ostensibly free press under the thumb of presidentialist autocracy and party dictatorship. Having been cofounder of Hoy in 1937, together with his cousin, Regino Hernández Llergo, Pagés Llergo left the magazine to start up Rotofoto in 1938. When Rotofoto was destroyed, Pagés returned to Hoy as an important collaborator until the admiration he expressed for the fascist regimes while in Japan was found to be unacceptable by the imperial power of his hemisphere: the magazine was placed on the U.S. State Department’s “unofficial blacklist” in 1941, affecting its advertising revenue.78 Hoy reluctantly marked its distance from Pagés, publishing an evidently painful disclaimer in which it declared that the world tour of the “brilliant Mexican journalist” was “absolutely personal.”79 In 1943, Pagés founded Mañana, again with Regino Hernández Llergo. Pagés left Mañana in 1947 and returned to Hoy as its general director; however, when the owners of Hoy attempted to censure a photo in 1953—creating a cause célèbre of Mexican journalism—he resigned and founded Siempre!. Pagés Llergo is considered to have been among the most honest journalists in Mexico, and he was certainly one of the most intelligent and tolerant of editors. Although he was close to all the presidents, those relations do not seem to have corrupted his work to the degree it did that of others, and he earned a reputation as a “maverick” by symbolic acts, such as not attending the banquet for Press Freedom Day, as well as by hard-nosed support for a free press: when Julio Scherer was expelled from Excelsior by President Luis Echeverría (1970–76), Pagés provided him with a floor of the Siempre! building in order to help Scherer start up Proceso.80 However, despite his evident interest in a genuine liberty of expression, he articulated in a concise and definitive way the limitations he placed on his journalists: “They can write whatever they want, as long as they don’t touch the President of the Republic or the Virgin of Guadalupe.”81 Rotofoto and Presente

The fate of Pagés Llergo’s first creations—Rotofoto and Hoy—could not have been more different. Hoy was one of the most important magazines in the country from the 1930s through the 1950s, carefully toeing the invisible but tangible line of the permitted. Conversely, the periodical most expressive of the roughhouse give-andtake during Cárdenas’s regime was Rotofoto, which offered images that rubbed against the grain. This magazine lasted only eleven issues, from 22 May to 31 July,

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1938, but during its short life it was an agile, provocative, and fundamentally visual attempt to vindicate the place of photojournalists in Mexican publications. Pagés Llergo felt that the period demanded, and would accept, his critical freshness. In terms of readership, he was right: Rotofoto’s irreverence attracted many, and the magazine was said to have broken all circulation records for the period. Reflecting back on the experiment in 1951, Páges wrote: Rotofoto was a destructive periodical. If Mexico lived the same epoch today I wouldn’t hesitate a moment to repeat the adventure. With Cárdenas, we had left behind the night of oppression. Avid of freedom, like waters that overflow a river’s banks, the periodicals threw caution to the wind. Rotofoto was the culminating expression of that climate.82

Rotofoto dealt with the powerful in a way that no other Mexican publication would until the 1970s. In sharp contrast to other periodicals, it demonstrated a distinct irreverence to presidentialism: its first cover featured a photo of Cárdenas sitting on the ground and eating with campesinos; later issues showed him on the beach in a swimming suit, and in his underwear after bathing in a river.83 Although the magazine avoided placing an undressed Cárdenas on its cover, it felt free enough to do so with Ramón Beteta, undersecretary of foreign relations, and an influential adviser.84 Sometimes the magazine went beyond irreverence to a biting iconoclasm that ridiculed politicians in “indiscreet photos” like the cover graced by a prominent senator stretching his mouth so that a large hunk of food would fit; the title read, “Senator Padilla clings tenaciously to his bone/[job]” (Photo 2).85 Images taken in the Chamber of Deputies showed congressmen sleeping—“Don Luis V. León is an idealistic deputy; more than an idealist, a dreamer”—or scratching their leg with a sock lowered: “They say that Representative Miguel Martínez is a man of few fleas but, from the photo, we can see that he has quite a few.”86 Rotofoto’s indiscreet pictures may have been inspired by the political uses made of photography in Germany during the Weimar Republic. In what was evidently a watershed, the Berliner Ilustrierte Zeitung published a “bombshell” picture of the leftist president, Friedrich Ebert, in a bathing suit, as part of its 1919 campaign to discredit him.87 Such imagery triggered photojournalists to adopt a new attitude, one result being the “candid” shots of famous men taken during the late 1920s and early 1930s by photojournalists such as Erich Salomon and Tim Gidal. Although Pagés Llergo did publish pictures of Cárdenas in a bathing suit and in his underwear, the most tempting target was Vicente Lombardo Toledano, Galahad of the left, who was mercilessly denigrated. Rotofoto was implacable in its attacks; for example, in its second issue appeared an “intimate” profile of the labor leader that ridiculed his family relations, his opulent office, and his ideological intransigence. In one photo, Lombardo Toledano appears to ignore his daughters, who play nearby as he looks

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2. Enrique Díaz, Senator Ezequiel Padilla caught in the act of eating, 1938. Cover of Rotofoto 6 (26 June 1938).

away from them while smoking; the cutline reads: “The leader sucks well and peers among the trees to see that no agents of the reaction lie in ambush there.” 88 In later issues, they accused him of being ignorant, a blabbermouth, a hangman, calumnious, and arbitrary. He declared a CTM boycott against the publication and de-

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manded the cancellation of its permission. In the next (the eleventh and last) issue, a photo of Lombardo Toledano appeared on the cover, his right arm raised as if signaling; the cutline read: “The most conspicuous traffic cop in Mexico attempts to detain the circulation of Rotofoto. We’re sorry to be in a hurry and are determined to continue committing infractions.”89 In spite of the editor’s intentions, Rotofoto was not permitted any more transgressions. Various leaders of CTM syndicates declared strikes against the publication, and police detained Pagés Llergo in his house while labor goons burned down the offices and destroyed the machinery. The incessant attacks on Lombardo Toledano were the determining factor in Rotofoto’s untimely end. Lombardo Toledano’s power to eliminate the publication demonstrated the dependence of Cárdenas on organized labor, as well as the lack of (and perhaps the lack of interest in) the well-oiled machine of national domination that would come into existence under Miguel Alemán. Rotofoto’s sudden demise has sparked other opinions. One of the great popular myths in Mexico about Rotofoto is that its destruction was the result of its having published images of Cárdenas in his underwear.90 I find this to be anachronistic: that is, it is a reading back through the all-powerful presidentialism of Alemanismo to ascribe that degree of control to Cárdenas. Alan Knight has perceptively argued that, contrary to this view, “Cardenismo . . . was less powerful, less speedy, and less capable of following its proposed route across a hostile terrain than is often supposed; it was more jalopy than juggernaut.”91 Carlos Monsiváis has a different idea about Rotofoto’s sin; he believes that the attack on the magazine was a result of the “scoop” of Enrique Díaz’s long career: his photoreportage on the rebellion of General Saturnino Cedillo.92 Evidently, Díaz was strongly criticized for having made “news” of that challenge to the state; his testimony to its existence was documented by the date of his visit in an image of Cedillo reading Excelsior, whose headline is clearly visible. However, Hoy published a similar article by Díaz, and little occurred beyond a protest by the CTM.93 In the final analysis, it may well be that Rotofoto’s irreverent images were what was most provocative, for it appears that the photojournalists had become a favorite target: Díaz, Antonio Carrillo, Ismael Casasola, and Enrique Delgado had asked Pagés Llergo to take out life-insurance policies for them shortly before the magazine was destroyed.94 The history of Rotofoto has become a symbol of censorship in Mexico, despite (or because of ) the fact that it took place during the freedom of Cárdenas’s regime, and the president does not appear to have been implicated. The case of Presente provides a more typical instance of governmental repression, as Alemán seems to have been directly involved, and the familiar tactic of “the carrot or the stick” was employed in its entirety.95 Presente was born in 1948, an offshoot of Jorge Piñó Sandoval’s column “Presente,” which had been suppressed by the chief stockholder of Novedades, Jorge Pascual, said to be “a front for Alemán.”96 Piñó Sandoval left

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Novedades and founded Presente, which included distinguished writers and humorists among its collaborators: Pagés Llergo, Tomás Perrín, Renato Leduc, Abel Quezada, and Antonio Arias Bernal. The magazine soon acquired a reputation for its “forceful critiques of the government and high functionaries close to Alemán.”97 Investigations about the vertiginously swift enrichment of the Alemanistas, a product of the massive frauds they were perpetrating, were published in the magazine, which “confronted Alemán as if at war,” according to Julio Scherer García, probably the most honest and critical of Mexican editors.98 Denouncing official corruption made Presente a rotund success. Blanco Moheno said that “it attained the greatest periodical sales in our history, to the point of provoking a black market”; the magazine’s popularity was explosive because, since the destruction of Rotofoto, there had been no publication “so valiant, so unquestionably funny, so sharply wounding.”99 Given the portentous investigations and popularity of Presente, the government’s response was swift. Alemán threatened Presente in his 1948 presidential “State of the Union” address (Informe), and the offensive against the magazine took on the familiar Mexican pattern of “hard” and “soft” lines of repression. The hard line followed a history similar to Rotofoto’s: gunmen assaulted the printing shop where Presente was produced and destroyed the machinery; evidently Piñó Sandoval was hospitalized.100 The government, for its part, confiscated the book Los presidentes dan risa (Presidents are laughable), by one of Presente’s collaborators, Magdalena Mondragón. At the same time, the publication was subject to “a new and more delicate sort of repression.”101 The paper supply from PIPSA, the government newsprint monopoly, was stopped and the magazine was offered Finnish paper at a much higher cost. Presente had to cut its number of pages in half and double its price; in a short time the magazine disappeared. Nonetheless, Presente’s history did not end with repression, whether “soft” or “hard,” but with the familiar “chains of gold.” Senator Carlos Serrano, an unconditional collaborator of Alemán, gave Piñó Sandoval 150,000 pesos so he could take an extended trip to Argentina; he returned to Mexico well tamed.102 There were at least two other ephemeral attempts to publish critical magazines during this period: Tricolor and Más. Tricolor lasted from 16 September until 23 December of 1944. Among the directors of the magazine were well-known communists such as Hernán Laborde and Efraín Huerta, the photography was under the direction of the Hermanos Mayo, and Leopoldo Méndez, the radical lithographer, created the covers. Writers such as José Revueltas, Alfonso Caso, and Leopoldo Zea published their essays on inflation and the rising cost of living, as well as on art, history, and proletarian life. The images of the Hermanos Mayo emphasized the presence of workers in the labor process, a distinct departure from the “industrialist photography” characteristic of other periodicals. Más was published from 4 September 1947 until 8 January 1948. It was a bit more critical than the dominant magazines, Hoy or Mañana, but certainly far from radical. There are no particularly im-

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portant writers among its collaborators, with the exception of Francisco Martínez de la Vega. What makes this magazine memorable are the photoessays of the Hermanos Mayo about poor barrios and police corruption. It is not yet clear why Tricolor and Más ceased to appear. Hoy and Mañana

Hoy and Mañana were cut from very similar patterns, as was to be expected from magazines created by the same team of José Pagés Llergo and Regino Hernández Llergo. Perhaps Hoy was less superficial than Mañana, above all during the periods when Pagés was the editor. The two publications were generally quite conservative, a result both of Alemanismo’s repressive context and the cousins’ ideology. Pagés Llergo’s fascination for the fascist leaders is well documented, and Hernández Llergo was described by Blanco Moheno (himself conservative) as “always reactionary”; both cousins were devout Catholics.103 During Cárdenas’s regime, Hoy was the magazine most loved by the private sector, and “the leading champion of the opposition.”104 One instance of Hoy’s struggle against Cardenismo was its publication of some sixty-two studies by the Instituto de Estudios Económicos y Sociales, a right-wing think tank, during 1938 and 1939.105 Moreover, because of the money problems that constantly afflicted Hernández Llergo, Maximino Ávila Camacho entered into Hoy in the early 1940s. A corrupt, ruthless caudillo and a fervent antileftist, Maximino was the secretary of communications and public works during his brother’s presidency. Having designs to follow Manuel in office, Maximino attempted to acquire influence through dallying in the press. His presence transformed Hoy’s oppositional position under Cárdenas into an unconditional support for the presidency (and, says Blanco Moheno, it also changed Hernández Llergo from a journalist into a businessman whose only interest was “living opulently”).106 The cornerstone of Hoy and Mañana’s ideology was presidentialism, and they fawned over the occupant of the office in turn. Tours, banquets, meetings, the inaugurations of public works, decorations received from foreign governments, and any number of other presidential activities filled their pages. In fact, around one-fourth of the illustrated articles published in these magazines dealt with the president in some way, and there were entire issues dedicated to him that could be up to three times as long as they were normally.107 The president’s public-relations office had unlimited resources, and the inevitable result was the unquestioning adulation the press heaped upon this figure. Such sycophancy—as well as the conflation of presidentialism and nationalism—can be seen in the photograph of Miguel Alemán and Daniel Morales, the general director of Mañana, which was taken when Morales visited Alemán to thank him for his letter of congratulations on the magazine’s seventh anniversary (Photo 3). The cutline stated:

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Licenciado Miguel Alemán, President of the Republic, extended to Mañana a courtesy that honors us and makes us proud. With a spirit of political intelligence and an affability that causes us limitless satisfaction, the Señor President outlined in his letter to Mañana what could be considered a message and a norm of conduct for the country’s press. In the photo, Daniel Morales renews the intention to continue working incessantly for the country’s benefit, which has been, is, and will be the ideology of Mañana. An ideology of national spirit.108

The president served as the great patriarch of a culture still dominated by a traditional family structure. The magazines’ portrayal of what a successful man ought to be was encapsulated in this figure, as well as in infinite replicas: the cabinet members, state governors, and the innumerable functionaries who subsidized photoessays on their activities. The visual message of these men in suits and ties (when not dressed to provoke populist identification)—inaugurating public works, sitting in banquets, appearing in political gatherings, or pictured in visits by photojournalists to their “private lives”—was clear: men should be important, and the clearest path to such public recognition was to be contributing members of the PRI dictatorship, finding their place on the ladder of patriarchal dominion. Women’s role was defined within this apparatus: they should be wives of important men. The primordial example was offered by the First Lady, whose public presence was essentially a reaffirmation of domestic values: she was her husband’s shadow at his public appearances, and when she was pictured without him her role as “wife and mother” was demonstrated in distributing cooking items—“The First Lady gives away 17,000 stoves on Mother’s Day”—inaugurating child-care centers, and handing out presents to poor children for Christmas or the Day of the Magi.109 Interesting exceptions to the rule included a Mañana series in the early 1950s, “Ellas también hacen la historia” (Women also make history), which focused on important women such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Evita Perón. However, the patriarchal pattern was usually undisturbed. It may be useful to compare this discursive core of presidentialism in Mexican magazines to those found at the center of publications such as Life and Picture Post. All these societies passed through disquieting social and cultural anxieties in the postwar period. A world weary of combat was not to be spared, as the major powers geared up to continue militarism, in spite of the general desire for demobilization and disarmament. The left had been fortified by its presence in organizing the labor movement during the Depression, and by the resistance it offered to fascism in the war. Fearful of the attraction the masses felt for genuine democracy, the ruling classes utilized the patriotism ignited by combat to maintain their power through the appeal to continue the unity fostered by the war emergency. The formulation of national identities was a convenient way to create consensus within the states, and one of the places that this occurred was in the illustrated press.

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3. Anonymous, President Miguel Alemán and Daniel Morales, director general of Mañana, Mexico City, August 1950. Published in Mañana 366 (2 September 1950).

In her study of Life, Wendy Kozol has outlined how the “representative family” constructed by that periodical served as the pivot of identity in the United States, demonstrating that what were conceptualized as “ordinary” families—white, middle-class, heterosexual, and patriarchal—were the vehicle for defining what it meant to be an “American.”110 Life’s reporting during World War II had linked the middle-class family with ideals of patriotism and moral obligation, and the magazine

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continued this pitch after the war, but transformed civic duty into consumption. Hence, the Life family conflated patriarchy and affluence: men were defined by the “breadwinner ethic,” measuring their success in terms of their domestic possessions, and women were confined to the homes their men provided for them, almost always in the suburbs. Life took documentary photography, which had largely focused on the downtrodden in previous decades, and used its realism to naturalize, and mythologize, the particular social form of the white middle-class family, turning it into a synecdoche for the “American Way of Life.” In so doing, “news coverage of some of the most critical issues facing Americans in the post-war period relied on domestic iconography that blurred the boundaries between public and private spheres and shaped national identity in the process.”111 In Great Britain, Picture Post grew out of the experience of the “people’s war” against fascism, which the magazine had portrayed as a spirit of collective effort rather than from the perspective of high policy and grand strategy.112 This carried over into the postwar years when, with a Labor government in power, a British documentary style developed that was based on the democratization of the photographed subject. As Stuart Hall affirms: Picture Post captured for the still commercially-produced “news” photograph a new social reality: the domain of everyday life. . . . People here do not require to be surprised off-guard, caught in candid poses, imitate themselves for the camera, perform or pull special faces. The Picture Post camera finds them interesting enough, complex enough, expressive enough in the detail of their routine everyday lives. It lends the dimension of significance, intensity to the commonplace.(83)

In Mexico, the family was not undergoing the dissolution that was occurring in the much more rapidly modernizing United States, and no “people’s war” had required the mobilization of populist imagery, as in Britain. Life legitimized the “American Way” through recourse to “ordinary people” in a mythical family, and Picture Post recast British identity in terms of everyday life unlinked to public events; but in Mexico this process of identification with the larger entity was carried out through the figure of the president. The revolution—that tiger Francisco I. Madero had loosed back in 1910—had to be tamed. Who better to control México bronco (wild Mexico) than the supreme patriarch who ruled with absolute authority throughout his sexenio, inheriting the mantle of power from the revolutionary pantheon of Madero, Venustiano Carranza, Álvaro Obregón, Emiliano Zapata, and Pancho Villa? The presidentialism of Hoy and Mañana went hand in hand with an unbridled admiration for the ruling classes. “The week’s outstanding social events” were regular features in every issue: images of and notes about the wealthy’s anniversaries, birthdays, breakfasts, and banquets were as ubiquitous as the “news” of “elegant re-

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ligious weddings” and “distinguished civil nuptials” of “beautiful and distinguished people” who married in “aristocratic temples and chapels.” Advice on fashion and hairstyles for women was constant, sections obviously directed at those who could take advantage of this information; a good encapsulation is Hoy ’s weekly column dedicated to “The Art of Dressing,” in which Cecilia Gironella (“Bambi”) visited the wives of well-known men so that they could parade their clothes. Aside from the regular features on Alemanismo’s winners, an entire issue was dedicated yearly to the bankers’ convention. The commercial advertising found in the magazines was clearly directed toward instigating the new middle classes to emulate their wealthier brethren’s faith in modernity, which was often imported. Airlines, both domestic and foreign, appeared regularly, as did ads for elegant furniture, jewelry, and department stores, new residential colonies in Mexico City and Acapulco, expensive cars, French perfumes, Spanish brandies, California wines, Scotch whiskeys, Swiss watches, Arrow shirts, and Parker pens, as well as products by Mennen, Revlon, and Bayer. AlkaSeltzer was also pushed, presumably to deal with the upset stomachs caused by such forced modernization. Commercial advertising was often related to government activities. For example, when a magazine focused on a state governor, it would publish a long photoessay on his activities, paid for from state monies. But it would also use the opportunity to recruit ads from public agencies and private businesses in the state, as well as paid insertions of congratulations for the governor by individuals who were obviously hoping for a contract or a job. The same process of securing local advertising was followed when the president arrived on one of his innumerable tours. In fact, the illustrated magazines depended a good deal more on government subsidies, both federal and state, than on commercial advertising or sales. As Julio Mayo stated categorically in talking about these periodicals, “Circulation didn’t matter. Advertising didn’t matter. The only thing that really mattered was publishing what government functionaries did. Every dependency had money to pay for public relations, and they paid for every mention of anything that had been done and could be related to a particular functionary, for example, public works.”113 This “news” (for that is how it was—and still is—published) typically took the form of picturing federal and state functionaries at the inauguration of new industrial accomplishments, meeting with international business leaders, and announcing social programs carried out by PRI politicians.114 Although the gacetillas are difficult to recognize, they may have constituted as much as 60 percent of the total magazine pages in Hoy and Mañana.115 Government advertising of its many nationalized businesses was also an important resource, as was providing rich subsidies for the printing of “special editions,” another way of making sure that the image of the country that the PRI wanted to give was published in the picture press.116

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These magazines were a good deal less interested in the underside of Mexican society. Work was usually pictured in the style of “industrialist photography,” where machines and structures dominated images from which laborers were often excluded. Union leaders were an exception to this rule, and they were sometimes the objects of ferocious attacks, particularly during the ideological wars of the 1930s. Vicente Lombardo Toledano was drawn to look like Napoleon, and on one occasion a photograph by Enrique Díaz was published on Hoy’s cover in which one teacher effusively embraces another because he had yelled at Lombardo Toledano that he was a “cynic” for having converted to Marxism.117 A constant tactic of the magazines’ antiworker line was to associate union leaders with communism. The ridiculous extremes to which this was carried can be seen in the cutline of a 1943 photo where Fidel Velázquez, the individual most responsible for facilitating government control of the Mexican unions, was described as “a man of such firm convictions that he preaches communism everywhere and all the time.”118 The magazines found union corruption an easy target, although they never acknowledged the role of the government in creating the immorality that caused leaders to compromise their independence, and discredited the unions to the general populace.119 The periodicals usually left the officialist leaders alone in order to concentrate on the organizers of those groups whose independence represented a threat to the established order; thus, they redirected what would have been a wellfounded criticism against the very individuals who were engaged in attacking the problem. A revealing example is offered by Mañana’s coverage of the 1951 “Caravan of Hunger”: five thousand miners, accompanied by fifteen thousand family members, marched from Nueva Rosita, in the country’s north, to Mexico City in hopes of presenting their case directly to the president. This movement was the last gasp of the miners’ struggle against the takeover of their union by charros imposed by the government.120 Alemán had utilized all his familiar tactics against the workers’ organization: a phantom union was created, and then recognized as legitimate thanks to judiciary collaboration that declared the strike “inexistent,” all accompanied by a military occupation of the mining towns. Their situation turned precarious by such harassment, the marchers left their homes and walked for fifty days through winter cold to Mexico City, where they were placed in a sports complex that had been conditioned as a “concentration camp” for them. Their rank-and-file leaders shared the hardships of the march and the camp, but an article in Mañana alleged that the leaders “came in luxurious automobiles, arriving at the most luxurious suites in the swankiest hotels, where they uncork the most aromatic cognac and toast the proletariat.”121 Mañana followed the line of most of the press, alternately defaming the marchers or ignoring the caravan.122 When the miners arrived in Mexico City, Mañana published a photo of them in the Basilica of Guadalupe, with the title “Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do.”123 The editorial facing the photo contained the expected chauvinis-

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tic pleas, “The clan of antinational machinations must be satisfied. Few times has it had the opportunity to use a group of genuine workers such as these against the country’s tranquillity.” The priest who presided over the mass for the miners had a different take: “They ask not for riches, but bread for themselves and their children. Bless them, Virgin of Guadalupe, as you have blessed so many just and noble causes.”124 The magazines pitted the military against labor, comparing the latter unfavorably to the former. Hence, workers were insidiously contrasted with soldiers in several 1938 photoessays composed of images by Enrique Díaz that “demonstrated” that servicemen could meet the need for labor without the accompanying problems of unions. Beneath a photo of soldiers engaged in road construction—those “simple and silent proletarians who demand nothing”—ran this cutline: “Workers would have deserted or gone on strike or asked for indemnification, etc. Soldiers neither complain nor ask for anything. Like men who know how to do their duty, they continued working.”125 Another photograph was called upon to testify on behalf of the military: “Though union leaders have said that the soldier is a lazy bum, these photos show the contrary: a soldier building a house from the foundation up.”126 What the photomontage as a whole shows is even more revealing: the magazine’s undemocratic orientation is embodied in the disproportionately large figure of an officer who looms over the scene to command the soldier and ensure the task’s completion—the antithesis of democratic self-direction. Things did not go any better for campesinos and Indians, who were portrayed as picturesque. Enrique Díaz’s images of grinning peasants on market day and smiling families of fishermen in Pátzcuaro, happy with their rather wretched lot, were a staple fare.127 The exotic approach also provided the publications with a veritable cornucopia of soft-core pornography. For example, the “Indian problem” was depicted by Rafael Carrillo through various images of bare-breasted indígenas in “the marvelous landscape of Cosoleacaque”; one of them appeared on the cover of Hoy, leaning conveniently over to grind corn on her metate.128 As a symbol of the nation, Indians were crucial to presidentialism. In one photoessay, “The President and His People,” an Indian is shown shaking hands with Alemán. The president is presented with his face to the camera, extending his hand to the fellow, who is photographed from behind, and thus has no personal identity. The cutline states: “This photograph is more eloquent than two hundred words. The spontaneous exaltation of a representative of our humble Indian class to reach out his hand to the First Leader of the Nation who has so profoundly occupied himself with the problems of Mexican agriculture.”129 Culture was a constant element in the magazines, and had its own way of contributing to the Alemanista creed of the rich and famous. Although there were the occasional texts by important intellectuals, those illustrated articles on culture that were given prominence of location, as well as more pages and photos, tended to

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focus on cultural figures as celebrities.130 These were most often movie stars, although the “private” lives of muralists such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros furnished good material as well. According to Carlos Monsiváis, the 1940s in Mexico marked the beginning of “faith in personages, in celebrities, in sacred cows.”131 One of the many U.S. products flooding Mexico, the fame fabricated by mass media created mythical figures for the people to emulate, thus channeling their energies into conforming, rather than questioning, the status quo. Photojournalists played their part in manufacturing this phenomenon: “The Celebrities! The forties is the decade of celebrities, and the Hermanos Mayo document this irreproachably. Not famous or well-known people, but something different, the new concept imported from the United States: the Celebrity.”132 The many articles on Mexican cinema focused largely on stars such as María Félix, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Pedro Armendáriz, and Dolores del Río, most often with a trivial emphasis on the “personal lives” of the screen idols. The publications’ general conservatism was reflected in the large number of photoessays on Cantinflas as opposed to the few that were published on Tin Tan, his main comic rival. Cantinflas was a well-respected figure whose characterization of the peladito, the shrewd country bumpkin who became streetwise in Mexican slums such as Tepito, had won him a huge following in the Spanish-language world for his capacity to turn the tables on the rich and powerful. In 1944, Salvador Novo wrote, “Cantinflas is the representation of the Mexican subconscious.”133 At his best, this comic symbolized those who know how to survive with dignity through quickness of wit in a highly stratified and hierarchical, but ostensibly democratic, society: a colonized being who carves out his own reality in response to a situation in which he is dominated. However, during the 1950s, Cantinflas became increasingly officialist, and one manifestation was the jingoist rejection of Tin Tan’s pachuco. In a pivotal Cantinflas film that marks the onset of the comic’s decline, Si yo fuera diputado (1951), a sign outside a barbershop reads, “Pachucos not served, because I don’t like them.”134 Cantinflas was safe for the magazines because, despite his characteristic play with words, he was never attacked for corrupting the Spanish language. Tin Tan received much criticism for incorporating English phrases, no doubt a result of the fact that in the 1950s, the pachuco symbolized transculturation, modernity, urbanization, the breakdown of traditional values, and a general unease with the suffocating nationalist homogeneity of Alemán’s regime. Hence, pachucos were viewed with disdain by both traditional Mexican society and Alemanismo’s nouveaux riches, who regarded them as social no-accounts and mutilators of the native language, while the ever more officialist (and ever less funny) Cantinflas was lauded with honors by the state apparatus, including the press. The conservatism of Hoy and Mañana was also reflected in their portrayal of international news. For example, during the Spanish civil war, a photo of women

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committed to Franco’s cause was published in Hoy with the following caption: “You can see the señoritas’ enthusiasm; happy as can be, they give the fascist salute while holding bread and canned goods in their arms.”135 Hoy had differed with Cárdenas’s support for the Spanish Republic, and the fact that it felt free to do so provides another instance of that government’s pluralism. But this magazine, and all the others, followed the official line for World War II. There was much coverage of this conflict, an event that offered the opportunity to publish a great number of traumatic and spectacular photos of violence. But wars and civil strife were not the only source of morbid, and ultimately insignificant, “shock photos”; pictures of ghoulish executions, spectacular suicides, grisly murders, and gory accidents appeared constantly.136 The directors’ Catholicism was reflected in regular features on the church throughout the world, and photos from international agencies of a more inane character were another constant, especially cute animals, picturesque curiosities, and cuddly babies. A great deal of international imagery turned around the political leaders of the world, often with a strong dose of anticommunism. Hence, it was typical to find Soviet diplomats being depicted in the act of disagreeing: “The almost eternal repetition of this custom, in the face of the patience shown by those present, among whom can be distinguished Dean Acheson of the USA. The theme in question is unimportant, you have to say ‘no.’”137 The cartoonists who drew the covers joined in the Cold War: Mañana showed the USSR chasing after Mexico, and the Virgin of Guadalupe being threatened by the Soviet bear.138 Hoy depicted Uncle Sam watching out for communists in foreign lands, while a U.S. leftist sneaks up to knock him out from behind; Mexican readers were warned, “It’s not very far away” (no está tan lejos), a title that played with the notion that the United States, and its dangerous leftists (!), were as near geographically as the radical threat to take over the world was imminent.139 Individual news photographs pounded away at communism, and it was common to find images in the magazines documenting the failures of the USSR—“Children sunken in the stupor caused by hunger, innocent victims of the red dictatorship”—and expressing discontent with the regime and its media: workers in a factory read Pravda, but “with very little interest.”140 When it was not overtly political, the “news” chronicled the doings of fabled celebrities. The royalty was always newsworthy, for example, the king of England’s visit to Mexico or the death of Romania’s Queen Maria. This interest in nobility found its U.S. counterpart in Hollywood’s celluloid stars. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard graced Hoy’s first cover, and the magazine claimed proudly to be “the only Spanish-language periodical in the world to have a complete and exclusive editorial staff in Hollywood.”141 In this first issue, Hoy set the stage for the future with articles on “The Private Life of the Stars” and “Hollywood Speaks,” antecedents of unceasing columns such as “How the Hollywood Stars Live,” as well as articles that appealed to the ever-lurking erotic interest by describing how

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“Hollywood Makes Love.” Movie stars were constantly called upon to legitimate the magazines: for example, when Mañana was founded in 1943, copies had evidently been sent to screen idols in order to receive responses from them. Thanks to the studios’ press agents, Mañana soon had autographed photos of stars expressing their congratulations for the new publication, which it then ran in issue after issue.142 This legitimation process was extended to the political sphere: stars were linked to the Mexican ruling class in images such as the full-page photo of Mickey Rooney with President Ávila Camacho, taken by Hoy’s “premier photojournalist,” Enrique Díaz.143 An analysis of the photoreportages and photoessays in Hoy and Mañana will enable us to decipher the magazines’ politics of picturing. Here, the concept that I use to differentiate between photoreportages and photoessays is the degree to which the subject is somehow “news.” That is, I define a photoreportage as something that presents an occurrence that is ostensibly “newsworthy.” The most obvious case would be “hard news”: coverage of catastrophes such as the 1943 eruption of the volcano Paricutín, or of important historical incidents such as Saturnino Cedillo’s 1938 revolt, the 1958–59 strikes, and the Cuban Revolution. I have also categorized as photoreportages those “events” that are presented as if they had the same importance as hard news: presidential addresses, tours, and campaigns, and the banking conventions, as well as cultural and sporting events, such as bullfights, and the openings of art exhibits and films. Photoreportages constitute around one-third of all illustrated articles in Hoy and Mañana. What I describe as photoessays are defined as “features” in U.S. journalism; they usually have little to do with “news.”144 Their significance is not related to a historical occurrence: they are not an event that has occurred, but rather a situation that exists. They originate in an idea that someone has—an editor, a photographer, a reporter—to tell a story of “human interest,” often related to culture or travel. Approximately two-thirds of the illustrated articles in Hoy and Mañana are photoessays, and among the predominant themes are visits of photojournalists to Indian communities, churches, and a great variety of tourist attractions within and outside of Mexico. They also deal with actresses and actors, figures from the sporting world, religious acts, and Mexican flora and fauna. The president is, overwhelmingly, the predominant subject of the illustrated articles in Hoy and Mañana. Photoreportages on his tours of the country, his campaigns, his presidential addresses, his public appearances—above all in relation to industrial development—as well as photoessays on different facets of his life (ad nauseam!), constitute around one-quarter of the total number of illustrated articles. The photoreportages about the president are to a great extent created media events; not really newsworthy, they are simply propaganda acts armed to grandstand the president and his programs, as well as demonstrate his personal support for governors and other functionaries.

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The absolute centrality of presidentialism for the photojournalists of this period is apparent not only in the quantity of illustrated articles on him; graphic reporters seemed to personally assume their role as official heralds, participating with gusto in the adulation of “El Primer Mandatario.” Enrique Díaz followed the “route of Alemán” on more than one occasion; he also composed a long and extremely picturesque photoessay in his honor, replete with scenic landscapes, laughing children, and beautiful women, accompanied by Ramón López Velarde’s poem “Suave patria” (Sweet fatherland).145 For another article, Díaz constructed a photographic collage to demonstrate “What a President Does”; the most telling aspect is that only the leaders have faces, workers appear as hands.146 The photojournalists had imitated Press Freedom Day, providing them with the opportunity to use that event to flourish their personal relations with presidential power: “We feel the security of a strong friendship between the government and the press photographers.”147 Graphic reporters vied with one another to appear in photographs with the president. Enrique Díaz was the most favored: in one image he is shown eating next to Alemán, and in another he wears a collar of flowers the president had given him (a wreath he would promise to guard like a jewel).148 Although other photojournalists also appeared in images with different presidents—Ismael Casasola, for example—perhaps the most spectacular instance of their sidling up to the “First Leader” is that offered by the pictures that Adolfo Ruiz Cortines took of Faustino Mayo with Mayo’s camera.149 These images, in which one of the more “democratizing” photojournalists in Mexico clowns with the supreme ruler, present in a nutshell the glorious amalgam of president and press that so inhibited the development of critical journalism. After the presidency, the upper class is the theme most often covered in the photoreportages of Hoy and Mañana. A large number of these picture the banking conventions that took place every year, although the wealthy’s weddings, funerals, banquets, birthdays, and christenings also appear incessantly. The magazines also published photoreportages about human tragedies, from floods and earthquakes to murders and suicides. Cultural photoreportages principally include the openings of exhibits and spectaculars, as well as the first nights of plays and films. There are very few photoreportages in which the working class appears, and they are generally limited to showing the unions parading in gratitude to the president in May Day marches or to their rare historical appearance in rebellion during the street battles of the 1958–59 strikes (obviously, from a very conservative perspective). Because I have classified the immense majority of the illustrated articles on the president as photoreportages, the presence of the government in the category of photoessays is not so great. There are more photoessays in Hoy and Mañana on religion, Indians, sports, and actresses than on the government, which appears largely in articles about the army or public works. Tourism, the arts, and medicine are well represented. Women, too, receive attention, although it is generally related to

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fashion, or to show them in bathing suits, underwear, or pajamas—or with even less clothing in the case of the bare-breasted indígenas. Actors appear about half as much as actresses, which is a little more often than Mexico’s flora and fauna. There are also photoessays on dance, the theater, literature, science, business, and cinema. Children do not get much space, but they do appear more than workers, to whom are dedicated the same number of photoessays as lepers. Among those that could be considered exceptional photoessays in Hoy and Mañana, either for their critical element or for their uncommon theme, are several that deal with the poor in urban slums, almost always with the collaboration of Nacho López or the Hermanos Mayo. Antonio Rodríguez was the author of both photos and text for several wrenching articles on extreme poverty in the Mezquital region, though the texts are much better than the images.150 There are a few pieces on poor children, often published a little before Christmas in order to play on sentimental chords. The photoessays that differ from the common pattern constitute some 5 percent of the total, and there are almost no critical photoreportages.151 In sum, the general panorama of illustrated articles in Hoy and Mañana is almost always reactionary in political terms, aesthetically conservative, and thematically monotonous. A Mañana reportage on the 1952 May Day fray between the official unions and independent workers offers a fascinating glimpse into the ways magazines imposed officialist interpretations on photos of working-class struggle, first by utilizing titles to determine their reading as news images, and then by transforming photoreportages of actuality into photoessays of human-interest stories.152 Under Alemanismo, May Day had been converted from a march of worker protest into a parade of banners thanking the president for his unceasing efforts on labor’s behalf. This reached one of its acmes in 1951 when Miguel Alemán marched through the Zócalo arm in arm with Fidel Velásquez, lifetime leader of the CTM; the image was published in Mañana over this cutline: “The first worker of Mexico: Miguel Alemán.”153 Whether such arrogant flouting of the government’s control of organized labor was responsible or not, the next year saw an exceptionally bloody struggle between CTM goons and the independent workers who attempted to enter the official parade near the Bellas Artes concert hall. Trying to take back May Day was a yearly custom among the unaffiliated but, perhaps because it was the last year to protest against the president who had created charros, the sold-out labor leaders, this was a particularly brutal confrontation. The 1952 melee was covered by two of the Hermanos Mayo, Faustino and Julio.154 One of Faustino’s images was given a full page in the photoreportage on the street battle: it was a young girl, probably overcome by tear gas, who is being treated by a nurse; the cutline describes her as an “innocent victim” of “the red provocation.” Another Mayo photo—it is unclear whether it is Faustino’s or Julio’s—shows a badly beaten man who is apparently being taken into custody. This would indicate that he must be one of the independent workers who, having

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been attacked by the CTM guardians, is now being conducted to jail by plainclothes police. The cutline gives this photo a very particular meaning: A group of senseless antipatriotic provocateurs attempted to lessen the force of the Mexican workers’ formidable and vigorous unity with the Government of the Republic presided over by Miguel Alemán, causing fratricidal violence in a battle with the May Day parade marchers in front of Bellas Artes. This photograph of tremendous drama reveals the instant in which one of the communist pistoleros is detained by the inflamed multitude. The workers’ serene and measured comportment kept the street battle from becoming a bloody tragedy, without precedent, without name.

Although Mañana published three Mayo images of this conflict, it did not include what I consider to be among the best of the Hermanos Mayo’s five million negatives: the image taken by Julio Mayo of the mother grieving over her dead son

4. Julio Mayo, Mother grieving over her dead son, Mexico City, 1 May 1952. Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo Hermanos Mayo, Chronological Section 5939. Reprinted with permission.

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after he, an independent unionist, was killed by CTM goons (Photo 4). Those photos that could be given a reactionary interpretation through the cutlines and text appeared in the magazine, but that of the grieving mother is too powerful and speaks too much for itself to permit its meaning to be transformed through an “extraneous conceptual framework.”155 It could not be printed in the reportage on May Day, 1952, at any rate. But, with the passage of time, this photo was recontextualized; thus tamed, it appeared in a 1955 photoessay on the “most journalistic Mayo photos.”156 There, the image was ripped out of its real matrix and, with a cynicism that relied on the ambiguity of even the most powerful photos, was assigned a fabricated significance, transforming a historical instance of the struggle against charrismo into a timeless and recurrent phenomenon of daily life: “Who is she? Who is he? Their simple names, from the pueblos, are condensed in this brief eloquence: mother and son. The mother destroyed by pain, the son knocked down by death. The scene: the Cruz Verde some day in 1950. Any day in which drama can occur. The moment that Julio Mayo etched could not be more moving.”157 Siempre!

A photo taken in Paris led to the birth of Siempre!. In spite of Pagés Llergo’s innate conservatism and his profound commitment to the established order, he had a relatively critical perspective and really believed in the freedom of expression. In 1953, he was the director of Hoy when a picture with explosive possibilities arrived over the international photo services. The image had been sent to all the major Mexican periodicals, but only Pagés thought of publishing it. Taken in the Lido, a famous Parisian cabaret, the photo was composed of three key planes: in the foreground was a seminude dancer; immediately behind her was Carlos Girón, a Mexican who observed the woman’s body with evident admiration; in the background was Girón’s young wife, Beatriz Alemán, the much-loved daughter of a powerful president who had left office only five months before. Beatriz looks at her recently acquired husband—they were on their European honeymoon—hurt, jealous, and bewildered (Photo 5). Perhaps Pagés felt that the time had come to open up new critical spaces in the Mexican press, or maybe he just could not resist the temptation to publish a sensational image. Whatever his reason, the editor confronted presidentialism head-on by placing the picture in Hoy, where he accompanied it with a text about the dancer, Simone Claris, which ended, “In the photo, observing most attentively, Licenciado Carlos Girón and his señora wife, Beatriz Alemán, daughter of ex-president Miguel Alemán.”158 When the magazine’s owners found out that the image had appeared in their periodical, they informed Pagés that henceforth, “everything that was to be published—photographs and written pages—would first be submitted to their censorship.”159 Pagés resigned from Hoy and founded Siempre!, the first issue of

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5. Anonymous, Dancer, Carlos Girón, and Beatriz Alemán de Girón in a cabaret, Paris, 1953. Published in Hoy 844 (25 April 1953) and Siempre! 1 (27 June 1953).

which appeared seven weeks later with the controversial photo and the following cutline: but what’s wrong with this photo? We only publish this photo because the birth of Siempre! is closely linked to it. If a photographer had not been present at the precise moment in which this scene occurred, this magazine would never have seen light. However, Siempre! desires to make it clear that, in publishing this photo, José Pagés Llergo does not have—nor could have—the slightest desire to annoy

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anybody. If someone wants to judge with political criteria what is merely a journalistic document, that’s something outside the jurisdiction of he who was yesterday the director of Hoy and is today the director of Siempre!. To Doña Beatriz Alemán de Girón and Don Carlos Girón, our respects.160

Many of Hoy’s best collaborators left the magazine with Pagés and joined Siempre!: Francisco Martínez de la Vega, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, Antonio Rodríguez, Luis Gutiérrez y González, Rafael Solana, Roberto Blanco Moheno, and the great cartoonist Antonio Arias Bernal. With them, and others attracted by the opportunity to work in real journalism, Pagés created the beginnings of a genuinely pluralist press that would slowly provide alternatives to the “depoliticized” monotony of Hoy, Mañana, and others of their ilk. The question of mexicanidad that so dominated the era formed part of Pagés’s decision to create a different magazine; rather than copy Life or any of the Mexican “foreignist [extranjerizante] magazines and newspapers,” Pagés wanted to blaze his own trail. He found that in a format that emphasized articles of opinion, no doubt recognizing that investigative journalism was not an option under Alemanismo.161 Moreover, he made it clear that lo mexicano was broader than the narrow confines in which it had been placed: “No party or power monopolizes Mexican thought. The cult of the Homeland is not exclusive to this or that group. Mexican thought lives and breathes in the traditional right, in the center which aspires to moderating equilibrium, and in the impatient and passionate left.”162 Siempre! represented a crucial attempt to shrug off the “chains of gold” and create an independent journalism; at its peak, it may have been the best magazine of its kind in the Western Hemisphere.163 Its challenge to traditional journalism was apparent in the magazine’s layout. The media events—for example, the president’s tours and opening of public works, as well as the activities of other PRI politicians— are to be found in the back pages of Siempre!; this identified them as paid insertions rather than presenting them as if they were news, the common tactic in Hoy and Mañana. A good number of the relatively few photoreportages in Siempre! are on the president, but these generally deal with real news, such as the yearly Informe and meetings with foreign heads of state. Although there are quite a few on the campaign of Adolfo López Mateos (1958–64), there was essentially the same number of photoreportages on international events. Visual reports on the Cuban Revolution, the government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and its overthrow, racial strife in the United States, and the Suez Canal crisis give an indication of Siempre! ’s seriousness, although there are also “photoshock” images: executions, suicides, macabre deaths, sensationalist crimes, and catastrophes. Some of the more frequent subjects of photoessays in Siempre! are life in Mexico City (at times relying on staged scenes), and Indians (often offering the opportunity to show bare-breasted indígenas).

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Perhaps the presidentialist adulation of Hoy and Mañana was replaced in Siempre! by a “womanizing” obsession.164 The magazine’s birth had been the result of a curious knot of presidentialism and pictured female nudity, and I believe that Pagés attempted to displace the political significance of his decision to publish the cabaret photo by emphasizing the erotic element, so it would appear that the objections to it were for the seminude woman and not for the presence of Alemán’s daughter. Time magazine characterized the incident as “Don Quijote vs. Venus,” and Pagés appeared on the cover of Siempre! ’s fifth-anniversary issue as a Don Quixote painting a woman in a bikini.165 Almost every issue contains the modest equivalent of a Playboy centerfold: the central pages are color photographs of actresses, dancers, and vedettes, breasts pouring out of half-unbuttoned blouses, legs tantalizingly exposed as they frolic negligee-clad in bed or lie next to swimming pools in bathing suits. The first issue of Siempre! without such images is number 69, and every once in a while thereafter the centerpiece was occupied by sections such as “Masterworks of the great painters”; needless to say, there are always one or two nudes among the paintings. Notwithstanding what today looks like shameless sexploitation, Pagés Llergo’s insistence on the erotic can also be seen as an important alternative to the prudish moralism of President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines. A Golden Age of Photojournalism

The twenty-odd years between 1937 and somewhere around 1955 are the “golden age” of magazine photojournalism in Mexico, as they were in many nations. The recognition given graphic reporters was evidenced in, as well as promoted by, activities undertaken by Antonio Rodríguez, a communist émigré from Portugal who became an important cultural critic in Mexico, writing on muralism, and deeply involved in photojournalism as a researcher, curator, and practitioner. He appears to have been the impetus behind the pathbreaking 1947 and 1952 exhibits of photojournalism, and the many related article-interviews about graphic reporters published in Mañana during 1946 and 1951–52, projects underwritten by the magazine.166 Press photography was given front-page treatment by the plastics arts world in two exhibitions of photojournalism that were to be shown in the Palace of Fine Arts, the most important exhibit space in Mexico. The first ran into the stone wall of the authorities charged with protecting that fortress of high art, who evidently refused even to consider it until Rodríguez got the celebrated composer Carlos Chávez to intervene.167 Even after it was apparently approved, Rodríguez remained skeptical, and had to deal with the objections of bureaucrats, such as the one who pointedly remarked: “Make sure that the exhibited photographs are worthy of the Palacio de Bellas Artes.”168 Perhaps the functionary was put off by Rodríguez’s accent, because he “placed much emphasis in repeatedly asking ‘whether

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the photographs to be exhibited are not denigrating for Mexico or its personages.’” The exhibition, Mexico Seen by Press Photographers, was inaugurated at the Palacio in July of 1947.169 It appears that “The Second National Exposition of Press Photography” never took place. After having been promoted in Mañana for months during 1951 and 1952, it simply vanished from the magazine’s pages. I have never encountered any images said to have won any of the awards that were to be given (as was the case with the famous Paco Mayo photo of the grandmother learning to read that was always referred to as the winner of the 1947 exhibit, and after whom one of the two prizes was named in the many announcements for the 1952 exhibit). Antonio Rodríguez appears to have left the project at the end of 1951, and he was eventually replaced by Antoniorrobles, a typically presidentialist hack. This would seem to indicate that Rodríguez encountered some problems with the editors of Mañana, and they forced him out. Although they tried to keep the exhibit going, it may have lost impetus owing to Rodríguez’s absence, and/or Antoniorrobles may not have been a convincing curator for the Palacio’s guardians. Their problems notwithstanding, the exhibits were accompanied by two extensive series of article-interviews about the members of this guild that appeared in Mañana. Between June and October of 1946, the magazine ran nineteen of these essays; Mañana later published another twenty-one between October of 1951 and May of 1952.170 Dedicating such attention to photojournalists must have appeared surprising, for the 1946 series opens by remarking, “Few qualified workers of the Mexican press are as anonymous and obscure as the professionals of the camera.”171 The essays (like the exhibits) are a convincing demonstration of photojournalism’s importance at that moment, for no such series on journalists of the written word appeared during the period from 1937 to 1960.172 The article-interviews reveal the different areas and interests of the photojournalists. Some specialized in police activities—accidents, crimes, executions; others were known for their pictures of sports or social life. Aesthetic considerations were, in the main, considered to be the sphere of Nacho López, “the aesthete of journalistic photography,” more than any other press photographer.173 Further, López is one of the very few interviewed who expressed a concern for the unprotected and disinherited, though he is accompanied in his social focus by Héctor García and Faustino Mayo. The “leitmotiv” of Héctor García’s photography is “destitute children and poor people,” and his imagery is often “a cry of protest against social injustices.”174 Faustino Mayo is described as having “ideological principles” at odds with much of Mexican journalism.175 In an era so marked by the search for mexicanidad, this subject could not go unaddressed: “With his ironic and always profoundly human photography, Ismael Casasola has contributed to imprinting a personal seal on Mexican photography that differentiates it from the other photographic schools in the world.”176 The

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treatment of Paco Mayo is particularly interesting in relation to the question of photography and national identity.177 Having emigrated in defeat from Spain, and been treated brutally in the French concentration camps, Mayo felt that he had been “reborn on once again breathing the air of liberty” in Mexico. The article’s author offers insight into both Mayo’s perspective on Mexico and his own notions about representing the nation, in his description of the photojournalist’s visual politics: “No one could find, among the five hundred thousand Mayo photographs, a single one that denigrated Mexico. It would be useless to look in his archive for drunks or disgusting figures, which are so loved by U.S. tourists. But neither is he a hunter of folkloric curiosities.” The two major themes that run through the article-interviews are presidentialism and the dangers photojournalists face. Risk is most emphasized in the 1947 essays. Agustín Casasola Jr. grew up in the midst of “Mauser fire and magnesium lightening”; of his brother, Ismael, it was said, “The aperture of his camera has fired at the same time as pistols and machine guns.”178 Luis Zendejas is usually “where bullets whistle,” while Aurelio Montes de Oca can always be found “between shots and fire.”179 Both Paco and Faustino Mayo risked their lives in the Spanish civil war, the former being gravely wounded. Almost all of the 1947 essays make reference to danger, with photographers reflecting on experiences from the Mexican Revolution to the 1940 election-day battles between followers of Manuel Ávila Camacho and Juan Andreu Almazán. Although less pronounced, this theme also appeared in the 1951–52 articles, in which press photographers were described as having a “love for danger,” who would give their “life for a photo.”180 Various photojournalists remembered the perils of the shootout during Ávila Camacho’s electoral fraud, and Miguel Espinosa was put in jeopardy during the “Bogotazo.” 181 Presidentialism is what really dominates the articles from the 1950s—reflecting the growth of this ideology over five years under Alemán—although Antoniorrobles underlines this aspect much more so than does Rodríguez. To a certain extent, this theme was built into the project, because the essays appeared as part of the promotion of an exposition at which the best photo was to be awarded the Presidential Prize. This aspect may have been what prompted Rodríguez’s resignation, for the presidentialism in Antoniorrobles’s articles was suffocating, and many photojournalists seem to have been caught up in that dynamic. Felipe Martínez had won a prize for “The Best Photograph of Licenciado Miguel Alemán,” and Armando Zaragoza had taken twenty thousand negatives of Alemán’s presidential campaign.182 Despite often finding himself in situations of considerable danger, Manuel “Chato” Montes de Oca’s most emotional moment came when he thought that he had lost sight of “the illustrious person who was to be the principal object of his photos. ‘Chihuahua!’ he exclaimed out loud. ‘I’ve lost the president.’ And then the person at his side turned toward Chato with his cordial smile, although now with a certain irony. It was Licenciado Miguel Alemán!”183

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The photojournalist who talked most about his relation to the president was Enrique Díaz. This is significant, for Díaz was the most respected Mexican photojournalist of his day: the headline of his 1946 essay-interview described him as an “Admirable Photographer, Exemplary Compañero, Exceptional Man,” and asserted that “Díaz rescues national journalism from its sins.”184 Díaz mentions the presidency in the 1946 article, describing how they inaugurated the yearly banquet with President Ávila Camacho, “at whose suggestion was born the organization the Mexican Association of Press Photographers.” However, this is mild compared to the 1952 essay, in which the photojournalist demonstrated an unlimited adulation for the holder of this office. The “first professional satisfaction” of Díaz’s long career was an invitation to dine with Francisco León de la Barra, when he was president in 1911. Díaz again praised President Ávila Camacho for “having formed” the photojournalist association, and he expressed his gratitude to President Alemán for the annual banquet on 15 January. For Díaz, the flowers that Alemán had once bestowed on him—taken from among the bunches hung around the president’s neck during one of the infinite stops of his recurrent national tours—were “the greatest satisfaction of his professional life,” and he promised “to guard them as he would the highest decoration, as ‘a jewel studded with diamonds and emeralds.’”185 For around twenty years, photojournalists in the magazines enjoyed an uncommon prestige. The periodicals fought among themselves to project an image of their visuality; Hoy, for example, hyped itself as “The Supergraphic Magazine.” The photojournalists generally received credit for their work, above all the “aces,” such as Enrique Díaz, Rafael Carrillo, Ismael Casasola, Nacho López, Walter Reuter, Héctor García, and the Hermanos Mayo.186 The magazines’ directories assigned workers their respective categories—reporters, columnists, photographers—below the administration: general director, editor, managing editor, and so on. Press photographers were grouped together in “graphic services,” as it was often called, and the position it occupied varied. For example, in the early 1940s photojournalists did not appear in Mañana’s directory, but in 1949 they were in fourth place, and in 1950 Enrique Díaz occupied the second rank in the masthead, immediately after ownerdirector Daniel Morales, the highest standing to which a photojournalist arrived.187 However, as the fifties wore on, the declining importance of photojournalism in the three major Mexican illustrated magazines reflected the growth of television, just as was occurring at the same time with the picture press in other countries. Hoy abandoned visual articles around 1955, and thereafter only employed images for illustrating political essays. Mañana held on a little longer, but by 1959 the magazine essentially ceased to publish photoreportages or photoessays. Because photoreportages and photoessays are the illustrated articles that provide images the most autonomy and importance, the decline of photojournalism is reflected most clearly in their disappearance. From their inception and up through the first half of the 1950s, the magazines published many of these graphic works in which images

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are the center of the narrative; the photojournalist received credit for the photos and, in the rare case, for the text as well. After around 1955, photoreportages and photoessays become increasingly scarce and, though the magazines continue to utilize a large number of images, they are merely illustrations for articles, and photojournalists receive credit less often. Siempre! began with a notable interest in photography, and seemed to be a visually oriented magazine. In the first issue, the photojournalists are right below Pagés Llergo and his subdirectors in the directory, and photoessays had a privileged place during the first twenty-five issues. Nacho López was the magazine’s most important photojournalist, and his presence was particularly noteworthy in the first six issues. Nonetheless, after about six months, photoessays became scarce and thereafter appeared only occasionally. The magazine focused increasingly on opinion rather than on news, and a monotonously conservative form of using images became predominant: almost every article consisted of two facing pages, one with a photo and the other with text. The pictures were rarely interesting and, what is more, the same ones were used time and again, usually images of the facing article’s author. Perhaps Pagés felt that he could not compete with the technological perfection of magazines such as Life, and decided to emphasize articles of opinion, which, written by the best Mexican journalists, did have a public. It may also be that he understood that the days of the illustrated magazines were numbered because of television’s competition. The fact is that Siempre! abandoned the idea of being an illustrated magazine prior to either Hoy or Mañana. Nonetheless, before the era of the illustrated magazines had ended completely, Nacho López was able to create some of the finest photoessays in the history of the Mexican press.

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3. Photoessays by Nacho López

Indians

With his first photoessay, Nacho López entered the world of the illustrated magazines as if it were his home. “Noche de muertos” appeared in Mañana during November of 1950, and his portrayal of Purépecha families during their all-night vigil on Janitzio Island in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, demonstrated López’s interest in exploring Mexico’s pluralities.1 It was also indicative of the regard with which he would be held in these periodicals: he was responsible for both the photos and the texts, something unheard of for a photojournalist so young, and with almost no experience in the mass media. The vast majority of Mañana’s illustrated articles in this period are collaborations between reporter and photographer. Enrique Díaz was one of the most highly regarded photojournalists of the era, reaching an unprecedented position of No. 2 on Mañana’s masthead during 1950, but he evidently never wrote texts to accompany the photos he provided. The Hermanos Mayo were the sole authors of photoreportages only on very rare occasions. “Noche de muertos” combines a cinematically inspired spatial narrative with a temporal structure that has a clearly marked beginning, middle, and end, a classic photoessay formula established by Life magazine. The story unfolds in time, beginning at midnight and following the ritual until it ends with dawn. The spatial narrative initiates with a long establishing shot of the island at dusk, a panorama that describes the geographic context of the “enchanted island” of Janitzio. Immediately afterwards, the camera zooms in on the faces of women next to the graves. The most pronounced close-up appears on page four of the eight-page photoessay, marking the halfway point in both space and time. However, this full-page closeup is not focused on human forms; rather, its subject is an offering (ofrenda) of corn 65

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ears and other foods. The choice to put an image that is essentially a still life in such a crucial position is demonstrative of the essay’s emphasis on formal structures, even when they come enveloped in human figures, and is indicative of the distance between the photographer and the photographed. After passing through various of the night’s activities—in medium shots and close-ups—the photoessay concludes with a high-angle “zoom-out” on the departing Indians at dawn. Indians were a relatively well-explored theme in the illustrated magazines and, in the great majority of the cases, they served as exotic prototypes of mexicanidad. Their rituals were the key to illustrating their picturesqueness, and the “Noche de muertos” has long been a favorite among photojournalists.2 The rite on Janitzio was particularly attractive: a year after López had published his essay, Héctor García went there to take photos, in 1956 Casasola collaborated in a photoessay that starred the actress Stela Inda, and in 1959 Walter Reuter made several photographs of this celebration on the island.3 It would appear that there was little critical consciousness in relation to imaging Indians during these years. Ismael Casasola’s insistent efforts to photograph forbidden ceremonies among the Coras, Kikapus, and in Chichicastenango, Guatemala, were typical of the lack of respect shown indigenous peoples; the dangers he faced served only to buttress the myth of photojournalists as daredevils; that he should never have been there in the first place seems not to have occurred to either Casasola or the magazines.4 There were exceptions: Héctor García, Walter Reuter, and the Hermanos Mayo always brought empathy to representing Indians, and ethnographic photographers such as Julio de la Fuente, Gertrude Duby Blom, and Alfonso Fabila were particularly effective in establishing rapport with them.5 Notwithstanding the good intentions of some image makers, I would argue that photographic representation is always—and more so in the case of subaltern groups—a question of power: some photograph, others are photographed; some see, others are seen; some are subjects, others are objects; to quote Octavio Paz, some are chingones, others are chingados.6 In the end it is the same old story of the who and the whom. Here, it is fundamental to differentiate between “Indian” photography and “Indianist” (indigenista) photography: the former is made by Indians, the latter is made of Indians by people from other ethnicities who, in Mexico, are sometimes related to the official ideology of indigenismo.7 Indianist photographers are, in the main, hunters involved in a sublimated, predatory, and intrusive pillage of people whose reaction to photography is usually expressed in avoidance and outright refusal to cooperate.8 The dominant tradition of Indianist imagery was (and often still is) that of representing Indians as passive but dignified victims, and López conformed to this convention in “Noche de muertos.” The tone of resignation and stoicism is projected through high-angle images, with López focusing from above on women whose “impassive faces show no sentiments.” The angle that López utilized throughout

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the essay is instrumental in converting the Indians into victims: ten of the fifteen published images are taken from above, with the photographer (and his readers) looking down upon the Indians. These photos literally embody Alan Sekula’s criticism of “the tendency of professional documentary photographers to aim their cameras downward, toward those with little power or prestige.”9 Moreover, the use of this angle is particularly reproachable in light of the fact that he was utilizing a Rolleiflex camera, which he held at the level of his waist.10 Had he been using a 35 mm camera, which is raised to the eye, the angle would have been more understandable. That he chose to photograph from such a high angle can only be understood as an expressive decision indicative of his perspective toward the Indians. Although López was later to change his way of representing Indians, the fact that only women and children—the most vulnerable of subjects—appear in “Noche de muertos” heightens the sense of victimization embodied in the texts and the angles (Photo 6).11 The Purépecha are presented as picturesque beings from another universe, celebrating a “strange rite that oscillates between the sacred and the profane.” The use of candles to illuminate the subjects’ faces was fundamental in creating this sensation. López had chosen to photograph without a flash in order to “preserve the dramatic atmosphere and the mysterious, mystical, and pagan sense provided by the candles.”12 However, the effect of candlelight, combined with the unfortunate captions, left an impression of the exotic. Candles illuminated the three women in a line, wrapped in their rebozos (Photo 7). This image evokes the aesthetic of classical Mexican cinema, whose form was introduced by Sergei Eisenstein and his cameramen, Edward Tissé, in ¡Que viva México! (1933), although the cinematography of Paul Strand in Redes (Fred Zinneman, 1934) was also crucial to its development. Mexican filmmakers quickly followed the aesthetic suggestions of Eisenstein and Strand, and a movie about this very island, Janitzio (Carlos Navarro, 1934), was only the first spinoff. The story of Janitzio had been inspired when the writer-photographer Luis Marquéz, a prominent exponent of exoticism, visited the island during the Night of the Dead. A young actor in the film, Emilio Fernández, would go on to remake two more versions of this typically Indianist tale in Eisensteinian-Strandian form. “El Indio” Fernández and his cinematographer, Gabriel Figueroa, carried filmic and formal Indianism to its logical extremes in movies such as María Candelaria (1943) and Maclovio (1948), the former moving the soap opera to Xochimilco, and the latter returning it to Janitzio. The cinematic precedents of “Noche de muertos” would seem to have offered two distinctly different alternatives: the social and critical (even revolutionary) vision of Eisenstein and Strand, or the picturesquely mythic perspective of Navarro–Marquéz and Fernández–Figueroa. Initiating his explorations into photographing Mexico, López appears to have decided here for the exotic imagery that is expected when Indians are pictured.13

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6. Nacho López, Women seated at family graves, Noche de Muertos, Janitzio, Morelia, 1–2 November 1950. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 374353.

In 1978, after having worked for years as a photographer for the National Indianist Institute (INI—Instituto Nacional Indigenista), Nacho López wrote an article titled “The Indian in Photography.”14 In it he criticized Gabriel Figueroa and Luis Marquéz—as well as other photographers, such as Guillermo Kahlo, Hugo Brehme, and Agustín Jiménez—because “They let themselves be carried away by the picturesque lyricism emanated by the isolated images of Eisenstein and Tissé. And they were particularly intent on emphasizing the petrified rostrum of the recently bathed Indian, suspended in time and unmovable before misfortune.” Unfortunately, the formal exoticism of “Noche de muertos” demonstrates

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7. Nacho López, Women seated in front of offerings for the dead, Noche de Muertos, Janitzio, Morelia, 1–2 November 1950. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 374355.

the same tendencies as Fernández–Figueroa, which López came to criticize so strongly. Photographing Indians is a complex issue, as can be seen in the imagery of perhaps the best Indianist photographer of the 1940s, Julio de la Fuente. This photographer captured the Indians’ vitality, depicting them as active individuals and historical actors rather than simple objects of the lens. The returned gaze of the Indians, combined with a depth-of-field focus, is the strategy that permitted his camera to capture this visual rebound in all the planes of the image. Through this structure, de la Fuente represented Indians as somehow different but still part of humanity.15 Nonetheless, he often photographed Indians within the contexts that

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serve precisely to transform them into “modern” beings, for example, the schools where they would learn Spanish and the “white man’s ways.”16 In these situations, Indians become mirrors of the civilization that is domesticating them. In portraying the Purépechas as if they came from another universe, was López beginning to express his refusal to reduce Mexico’s inhabitants to the homogeneity that Alemanista nationalism required? When López wrote that an oration in Tarascan is “as beautiful as the Ave Maria,” could that be construed as an affirmation that the Indian traditions have as much validity as the Christian? If this photoessay is a first effort to document the “worlds apart” of which López believed Mexico was made up, it comes up short. López’s representation of the Indians is not terribly distinct from that of other photographers, with the exception of the aesthetic power that always differentiated his work. Moreover, his images fall all too easily into the Fernández–Figueroa camp and, like them, essentially incorporate the Indians into the national culture, exactly the project of INI, founded in 1948 by Miguel Alemán. However, perhaps the distance between the photographer and his subjects was an accurate representation, an aesthetic consequence, of that which the Tarascans and López felt for one another. Maybe that is why the ofrenda is at the center of the photoessay rather than an image of people. Such reflections point toward the fundamental question of Indianist photography: How can the otherness of Indians be captured without falling into picturesqueness, and how can their essential humanity be expressed without taking away their otherness and reducing them to the photographer’s way of being? Nacho López’s search for ways to represent Indians did not end with “Noche de muertos.” Around a year and a half later, he published his only other important photoessay on campesinos during this period, “Ante el umbral del silencio” (On the threshold of silence).17 It deals with a burial in Villa de Ayala, a town in the state of Morelos: “A Mexican funeral, a ritual in which are interwoven the pagan and the Christian, the profound and the sacred.” The essay’s emphasis falls on the “anguished reality” of those left behind, which is reflected in the faces of “humble men and women,” who stand before death’s “terrible but marvelous presence.” The deceased has arrived at “the awaited peace, where there is no envy, no passions in conflict, no egotism, because ambitions, pleasures, and anguish have ended.” The death of this unidentified person has no narrative importance. For that reason, “Umbral” is a photoessay rather than a photoreportage, because it is about something that occurs every day, and thus is not an event. It appears that converting events into daily life (or death, as the case may be) was a tactic used by the illustrated magazines to depoliticize news. Nacho López later provided information about this funeral, fleshing out the political context. He stated that it was shot in Anenecuilco, “where the guerrilla Emiliano Zapata was born,” and that it was “the burial of a well-known woman from that town whose two sons had been assassinated a few months before, something that surely—according to the

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people—had provoked her death.”18 The link of Zapatismo and the assassination of campesinos would have taken on a particular meaning to the magazine’s readers: that they, like Zapata, had been murdered for resisting the takeover of their land, which was occurring at an even greater rate in the 1940s and 1950s, under the impact of agro-industry, than it had been when Zapata rose up in rebellion. The possibility of this alternative reading may well have been the motive behind transforming an event into a daily occurrence. Notwithstanding its political obfuscation, “Ante el umbral” is a moving photoessay, which follows the same narrative strategy as “Noche de muertos.” In temporal terms, it begins when the coffin is being carried to the cemetery and ends as it is lowered into the grave, the same moment in which “the day has also died in the horizon.” In spatial terms, the essay initiates with an establishing shot, and later moves in to focus on the faces of the afflicted women. Nacho López’s use of angles to portray Indians is quite different from that of “Noche”: of the thirteen photos published, six were taken from a low angle (one of which is Photo 8), four are straight on, and only three are high-angle shots. The belief that Nacho had intentionally transformed his camera’s perspective is buttressed by the fact that the camera he used was (to judge by the negatives) evidently the same Rolleiflex of “Noche.” The language also reflected this change, because it focuses on the pain “of the irredeemable,” rather than on the exotic. The development of Nacho López’s consciousness about photographing Indians is clearly revealed in comparing these two essays. However, in order to fully appreciate his contributions to Indianist photography, it is useful to consider as well the imagery made during the 1970s, while he worked for the INI. To judge from his essay “The Indian in Photography,” Nacho had come to understand the importance of personal relations and rapport in the photographic act, and he distinguished sharply between aggressors and amigos: The camera can be an instrument of aggression or a connection between friends. In the first instance, the photographer-tourist shoots his camera as a rifle, without any consideration, looking for sensationalism and “magical barbarism.” When the camera is a link of friendship or legitimate intercommunication, the photographer assumes a great responsibility and a commitment, which implies a critical and analytic position.19

In his later images from the 1970s and 1980s, we can see these ideas demonstrated, and a significant advance over even the imagery from “Ante el umbral.”20 The personal relations that he had established with the Indians are apparent in their interaction with the photographer, at whom they smile trustingly. Even when they do not smile, they return the camera’s gaze, masters of the situation rather than objects of the camera. The Indians in these images are not quiet and resigned but active

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8. Nacho López, Burial, Villa de Ayala, Morelos, 1952. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 374940.

and moving: one woman wraps her rebozo quickly around her, another constructs an ofrenda; López, who captures their movement within the frame, underscores their activity. If Indianist photography must be done, the sort of imagery that emphasizes interaction and energy seems to offer the best option. Prison

A week after his 1950 debut with “Noche de muertos,” Nacho López reappeared in Mañana with a photoessay made in collaboration with Carlos Argüelles. “Prisión de sueños” (Prison of dreams) indicated that the young photojournalist’s strength

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was to be urban, not rural, concerns, and, with the exception of “Ante el umbral,” he did not produce another work for the illustrated magazines on the people of the countryside.21 Moreover, an analysis of his work as a photojournalist makes it clear that he was, above all, a photographer of life in Mexico City.22 If in later years he dedicated himself to Indianist photography, I imagine that this was because it was a work that allowed sufficient freedom of expression, and was relatively well paid. If he had been funded to photograph the city and its inhabitants under the same conditions of autonomy that he enjoyed in the INI, I believe that he would have dedicated himself to urban photography. This situation offers one example of how the state mediates culture; surely the powerful found it much less threatening to have him portray Indians than to document misery in the metropolis. “Prisión” demonstrated López’s interest in exploring worlds apart, in this case, the universe of those encaged in the Mexico City penitentiary. The existential anguish in the prisoners’ faces speaks of a cosmos from which there is no exit. This is the first denunciatory photoessay on Mexican prisons in an illustrated magazine, though many images of prisoners—taken between 1900 and 1935—can be found in the “Judiciales” section of the Casasola Archive, some of which appear to offer the possibility of a nonofficialist reading.23 Nonetheless, if there is a critique of the judicial system in the Casasola images, it remains at the implicit level rather than being explicit. Moreover, covering the jails was generally considered among the least attractive of the photojournalists’ tasks, something illustrated by Faustino Mayo’s anecdote about what happened to him when he entered La Prensa in the 1940s: The Director of Photography, Miguel Casasola, wasn’t too pleased with my appointment to the staff, and his first words were, “What! A refugee! Here!” So, to hassle me he sent me to cover the police news. However, I’d already worked that beat a lot while in El Popular, especially in the old penitentiary. I had a lot of friends among the police and they let me go back among the prisoners, something they wouldn’t permit anyone else. When I returned to the office with those photos, Casasola was astonished: “How did you ever take these?” I told him, “Well, you sent me there to screw me, but I screwed you.”24

Very few articles about jails were published in the illustrated magazines during this period and only one other photoessay of any importance, that of Faustino Mayo on the women’s prison.25 However, in these years some films about prison life were produced. In 1949, Emilio Gómez Muriel directed Las puertas del presidio (The doors of prison), a “dreadful prison melodrama” that was apparently made to take advantage of the enormous popularity of Ismael Rodríguez’s Nosotros los pobres.26 Evidently, Las puertas del presidio “was a box-office success” because in 1951 Gómez Muriel made a second version, Carne de presidio (Prison meat). The movies have the typical defects of the era’s culture; as Emilio García Riera commented,

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“The story of Carne de presidio offered the opportunity to deal with a legitimate theme: that of a worker’s impotence before the primitive judicial machinery. But Gómez Muriel allowed the melodrama to ignore the possibilities for a social critique by prostrating himself before the dominant Manichaeism of the period.”27

9. Nacho López, Hands with cigarettes under cell door, Lecumberri penitentiary, Mexico City, 1950. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405602.

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The narrative structure of “Prisión de sueños” is distinct from that utilized in “Noche de muertos.” Here, the camera enters the penitentiary and documents the prisoners’ lives. In rejecting a clearly defined structure of beginning, middle, and end, it replicates the limbo in which the prisoners live, perhaps because a narration based on development over time would have been inappropriate; many of the unfortunates have no future, they will exit only with their death. The photoessay opens with one of the most powerful images in the entire oeuvre of López, that of the hands that beseech from under a rusted door (Photo 9). “Anguish. These hands that still exude the blood of their victims plead for clemency or ask for a cigarette. This is the door to the special punishment cell, where they lock up the dregs of the crime world, those that can never be reformed. This is his tomb.” This image introduces the idea that the prisoners’ situation is one of “no way out,” an important expression in existentialist thought in this period, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (1944). Nacho López returned to this theme in another picture: the woman prisoner tormented by the fate of her children in the street (Photo 10). Below the title, “the dimensions of anguish,” the photo appeared with the following cutline: She thinks about her children who will surely sleep in the street and steal fruit in the market in order to eat. Perhaps she believes that her destiny is reserved as an inalienable inheritance for her descendants. If she gets out of prison alive, she will be embittered. If she dies there, she will curse the world. Her crime may be grave or it may be minor, but prison has trapped her and only with great difficulty does prison let a convict free.

Other responses to this situation are examined. There are those who have adapted themselves to their new world and receive the recognition of its inhabitants, such as the inventor with his laboratory who “has won the esteem of all the prisoners,” and the lawyer who has “become the unpaid defender of his compañeros.” It is usually the older prisoners who adapt better; they “count the days with resignation.” The young go crazy because they must “forget about their youth.” As to possible exits from this inferno, “Prisión” offers two in its concluding pages: death and religion. Death appears in a picture of a coffin carried out through barred doors, “The only way to leave prison without having finished the sentence. Free at last.” Religion is portrayed in the last image of the essay, a fullpage photo of a shrine women prisoners built, where “Every day, the Virgin of Guadalupe hears heartfelt pleas that ask for freedom, freedom, freedom.” However, the photo is dissonantly mediocre to occupy such a privileged position, and it is difficult to imagine that Nacho López would have chosen it.28 The most prominent among the unpublished negatives of this photoessay are images of prisoners laboring in a shoe factory and a carpenter’s workshop, as well as women convicts sewing prison garb. They may have been excluded on aesthetic

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10. Nacho López, Woman prisoner and clotheslines, Lecumberri penitentiary, Mexico City, 1950. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA– INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405601.

grounds, but the absence of pictures showing the prisoners in active doing leaves the impression that they are passive victims. The veto of the negatives depicting work must have been an editorial decision, for López had certainly been thinking about labor while he photographed. He knew that the distress on the woman’s face (Photo 10) was directly related to her work, and wrote on the negative envelope, “Woman with an anguished face and a clothesline behind. Series: Work without dreams.” Mañana cropped the picture to focus tightly on the woman’s face, eliminating the clothesline’s visual reference to work. In reflecting on this photo when it appeared as part of the 1956 exhibit, López wrote, “She was a prisoner who had just finished washing a huge quantity of clothes. I believe that her face portrayed the

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exhaustion of her intense labor and the anguish of a empty solitude, without the force to even hope.”29 When this photo was republished in Yo, el ciudadano, it was cropped very differently: the whole upper-right hand of the negative was included so as to emphasize the clothesline, something we can assume must have been more in line with the photographer’s proposal.30 Nigel Warburton believes that the most authentic of the different prints that exist of a photograph ought to be “The prints which most fully embody the photographer’s intentions. . . . Since photographers typically produce numerous negatives, and in some cases numerous prints, it is important to distinguish which are genuinely part of a particular photographer’s consciously chosen output.”31 López collaborated with Fernando Benítez, an important Mexican intellectual, to produce Yo, el ciudadano. Hence, the print therein represents López’s intentions much more definitively than Mañana’s image, both because it was published in a book in which he had input and because books as a medium generally provide more of the space capable of allowing for an “authentic” print. This is particularly true of a book such as Yo, el ciudadano, which allots a page for every photo. Conversely, the print published in Mañana is most likely to have suffered extraneous cropping by the magazine’s editors. Comparing the two prints permits us to infer that representing work was important to Nacho López, but Mañana’s visual ideology—the tight focus on the individual extrapolated from her material context—excluded labor’s appearance in the photoessay. “Prisión de sueños” is a rather melodramatic instance of victim photography— the prisoners could not deny the photojournalist the right to shoot them—with a dash of dignity. Not really denunciatory, the tone is sad and resigned, and that is how it pictures many of the prisoners. It shows a world with its own rules, but in illustrating instances of “the prisoners’ laws,” it only speaks of the violence among them. This may be where the essay fails most, for it presents the authorities as if they were neutral and unrelated to the inhumanity of prison life. Visually, this message is conveyed by the absence of guards, who appear in only two of the twentysix photos, where they are photographed from behind. Nacho López would go much further in censoring Mexico’s judicial and social system three years later in “Sólo los humildes van al infierno” (Only the humble go to hell). Life had gotten to the penitentiary before López did. In March of 1950, Life published a photoessay, “The Black Palace,” that would be accompanied during the decade by some twenty-six articles in the magazine about Mexico, dealing with topics such as tourism and tragedies, pickpockets and priests, magic mushrooms and presidential inaugurations. The U.S. presence was acknowledged in essays on “wetbacks,” as well as by a 1960 incident in which a Mexican legislator made “an anti-American, pro-Castro speech in front of visiting U.S. congressmen. U.S. made official protest, received official apology.”32 Life’s photoessay on the jail was designed to project the image of reform. “Mexico’s energetic President Miguel Alemán” had appointed his

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friend Francisco Linares as the new warden, and Linares was determined to do away with the endemic corruption and violence that characterized the “stinking, graftridden place.” The photographs, by Life ’s Frank Scherschel and a German photojournalist who had immigrated to Mexico, Juan Guzmán, portrayed the reformist spirit in images of prisoners lined up on the athletic field, dressed in new uniforms. They also placed before U.S. readers scenes of prison “a la mexicana,” showing “privileged prisoners” who employ fellow inmates as servants, “devout prisoners” who pray in a schoolroom, and the conjugal visits that “prevent homosexuality” and “preserve the nation’s strong family tradition.” At the essay’s end, it devotes two pages to those held in the solitary confinement cells, with the “incorrigible killers” sticking their heads out to be photographed. The mediocrity of the imagery is most patent in these photos, for they have little of the power found in the picture López made of these cells, with the prisoner’s hands thrusting out from under the rusted door.

11. Nacho López, Little girl in the Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City, 12 December 1950. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH– SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 374168.

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Church

The fascination that the “sacred and profane” held for Nacho López led him to collaborate with Ángel Fernando Solana in his next photoessay, “Virgen india,” on the celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico.33 The opening image establishes the juxtaposition of the sacrosanct and the irreverent that so defines the article. A young girl is turned in the opposite direction of the people who accompany her; they are praying, but she, an unquiet and restless figure, goes against the grain (Photo 11). The expected pictures of people at prayer are not lacking: one large photo shows women kneeling, exquisitely illuminated by candles (Photo 12). The poor make their appearance, exposing the broken soles of their deteriorated shoes as they kneel: “If the humble rebozo hides a familiar drama, the spent shoes reveal it in a form that provokes tenderness” (Photo 13). López was evidently interested in photographing feet, because they appear in some 10 percent of the existing negatives; perhaps he was inspired by a 1935 Alfred Eisenstaedt photo of an Ethiopian soldier’s feet.34

12. Nacho López, Women worshiping in the Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City, 12 December 1950. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 374276.

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13. Nacho López, People kneeling in the Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City, 12 December 1950. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA– INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 374277.

Nacho López’s emphasis on the humble may have led to an exaggeration. The photo of a man with his daughter, posed as if he were teaching her to pray, was published immediately beneath the image of the feet, with the cutline, “If the girl’s eyes denounce premature anguish, the contracting hands and the undulating vein in the father’s forehead demonstrate the intensity of the suffering in which both live” (Photo 14). But, on looking at the photo well, we are left with the question: What anguish, which suffering? To judge by the clothes of the two, as well as the man’s tie and the pens in his pocket, they are not poor. Here, it seems that the context created by the photo of the feet was used to generate a meaning that did not correspond to that which is depicted in the image of the father and daughter.

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The photoessay documents the worldly and mundane aspects of the rite surrounding the Virgin of Guadalupe: “The profane but necessary. Perhaps a negation of the spiritual but an absolute confirmation of the inescapably vital.” 35 The images show people eating, drinking, and sleeping under the trees: a man hoists a jug to quaff pulque, a woman sells votive candles, families down gorditas, Indian

14. Nacho López, Father and daughter kneeling in the Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City, 12 December 1950. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 374260.

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musicians in typical clothing play guitars, and a couple poses in front of a large image of the Virgin to have their picture taken.36 These images, so lay and irreverent, are an insistence in the profane and the quotidian in the midst of a ritual that has acquired not only religious sanctity, but nationalist sanctification as well. Two types of images are among the negatives that were not published: the traditional and the critical. The photo of the woman crawling on her knees toward the basilica to honor a promise is a quintessential picturing of this rite (Photo 15). López took several photos like this one but they were not published in “Virgen,” perhaps because they were too hackneyed. Nonetheless, it is not easy to determine who was finally responsible for saving “Virgen india” from falling into the religious idolatry typical of illustrated articles on the church, because Nacho López produced, three years later, both the text and the photos of an essay for Hoy, “México místico” (Mystical Mexico), which included Photo 15 and others of its ilk.37 Moreover, in this later article, the photographer expressed sentiments linking religion and nationalism that are uncharacteristic of his work: “The Mexican believes and that’s enough for him. He places his hopes, his ethics of good and evil, not in the heroes of daily life, governors or presidents, but in the image free of all imperfection.” It is difficult to imagine that an individual who wrote such words could have made the photo, unpublished in “Virgen india,” that carries out a ferocious critique of religion in Mexico.38 A boy wearing dirty and torn clothing sells religious articles in front of a poster for the National Guadalupana Association for Mexican Workers (Photo 16). On the poster is a smiling proletarian couple, he dressed in overalls and she in picturesque regional garb; the Virgin of Guadalupe hovers over the pair. There is little doubt that the photo is posed, as the photographer has arranged the scene and placed himself so that the poster is framed between the boy and his shadow. Too articulate about the social uses of Guadalupismo in maintaining sharp class differences, and thus heretical both in relation to religion and nationalism, the image could not have appeared in a photoessay on the Virgin of Guadalupe in the 1950s . . . and probably today as well! From the Archive

Producing illustrated articles on almost a weekly basis during November and December of 1950, Nacho López developed a photoessay form previously unseen in Mexico. “La calle lee” (The street reads) and “Yo también he sido niño bueno” (I’ve been a good kid too) are what might be called “archival photoessays”—predecessors to his visual reflections about Mexico City that would appear at the end of the decade.39 These “reportages” were constructed entirely with photographs López had in his archive, but I suspect that he called them reportajes to make it appear that they were news-related (and perhaps to disguise the fact that several pictures

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had been taken two years earlier and in other countries). The idea may have been so new—I have not encountered any other photojournalist who made photoessays from archival photos—that he feared Mañana would not accept it unless the essays were disguised as reportage. Obviously, magazine archives were relied on constantly for imagery to illustrate articles, but they were never the center of a photoessay, and they were invariably published without crediting the photographer. Nacho’s development of this form is evidence of his creativity, the power of his images, his capacity to create well-written scripts, and his self-assuredness, qualities that were surely determinant in convincing Mañana’s editors.40 These photoessays are

15. Nacho López, Woman fulfilling a vow by crawling on her knees to the Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City, 12 December 1950. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 375500.

16. Nacho López, Boy selling religious images, Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City, 12 December 1950. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 374261.

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expressions of his directorial impulse, as well as his interest in having authorial control over his work; the ideas for the archival photoessays originated with him; he selected the images, and he wrote the texts; he also determined entirely the reality presented, making it up out of images from his archive. “La calle lee” is the only photoessay I know of that deals with the act of reading, and it must have reflected López’s own interest in intellectual development. The photographer’s familiar emphasis on Mexico’s humble is present in those who read in the street. Poverty is public: the acts that the bourgeoisie and the middle class practice in the privacy of their houses often are performed by the poor in public places. The photoessay opens with a boy in worn clothing who lies on the sidewalk, his bare feet in the street; he reads a newspaper: “This is certainly a street: asphalt, cement blocks placed in harmonious proportions of indifference and dust; shopwindows that reflect everything; the friction of half-soled shoes; and readers” (Photo 17). When he later published this same image, López would direct himself to the falsifying content of the periodical the boy was reading.41 In “La calle lee,” however, his reflections about urban life appear to be an early experiment for his 1964 collaboration in the prominent magazine Artes de México, which dedicated an entire double issue to “Yo, el ciudadano” (I, the citizen), composed of López’s photography and an essay by him on life in Mexico City.42 This photoessay introduced an image that would be reproduced time and again in Mexican books and magazines up to the present; evidently, it strikes a deep chord in the nation’s psyche.43 The photograph is of a “Campesino reading a piece of newspaper, 1949,” according to the description that López wrote on the envelopes that contain the four negatives he saved of the scene (Photo 18). On one envelope, he added the words “(poster) campaign?”—a note that could have been a reference to its possible use in an adult literacy campaign. There had been three well-publicized drives to teach reading and writing from the 1920s to the 1940s, and they had been the inspiration for the best-known image of the Hermanos Mayo, one by Paco that won the Extraordinary Prize in the 1947 Photojournalist Exhibit.44 A candlelight-illuminated picture of a grandmother struggling to learn how to read with the help of her small grandchildren—her brow furrowed as her gnarled hand follows the letters on a page—the Mayo photo was moving, though sentimental. Nacho’s image—powerful, contradictory, impertinent—does not admit an easy reading. The photo breaks genre conventions, creating a disjuncture with the formal expectations we bring to it. Taken slightly from below, an angle usually reserved for the powerful, the camera here looks up to photograph that at which it usually points down. Obviously a low angle has been used not only to portray leaders and other important personages, but to express the power of a class as well; one example is the Hermanos Mayo image of a worker shouldering a sledgehammer.45

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17. Nacho López, Boy reading in the street, Mexico City, ca. 1950. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 386542.

Nonetheless, in López’s photograph the campesino’s individuality will not permit him to be reduced to a symbol of his class. He cannot stand for country people in the same way that they are represented in the Mayo pictures from the La Laguna region, where the low angle makes their pitchforks stand out against the sky. The particularity of this campesino is derived from his physiognomy, as well as the pose he strikes. This is not the typical rural victim, hungry and sad, nor is it the picturesque peasant, grinning stupidly. Relaxed, and with an almost imperceptible smile, it is evident that he is posing for the photographer. We know that the photo is staged, because at least four negatives were made of the scene. However, within the image itself there is reference to this, perhaps most of all in the way he holds the

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paper in his hand as if following the photographer’s instructions, but in a way that is somehow only his. The collaboration of photographer and photographed resulted in a complex image whose iconographic elements are rooted in the period’s transformation. The sombrero and the sunburned skin identify him as a campesino, but the overalls are clothing typical of a worker in the city. Moreover, he is seated in front of a wall, an urban space, and hence becomes a synecdoche for Mexicans’ rapid transition from rural beings to city dwellers, a process that has much marked the post-1940 era. The photo appears to be a visual rendering of one of the presumed sources of

18. Nacho López, Man reading torn newspaper, Mexico City, 1949. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 386564.

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Mexicans’ mythical inferiority complex, “the tragedy of the Indian campesino obliged to become a proletariat before his time.”46 Although ideologists turned this trauma into an essence of mexicanidad, it nonetheless has its material base: the growth of agro-industry during Alemanismo pushed (and continues to push) campesinos off the land and into the cities, creating armies of people such as this underdog. Far from the idyllic countryside in which Paco Mayo’s photo had situated the grandmother, this image documents displacement, making it an unlikely candidate for government propaganda. The photo seems to offer a version of the “bent hero” that Roger Bartra described as a central construct of the search for identity, and perhaps the intention of the photographer in giving him the paper was that of creating the metaphor “broken paper/broken man.” However, López may well have been constructing a response to the myth of the héroe agachado, utilizing the act of reading as a way of indicating that literacy is the only way out of subjugation. And, the singularity with which López depicted this individual resists facile typification: the image cuts back against our expectations about symbolic portraiture and leaves us in front of an everyman (or “every Mexican”) who is, at the same time, only himself. A week after “La calle lee,” López published another archival photoessay, “Yo también he sido niño bueno,” about poor children and their vain hopes at Christmastime.47 If reading in the street had been an unexplored topic, the same could not be said for the theme of indigent street urchins. In fact, only two months earlier there had been a photoessay in Mañana about needy youth, “Ángeles con caras sucias” (Angels with dirty faces), and four months later, Alberto del Razo published another there on the same theme, “Los otros niños” (The other children).48 However, children and Christmas was a particularly attractive package, above all in demonstrating the government’s concern for the less fortunate youth. For example, on Christmas Day of 1954, an article appeared in Mañana about impoverished youngsters, and how a government campaign had bettered their lot.49 Nevertheless, if a few illustrated articles on poor children were published at this time, in none of them do we find the social and aesthetic commitment that marked López’s essay. It appears that he had a particular interest in the young, and talked about that in an interview with Luis Suárez: “Children have always awakened a great tenderness in me, above all, poor children. I see, together with their poverty, their dignity and joy.”50 Antonio Rodríguez had referred to this as well: “Of all the themes, there is one Nacho López treats with special devotion and that appears in his work intermittently, as a leitmotiv: the theme of children.”51 “Niño bueno” is excruciatingly sad, though it does include one or another image of smiling children. In describing the anguish, misery, and solitude in which they live—“persecuted by rickets and hunger”—López earmarked the effects of living with anemia, their “brown muscles perforated by fever and hunger.” He also commented on the pain caused by their incapacity to communicate their problems in

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words; this is another of the “worlds apart”—that of the children who, abandoned in misery, have not learned how to express themselves, and are alone in the world. It is almost time for Christmas and the visit of the Magi.52 “Yo también” turns around the children’s anxiety about their presents: they have been good kids too, but will they receive any gifts? In one of the photos given a full page, we see a child look out a window: “There is surely nothing more beautiful nor more sad in the world than these eyes full of anguish. She has no toys either” (Photo 19). Not having toys is painful, but it can stimulate creativity, leading children to invent playthings “made by themselves.” The situation can develop an ingenious mentality: “From their very limitations, poor Mexican children extract a sorcerer’s ability.” Other illustrated articles about poor children that appeared during this period underscore

19. Nacho López, Child peering out window, Venezuela (?), 1948. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405763.

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the lack of toys, but they never consider the possibility that it might also produce inspiration to create one’s own; functioning in only one dimension, they present the children as victims, while Nacho López emphasizes the children’s active attitudes. Whatever the fruits of their creativity, the children in “Yo también” still long for “real” playthings: “Let’s build sand castles. And their agile fingers raise fabulous constructions, which, like their hopes for ‘real’ toys, crumble.” In the end, that which most defines the children in this essay is their disappointment, such as that expressed in the essay’s last photo, a moving image of a little girl laughing (Photo 20). The cutline encapsulates the article’s intentional contradictions by articulating both the children’s vitality and the disillusions that await them as members of Mexico’s vast impoverished class: “In spite of being ridiculously poor, she too was good and anticipates her well-earned visit from the Magi, who never fail to hear the requests of those who have been good. But the miracle of her laugh will probably become a sob.”

20. Nacho López, Girl laughing, Mexico City, ca. 1950. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405761.

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Down but Not Out

Disillusion was also the theme of “Noche de Reyes” (Night of the Magi), a photoessay that Nacho López did together with Carlos Argüelles a short time after having published “Niño bueno.”53 It is the Night of the Magi and the indigents sleep on petates, wrapped in their filthy rags, dreaming about “that childhood of the Magic Kings.” However, it is “just another night” to the prostitutes who await clients in the street. Through this structure, the photoessay plays with the irony created by the contradiction between the expectation that is a special night, while “For the forgotten, a Night of the Magi is just like any other.” In its focus on the disappointment of the disinherited, this photoessay took a very different tack than other illustrated articles about the Night of the Magi. A standard tactic for incorporating this celebration into official discourse was to document the First Lady distributing toys to poor children, who naturally were enchanted with their new baubles.54 The cutline of one photo that appeared in the magazine Así encapsulates the usual perspective: “In the images captured by Así ’s photographer, the reader will encounter moving scenes of the distribution of toys to the poor children.”55 The last photo of “Noche de Reyes” leaves little doubt that the poor had no reason to feel let down, because they never really had the illusions of childhood. The cutline of an image of a boy sleeping in the street states: “On being born, he lost his infancy. And now, at thirteen, he’s an embittered old man who doesn’t believe in those travelers who arrived at Bethlehem. He’d be satisfied with much less than a toy: perhaps a piece of hot bread and a sip of coffee.” The desperation of those trapped in poverty was the theme of the best photoessay López published in Mañana during these first years, “Una vez fuimos humanos” (We were humans once), again in collaboration with Carlos Argüelles.56 The title itself reflected the constraints of photojournalism, for Nacho had evidently planned to call it “We are human beings too,” a title with much more bite. The published title, moreover, is nonsensical: there is nothing in the images, or in Argüelles’s text, to indicate that the poverty we see is the result of some loss on the part of the subjects; that is, that at one time they were human and now are not. Both the photos and the text give the impression that, although the slum inhabitants may have been expelled from countless places, they have always been among humanity’s losers. The essay’s first image occupies a page and a half, and López’s camera vigorously documents the living situation of the “two thousand living cadavers who feed on rancor and the crusts of Mexico City” (Photo 21). Focusing on the poor was not terribly uncommon in Mexican magazines and, of the published photoessays on them, several were by the Hermanos Mayo.57 It is interesting to compare the general tone of the Mexican articles with those that appeared in the United States. Very few Life articles dealt with “social problems,” but

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21. Nacho López, Family in shack, Río de la Piedad, Mexico City, 1951. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 375253.

Look published some, and their structure reveals much about the differences between the two cultures. James Guimond has written of the U.S. articles that These photoessays often started with a large picture, often a news photograph, showing some kind of disorder—for example, a riot or a father sobbing after losing the custody of his child in a divorce case. But the editors followed these disorderly images with pictures illustrating the nature of the problem, with captions or texts giving expert opinion, and then with an emphatic solution—illustrated with calm pictures—showing how the problem would be solved by a return to traditional, middle-class American values or a reliance on middle-class institutions.58

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The Mexican photoessays do not generally follow this pattern, with the exception of some in which Nacho López collaborated, and that are discussed later in this chapter. One or another photoessay referred to government programs for problems such as housing, and some focused on charity’s efforts to alleviate poverty. But, “denunciatory” articles about the poor usually limited themselves to describing the horrible conditions of “barrios of the damned” such as Tepito. They might be progressive in documenting the existence of inhuman situations but, in Mexico, they could hardly affirm that solutions to these social problems were on the way. It was all too clear that neither the government programs nor private charity were going to remedy the circumstances of people trapped in infernos. In the few cases where Mexican photoessays attempted to identify the source of misery, they limited themselves to criticizing government functionaries. Here, we see an important difference that López’s photoessays introduced, because one of the strongest elements in “Una vez”—both in the text and in the cutlines—is the comparison it makes of social classes. During this period of “National Unity” and the glorification of personal enrichment, one rarely saw any mention of class difference. “Una vez” provided reminders that contrast the misery obvious in the photos of this “city of pain” to the lives lived by those better off, and it added a critique of the neocolonialist mentality, in discussing a photo that showed open sewers running from the shacks: “These men don’t live very far geographically from their brothers. One hundred meters away young people walk about with clothing from New York’s Fifth Avenue” (Photo 22). However, notwithstanding the comparisons rendered in the cutlines, class contradictions are not presented in visual form. Some images demonstrate solidarity among the poor, for example, one in which “Two comrades share their tortilla. This is the bread of every day to those who have been forgotten by society.” Here, by extension, the essay makes an implicit criticism by contrasting the lack of such solidarity among the rich. Nevertheless, there are no images in which the “disinherited” are presented together with the wealthy. Rather than attempting to create such juxtaposition within the frame, Nacho López embodied the spirit of contradiction by going against the grain of the readers’ usual fare. He portrayed with vitality those who (on the rare occasions they appeared in the magazines’ pages) were normally represented as victims, reduced to the level of objects. A full-page photo of children with a mouse offers one example (Photo 23). Obviously, the image documents the precarious sanitary conditions in the slum, as well as the children’s poverty. But it also shows the creativity that flowers in the midst of want: “Whoever says the poor don’t have toys isn’t telling the truth. They have them in their bedrooms, at the reach of a hand, and they share them with those who don’t have bedchambers and sleep under the stars.” Two formal elements of the photograph serve to represent children as active subjects. On the one hand, they interact with the photographer and look at the camera. On the

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22. Nacho López, Couple walking in front of shacks and open sewer, Río de la Piedad, Mexico City, 1951. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 375256.

other, the slight low-angle chosen by López gives them power in the frame, instead of peering down on them from above. Another image demonstrates the children’s capacity for reappropriating the detritus of their daily lives: that of the boy playing with a trinket he found in the garbage his father brought from the dump, “The silk plumes of colors unknown in the barrio of Río de la Piedad still hung from the bottle top, and he contemplated his treasure for hours” (Photo 24). As we shall see, Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados (The Young and the

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23. Nacho López, Children with mouse, Río de la Piedad, Mexico City, 1951. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 375257.

Damned, 1950) was probably an important precedent to “Una vez,” but the photoessay may here run counter to the film. In the movie’s last shot, Pedro, the “hero” killed by El Jaibo, is thrown callously on a garbage dump by his “family,” reduced to utter nothingness, and beyond reclamation. In “Una vez,” we are offered a more optimistic vision of trash, perhaps an anticipation of the “aesthetics of garbage” that Brazilian cineasts would develop during the next decade. According to Robert Stam, The ideal postmodern and postcolonial metaphor, garbage is mixed, syncretic, a radically decentered social text. . . . In aesthetic terms, garbage can be seen as an aleatory

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collage or surrealist enumeration, a case of the definitive by chance, a random pile of objets trouvés and papiers collés, a place of violent, surprising juxtapositions.59

For all the power of this image, though, it does raise the question of whether poverty is aestheticized. We do not know whether López placed the boy in front of the rough material that frames him, or if he found him there, but the play of textures between the boy and the sacking is perhaps too exquisite. Of course, one could construct an argument thusly: although the discarded boxes and torn material overwhelm the boy—metaphors for the poverty that crushes him—his challenging spirit nevertheless rises up against these conditions. However, this photo walks

24. Nacho López, Boy playing with “toy” found in garbage, Río de la Piedad, Mexico City, 1951. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405617.

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a thin line, and has the possibility of falling into the well-known trap of dressing up destitution so as to make it palatable for readers from a more comfortable milieu. A recourse that López utilized in this photoessay to unsettle his audience was to create contradictory relations in the cutlines of two photographs. In the first, we see a girl peering through a crack in the kitchen wall at her mother who is cooking. “It’s midday and she’s hungry. This is the most prosperous home of the district, and they have a stove; unfortunately, it doesn’t work” (Photo 25). We might call the structure of this text a “yes, but.” This compositional form can be found in Luis Buñuel’s film Las Hurdes (Land without Bread, 1932), a documentary about one of the poorest

25. Nacho López, Girl peering into house, Río de la Piedad, Mexico City, 1951. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO— Fototeca Nacional 405609.

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regions in Spain.60 The fabric of negation in that film is represented in different situations: the schoolteacher gives bread to his hungry students, only to have their parents throw it away because they do not know what it is; cherries begin to ripen, finally providing the famished peasants something to eat—unfortunately, the fruit is devoured while green, and gives them dysentery. The cutline of another López photograph goes in the opposite direction, one we could describe as “no, but nevertheless.” Here, a little girl is seated with a schoolbook in a filthy patio she shares with a pig. The caption tells us, “One day, the knowledge she has acquired in that primer will get her out of the dump. Obviously she lacks desks, notebooks, and pencils, but she wants to learn” (Photo 26). I do not know if Nacho López saw Las Hurdes, but I feel certain that he must have seen Buñuel’s Los olvidados. A sharp contrast from a golden age cinema that

26. Nacho López, Girl seated with book, Río de la Piedad, Mexico City, 1951. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO— Fototeca Nacional 405612.

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too often romanticized poverty, Los olvidados is a ruthless, implacable, and highly realistic portrayal of life at the bottom. Buñuel greatly admired Shoeshine (1946), an Italian neorealist film by Vittorio de Sica that recounted the tragic tale of two shoeshine boys.61 Inspired by neorealism’s method of drawing stories from daily life rather than inventing fictions, of using authentic urban contexts in place of sets, and of relying on nonprofessional actors, Buñuel had spent almost six months researching in the urban slums to prepare for filming. The result is an unpitying analysis of those trapped in poverty, and certainly one of the most critical films ever made about life in Mexico City. The reactions to Los olvidados began during the filming, and provide insight into the climate of opinion in those years, above all the predominance of a nationalism that impeded the development of critical thought.62 A technician demanded of Buñuel, “But why don’t you make a real Mexican movie rather than a miserable picture like this one?” Another member of the staff complained that the scenery was too real: “Mr. Buñuel, this is a garbage heap. Not all Mexico is like this. We also have lovely residential neighborhoods like Las Lomas.” The film’s hairdresser resigned because of the heartless portrayal of the mother, who rejects her son: “In Mexico no mother would say that to her son. It’s degrading; I don’t want to work on this movie.” Los olvidados opened on 9 November 1950 (four months before López’s photoessay was published), and it provoked an immediate backlash. The film showed for only four days before it was retired from the theaters (it would have to be recognized in Europe as a masterpiece before Mexicans could accept it). But, in that short time it won Buñuel the enmity of those who screamed that he had committed “an infamy against Mexico”; he became an anathema to unions and other organizations, who called for the application of article 33, asking that he be expelled as an “undesirable foreigner,” and “a Gachupin who had come to insult Mexico.”63 As was to be expected, the press ferociously attacked the film for “blackening” the country’s image. Buñuel attributed the reactions to nationalism: “One of the great problems of Mexico, today as yesterday, is a nationalism carried to the extreme.”64 The vitriolic attacks notwithstanding, not all Mexicans reacted negatively to Los olvidados; well-known artists and intellectuals such as David Alfaro Siqueiros praised the movie, and one can imagine that Nacho López must have been among those who liked it. Two of the cutlines in “Una vez fuimos humanos” refer to Mexico’s “forgotten ones” (los olvidados), and children appear in fourteen of the twenty-two published photos; in eight of these the children are alone, and in six they are with adults. However, despite the probable influence of Los olvidados on López’s photoessay, there are interesting differences between them. The film is much more critical of the poor: if it takes their side as a class, it nonetheless demonstrates little sympathy for them as individuals. Further, in its positive characterization of a correctional school’s director, who attempts to aid one of the

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boys, the movie appears to propose that governmental programs offer an answer to poverty. In López’s photoessay, texts and cutlines critique government campaigns—with veiled allusions to the corruption that keeps the proceeds from reaching those who most need it—as well as private charity. For example, beneath one photo appeared the following caption: “Their ignorance of the world is manifest. They don’t know that there is a postage stamp for the protection of children and that they should have received its fruits. It’s also unforgivable that they are unaware of the charity tea-canastas that are being given for their benefit in the city’s higher realms.” The implicit criticism of the well-known discrepancy between what the Mexican system apparently provides for the less fortunate and what it really allots them is carried forward in another image of a sick child. Here, reference is made to the publichealth programs so trumpeted by the revolution but so deficient and underfunded: “He was born under the zodiac sign of rickets. He suffers from all the known diseases, and the specter of tuberculosis looms over him. Children’s hospital? Campaigns against endemic childhood illnesses? Imagine that one day he comes to know that these things existed for him.” The press maintains this unjust situation by fomenting the illusion of society’s benevolence. Its role is outlined in the essay’s text: “And those who know how to read are made even more bitter on seeing the social chronicles of those receptions organized in ‘their’ honor in the papers they use to wrap their children for warmth during the winter. Receptions so that they have bread and shelter, so they see that their brothers from above are generous.” Perhaps the most surprising image, in this period of chauvinist exclusivity and officialist adulation, is that of a hut with the Mexican flag flying over it; the cutline reads, “Over the slum’s most opulent mansion floats a flag stolen in some pompous and spectacular parade. Although they are ignored, they have not forgotten the fatherland, in whose heart they live, next to one of the swankiest residential zones.” Here, López made an implicit criticism of using nationalist symbols to disguise class domination, referring explicitly to the common practice of enticing and/or bullying (acarrear) the poor to political meetings of the PRI. Trucked there in great numbers, the acarreados were given trinkets such as hats and flags. The cutline of the essay’s last photograph bids farewell to its readers (much in the style of Las Hurdes) by criticizing the picturesque image of the country constructed by the officialist propaganda to promote tourism: “The visit has ended. This paradise is not included in the advertising that is distributed outside the country.” Some of the unpublished photos are similar to those excluded from other photoessays. There are few published images of people working, and these are usually women caring for children, although surviving negatives attest to the fact that López took several pictures of men laboring. Images depicting resistance were also

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left out, as were the more extreme photographs such as a sick man lying on the bed with people looking on. This photoessay offers what appears to be an instance of López’s penchant for directing. A boy who is present in two of the images seems out of place among the children of the poor barrio. In the photo of the children with the mouse (Photo 23), the boy is the nearest to the camera, in a plaid shirt. He reappears on the following page, sharing a tortilla with the boy who held the mouse. His clothes are visibly different from the torn rags of the other children, which leaves the impression that López may have taken the boy with him to the shantytown in order to have him “act” in the photoessay. If so, the interest in direction that the photojournalist demonstrated in this essay would be taken to much greater lengths in his staged scenes for Siempre! two years later. A photoessay of great power and originality, “Una vez fuimos humanos” carries out an implacable denunciation of the Mexican social system in comparing the different classes, even though this contrast was not realized at a visual level. The reasons for this are obvious: the rich can protect themselves from the camera’s intrusion. The poor are helpless and, moreover, can be convinced that it is in their interest to permit a photojournalist to take and use their images.65 Nacho López’s photoessays from the early 1950s such as “Una vez fuimos humanos,” “Prisión de sueños,” and “Yo también he sido niño bueno” offered no way out for the downtrodden. However, he did collaborate in one photoessay that presented a social problem and, in the familiar pattern of U.S. magazines, proposed a solution. In March of 1951, López worked with Luis Gutiérrez y González to produce “Filósofos de la noticia” (Philosophers of the news), a photoessay on newspaper vendors.66 There, they examined the “enervating daily monotony” of those beings who labored in the immediate vicinity of the newspapers, but who were evidently too insignificant to have attracted the attention of other photojournalists.67 “Filósofos” begins with López’s favorite subject. We see poor families with children; they suffer from a hunger that cannot be satisfied, but their spirits are intact. Class comparisons are made in the cutline of one photo, which indicates that the young from more comfortable social groups can avoid such discomfort: “Mothers and children jumbled together in a single effort. The city still sleeps, as do the children who have the privilege to sleep until dawn or later if they so desire. The palates haven’t yet tasted any food and the bodies survive only because of the spirit’s force.” The reasons for which Nacho López decided to collaborate in this photoessay must have been at least two. On the one hand, he had already demonstrated an interest in photographing the act of reading in “La calle lee.” On the other hand, it permitted him to again deal with the theme of children, a constant preoccupation in his work. The emphasis on children in “Filósofos” is clearly marked in the published images: of the twenty-seven published photos, twenty-two include children.

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In a photograph typical of this essay, he documented a poor newspaper boy with the following cutline: “A bread roll [bolillo] smeared with homemade beans is the only meal of an infancy that lives at the margin of the sociological sermons. The torn jacket, the depressing pants and shoes shout out the drama.” “Filósofos” offered a resolution that was rarely seen in López’s work: collective organization. On the penultimate page, five photos appear of the Casa del Papelero and the Casa del Voceador (homes of newspaper vendors), two homes that offered living areas, schools, and dining rooms for vendors and their families. According to the text, the homes were products of the vendors’ “sacrifice and will,” constructed with “incredible deprivations.” The images of the homes are basically informative and have little aesthetic interest, perhaps an indication of the distance López may have taken in relation to the organizations that constructed them, and which probably had official ties.68 Notwithstanding his apparent disinterest in the organizations, Nacho López was evidently moved by the vendors’ collective struggle. The last image of “Filósofos” occupies an entire page; I would describe it as the “Heroic Newsboy” (Photo 27). Here, at the end of the essay, having passed through the torments of the vendors, and their efforts to construct homes of their own, we arrive at the Promised Land. Photographing from a sharp low angle, López gives the boy great power, and he magnified that by drastically cropping the negative in a way so as to reduce the urban background, and make the boy stand out against the sky. The visual result of collective struggle is a newspaper boy who stands well planted on his own two feet beneath a cutline that reinforces the message: “Image of Mexico: a paperboy, consciousness in rapid gestation.” Nonetheless, despite López’s efforts to create a figure that somehow embodied the heroism of quotidian journalism, the photo contains contradictory messages. The attitude being generated by the newspaper, Excelsior, was reactionary: the headline trumpets, “danger of battles between miners of the caravan and city bureaucrats,” following the official line of complaining about the problems caused Mexico City by the 1951 “Caravan of Hunger” of the Nueva Rosita miners. Two weeks earlier, Mañana had published an editorial excoriating the miners, and this, the only image by Nacho López related to the famous “Marcha de Hambre,” demonstrates the contradictions of trying to function with progressive eyes within conservative media. Celebrities

To judge by his publications, it appears that Nacho López worked in the illustrated magazines for relatively short, but intense, periods. For example, between November of 1950 and April of 1951 he published fifteen photoessays, an average of three a month. Although some of his better photoessays appeared during this time, he was still a photojournalist and, even if he usually enjoyed more freedom than the oth-

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27. Nacho López, Newsboy, Mexico City, 1951. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 374783.

ers, he still had to function within the limitations of the press. So, at the same time that he focused his camera on the downtrodden, he was also photographing the powerful for the only photoreportages he did of society news, “Fiesta en Nicaragua,” and of political propaganda, “Rafael Ávila Camacho,” and “6 millones por hora.”69 These illustrated articles reflect the other side of what is essentially the same coin. Hence, when Alan Sekula criticized professional documentary photographers for aiming their cameras downward at the powerless, he also noted that “The obverse is the cult of celebrity, the organized production of envy in a mass audience.”70 The 1940s saw the explosion of celebrityhood in Mexican culture, but it is clear that López was not much interested in celebrities, because there are few images of the famous in his archive. Nonetheless, he participated in this journalistic genre in “Fiesta en Nicaragua,” a standard piece of society fluff on the wedding of Anatasio Somoza Debayle, son of General Anatasio Somoza, the Nicaraguan

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dictator. It appears that the Somozas enjoyed a mutually profitable relationship with Mañana, as two articles on them appeared during these years, praising their “fertile labor” and sportsmanship.71 After the general’s assassination in 1956, he was succeeded by Luis Somoza Debayle, who evidently paid for a “special issue” of Mañana dedicated to Nicaragua, with him on the cover.72 The text for “Fiesta,” on “the most aristocratic and sumptuous wedding ever celebrated in Nicaragua,” is uncredited but it must have been provided by Somoza’s public-relations office. Nacho López’s imagery is of a piece with the words: the prosaic pictures are made as if for the society pages, and are completely straight-faced in providing “photographs that reveal the splendor of this unparalleled wedding in Central America,” and document how “the pueblo of Nicaragua, overcome by emotion, throw themselves at the couple.” There are no critical images from this trip to Nicaragua in López’s archive. The reportage on Rafael Ávila Camacho’s assumption of power as governor of Puebla has a similar unctuous tone, characteristic of the period’s officialist political propaganda. “Rafael Ávila Camacho” is about a media event, a staged political ritual that is not really newsworthy. Of course, a gubernatorial inauguration is news, to a certain extent, particularly within the state. Nevertheless, it is by no means an event of such importance that a leading national magazine would dedicate twelve pages to photographs as hackneyed as these: functionaries greeting one another and giving speeches of “moving hope”; “outstanding tables” of the powerful who, together with their “distinctive women,” sit before heaps of food and drink; the “masses, masses” stand under enormous effigies of the leaders, and beneath banners declaring their servitude, while stern soldiers hold them back; the “prodigious spectacle” of Indian dancers whose performance is their “supreme homage” to the new governor. This nauseating officialism ends with the personal touch: a full-page photo of Rafael Ávila Camacho kissing his wife on the cheek upon returning home after the festivities. It was not at all usual to devote so many pages, nor to send the best photojournalist, to cover a governor’s inauguration. This particular political act must have paid good dividends to the magazines—a common form of subsidy was to reward periodicals handsomely, from public funds, for printing this sort of thing—because a similar photoreportage on this inauguration was published in Hoy, where it was also unusual to cover the gubernatorial changes in the states.73 Among the pictures in “Rafael Ávila Camacho” that permit a discordant reading are those in which politicians—including Ruiz Cortines, soon to become the PRI presidential candidate—are photographed against an overwhelming backdrop, a huge banner with the face of Miguel Alemán looming over them. Was López here simply covering the scene, or could he have been alluding to a “Big Brother” presidentialism that was looking over the shoulders of all? In reconstructing this era, José Emilio Pacheco remembered the use of such imagery: “The smiling face of

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Misterpresident everywhere: immense drawings, idealized portraits, ubiquitous photographs, allegories of progress with Miguel Alemán as God the Father, laudatory cartoons, monuments. Public adulation, insatiable slanderous gossip in private.”74 It is difficult to know to what extent López was attempting to utilize the relation of foreground and background to develop a critique of presidentialist propaganda, but he may well have left a heritage that the New Photojournalists would appropriate in constructing their strategy for recontextualizing officialist advertising.75 A Puebla campesino who wears PRI propaganda in his ragged sombrero is another of this reportage’s problematic images (Photo 28). It is hard to judge López’s intentions here, as the photo has some of the tones found in the campesino pictured in “La calle lee.” His sombrero is too frayed, his shirt too dirty, and his face too singular to comfortably serve as the symbol for the “citizen fervor” described in the title. It is a photo that would fit only with difficulty into the image the official party wishes to project. Notwithstanding, as in the photos of Alemán’s enormous visage towering over and dwarfing the human figures, the critical readings I am suggesting are, in the best of cases, implicit. The photoreportage “6 millones por hora” was on the inauguration of public works by President Miguel Alemán and the Regent of Mexico City, Fernando Casas Alemán. The three officialist articles were closely bunched within a period of two months, and may have represented a crisis point for Nacho López, as this was the last time he would participate so directly in magazine photoreportages linked to the PRI. His decision to work in these essays may have been a product of his inexperience and youth, for he had just entered into the magazines a few months earlier; it may also have reflected a pressing economic need that could be quickly met by accepting these assignments. Whatever the reason, López received no credit for his imagery in this last panegyric of the powerful. We do not know whether he had explicitly distanced himself from the photos he made, but the reportage is revealing as a piece of Alemanista political propaganda. The article opens with a full-page photo of a family standing sideways to the photographer. They gaze slightly upward and in awe at something that is out of the frame; the line of vision carries over onto the facing page, where another photo, of Alemán and Casas Alemán, becomes the object of the family’s reverential contemplation. The central figure of the group is the father, who removes his hat in deference, a patriarch who, in rendering homage to his lord, provides a model of Alemanista citizenship for his own subjects. The title notes their “inspired respect,” and the cutline describes the object of their idolatry: The hand reached the sombrero’s rim and uncovered a head in which there were two names: Alemán and Casas Alemán. He had taken his family so that they would know who was concerned to give them water, schools, paved streets. And the mother

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28. Nacho López, Campesino with PRI propaganda in hat, Puebla, 1 February 1951. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO— Fototeca Nacional 380601.

and children were witnesses of his admiration and respect for those two names: Licenciado Miguel Alemán and Fernando Casas Alemán.

In another image by López, the president is shown in the midst of a group of people, all smiling broadly. The title trumpets “jubilation,” and the cutline articulately represents the conflation of president and pueblo:

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This could only happen in Mexico. There was the President of the Republic wrapped up in an embrace with his pueblo. There was Mexico City’s Regent receiving the gratitude of the urbanites. It was a prodigy of communion for Mexico. It was a tribute to the only hierarchy: that of the spirit. There was only one thing there: love for the country.

I am not greatly surprised the Nacho López would have done these photoreportages on Somoza’s wedding, Ávila Camacho’s assumption of power, and Alemán’s inauguration of public works; the illustrated magazines were, in the main, made up of this type of articles. Neither am I astonished that there are no explicitly critical photos in the published essays; after the destruction of Rotofoto in 1938, images that criticized important PRI politicians only began to reappear with the “irreversible” photo by Víctor León of the Mexican unions’ millionaire leaders, There Will Be No General Strike (1978).76 What I did not expect was the complete absence of critical images in López’s archive from any of these three reportages.77 I believe that what we have here is a classic example of how self-censorship operates in photojournalism; that is, photojournalists do not take photos that have no possibility of being published. Perhaps, as Elsa Medina, a Nachito, asserted, “Once you’ve decided to censor yourself, you don’t even see those things.”78 Nacho López enjoyed great freedom within the press, and he maintained control over his negatives for future use; if he failed to take advantage of occasions such as these trips to Nicaragua and Puebla, we can imagine the great degree of self-censorship among other photojournalists. Many Mexicos

The photoessay “Profesionales de lo insólito” (Professionals of the unique) presents individuals with unusual work—bullfighters, clowns, organ players, acrobats— including some of López’s familiar humildes: an outdoor barber, a garbageman, and a beggar.79 The imagery of “Profesionales” is not exceptional, but the essay demonstrates how Mañana’s mexicanidad transformed a trenchant critique of the country into an affirmation of machismo. A notable discrepancy exists between what López said in his image of a worker suspended high over a city street, tightening a nut on the skeleton of a building under construction, and a later reading imposed by the magazine. In “Profesionales,” the cutline emphasized the lack of safety equipment: Only in Mexico can this scene be observed, which in other countries would merit the intervention of as many societies as exist for the worker’s protection, or of the governments themselves, to demand that the company furnish a safety belt to guarantee the audacious worker’s life. But Mexico, a country in which anything can

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happen, and everything does, has a minimum concern and it matters to nobody that the only support of the impavid screw tightener is precisely the hand that is holding the wrench. If the wrench slips a bit, everything will be reduced to a shout and a fall.

Six months later, Mañana republished this photo in its eighth-anniversary issue. It came out on 15 September, the eve of Mexican Independence Day, and contained a section of almost 150 pages dedicated to “El mexicano.”80 There, the photo was not credited to Nacho López, and the cutline praised the “Mexican worker’s audacity” as well as his “force that is not only physical but emotional”; it concluded with a strong dose of machismo: “This one is surely a ‘coward.’” The cutline in “Profesionales” had identified Mexico as a place where singularly little consideration was shown laborers. In “El mexicano,” nationalism was used to divert attention from the dangers workers face in a society underdeveloped in terms of labor safety, emphasizing instead that, if they wanted to be Mexican, men were expected to take a devil-may-care attitude toward their own survival. Photojournalists were continually faced with the problem of rights to their own work, in this case, the right to say what the picture was really about. Although Nacho López contributed to the exploration of mexicanidad, he was much less interested in looking for “The Mexican” than he was in encountering its infinite variations among the nation’s people. In the photoessay “Pregón del tianguis” (Cry of the market), he revealed Tlatelolco marketplace to his readers.81 López was evidently inspired by the notion that “Mexico City’s most characteristic niches are its markets,” and the essay contains many images of the commonplace. The beauty of the everyday is seen in the tortillas, which “have a special charm in the brown hands of the Indian who makes them.” López’s insistent reference to class difference was expressed in two adjoining photos: one of the poor, “modest vendors who withstand the burning sun,” the other of sombreros that “await more fortunate mortals.” Portraying the dignity of the humildes was one of López’s constant concerns. The most representative image of “Pregón” occupies the entire penultimate page; it is that of the mecapalero, those men who have carried produce and goods into and out of markets from time immemorial (Photo 29). López used a low angle—as he had done in representing the campesino of “La calle lee”—in order to give power to an individual who would have been considered bothersome to the new order that was being constructed under Alemanismo. However, in this image the photojournalist slipped close to the picturesque; a strong play of light and shadow masks the face, while the pose with the cigarette converts him into a type. The photo tends to typify rather than individualize the portrayed, something reiterated in the cutline: “Mexico’s most typical personages can be found in our markets; among them the mecapalero, his face swollen by an excess of pulque, who patiently awaits

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the arrival of clients who will have to employ his good offices.” Perhaps the ironic title above the photo was intended to save this individual from such typification, for it added a touch of “classic” indigenismo: “An Old Mercury with Indian Blood Presides over the Transactions in the Market.” As a market carrier on the lowest rung of that social microcosm, however, the macapalero is far removed from any presiding functions. If López appeared to be treading dangerously close to exoticism in one image, he could surprise his readers in others. A mannequin dominates the foreground in a full-page photo, eclipsing the social drama that is occurring behind it: “The money is about to run out! Only a few coins remain in the purse and it will surely

29. Nacho López, Market carrier, Mexico City, 1951. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 376109.

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not be possible to buy many things that are lacking for daily sustenance. The old wooden stands and indifferent mannequins are mute witnesses to dramas both great and small” (Photo 30). By focusing on the mannequin, López gave another turn of the screw to the documentary style of this photoessay, providing perhaps a species of the magical realism that has so marked Latin American literature. We might call the relation that López created within this image—and between this image and the others—the magical within the quotidian.82 The intertwining of the mundane and the surreal is carried out in the relation between a text that speaks of the problems of daily life and a photo that appears to belong to a world quite distinct from that of the market (although it is in fact the mannequin of the market’s fortune-teller). The last photo of the essay is a high-contrast image, a sharp chiaroscuro of sun and shade, of an old and wrinkled vendor in her stand: “We can neither know nor even suspect the rich and intense internal life of the modest merchants who people Mexico City’s rough markets. We only see half of them, that which reveals their external misery. The other half, their great dignity, remains in the shadows.” Perhaps López was using this image and its cutline to construct a metaphor for what Guillermo Bonfil, a good friend of his, would later call “Profound Mexico,” a land ignored by the deliberations on lo mexicano during the 1950s.83 A very different Mexico, the new country that was being constructed through industrialization, was the theme of another photoessay, “Pasos en el cielo” (Steps in heaven).84 Nacho López, Faustino Mayo, and Carlos Argüelles collaborated to make this reportage on the construction of the Latin American Tower: “An unknown vision of Mexico in transformation springs up in this reportage. The photographers’ professional eye detained old Mexico precisely in the instant of its transition.” Because building a skyscraper in an area known for devastating earthquakes was an extraordinary undertaking, the Tower became a symbol of the absolute priority given industrial development under Alemanismo. Nevertheless, this essay makes no direct connection between developmentalism and either the president or the PRI, and is one of the few illustrated articles that did not directly attribute the country’s metamorphosis to those in power. The article’s text asserted the importance of constructing skyscrapers, and underlined Mexico’s progress in comparison to other Latin American countries. However, the danger that the photojournalists had faced in making their images was the photoessay’s real focus: Two reporters had arrived at the last girder of the tallest building in Latin America. Their mission was to encounter “curious angles” in the skyscraper’s construction. They got as high as floor 32, which was, for them, almost the antechamber of another world. It is not common to employ two photographers to do one reportage. Nonetheless, Faustino Mayo and Nacho López threw themselves into the little-

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30. Nacho López, Mannequin and shoppers at market, Mexico City, 1951. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 375909.

appealing adventure of risking their lives thirty-two times going up and another thirty-two times on the way down in order to achieve their objective: an interesting photo for the public.

Photojournalists were the stars of the moment throughout the world. Graphic reporters such as Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, David Seymour (Chim), Hans Namuth, Georg Reisner, Walter Reuter, and the Hermanos Mayo had redefined photojournalism during the Spanish civil war, where the extensive use of the Leica 35 mm

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camera had radically changed the aesthetic of reportage. Compared to bulky cameras such as the Speed Graphic, which weighed around nine pounds, the Leica greatly increased reporters’ mobility, allowing them to move about freely and get into the very center of events without being too conspicuous. Competition between the photojournalists turned the possibility of getting close into a necessity. Their courage and recklessness soon converted them into mythic figures and, perhaps even more important, into celebrities. The outstanding example was Robert Capa, who condensed in his well-known aphorism—“If your photos aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough”—what might be considered the slogan of the Spanish civil war photographers. Capa began to construct his legend during the civil war with his picture of the Republican soldier falling at the moment of his death, and it was reinforced during World War II with images made of the first waves of soldiers landing at Normandy; these photos were possible only because the reporter was in the front lines.85 After World War II ended, Capa’s relationship with Ingrid Bergman, as well as his friendship with figures such as Ernest Hemingway and John Huston, made him into the prototype of the intrepid, daredevil photojournalist/playboy. His death in French Vietnam sealed his legend and added yet another martyr to the list of heroic photographers killed or wounded in duty: Gerda Taro, David Seymour, Werner Bischof, and Eugene Smith, among many others.86 This international backdrop of photojournalists risking their lives in search of images surely figured in the decision to make a photoessay on the Latin American Tower. The dangers that Mexican graphic reporters faced were a central thread of the forty article-interviews that appeared in Mañana during 1946 and 1951–52.87 In this reportage, the “mission” of Faustino Mayo and Nacho López was to report on the Tower’s “fearless fly-men,” who battled to industrialize Mexico. Above, among the structures that formed the “skeleton of progress,” the photographers documented the country’s development, made possible by the labors of those “whose lives hung by a thread.” Making photographs of skyscraper construction was a theme that had been relatively well explored outside Mexico when López and Mayo went aloft in the Tower to do their duty. Lewis Hine was contracted in 1930 to portray the erection of the Empire State Building in New York, around the same time that Margaret BourkeWhite photographed the Chrysler Building and Berenice Abbott documented Rockefeller Center. There were evident differences between these photographers: Hine insisted on the human element, while Bourke-White and Abbott followed the Modernist tendency that dominated industrial photography during the 1930s, celebrating the geometric forms and volumes of machines and buildings, while relegating workers to insignificant planes, when not leaving them out altogether.88 Most of the imagery by Mayo and López focused on the individuals constructing the Tower. However, notable differences between them can be observed in this “singular mano a mano of Mañana’s two aces.” These divergences demonstrate the

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variety of interests and intentions among photojournalists and, hence, the subjectivity of these artisans who are often conceived of as objective reporters. López sought aesthetic expression, pointing his camera upward to create vertical forms, as in the essay’s first photo, shot into the sun’s sharp light in order to silhouette the men against the backdrop of the sky (Photo 31). When López pointed his camera down it was usually to make a joke, such as capturing Faustino Mayo “lovingly embracing the ladder” in the moment of photographing, or documenting the workers sleeping: though they were high up on a construction site, “they could have been in a garden or a summer beach.” However, López’s images—whether those published or in the archive—generally incarnate his artistic search, and for that reason focus on vertical forms such as the geometry of the Tower’s framework.89

31. Nacho López, Construction workers, Latin American Tower, Mexico City, 1951. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO— Fototeca Nacional 374776.

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Faustino Mayo’s photos are generally horizontal in comparison to the verticality of López’s. The “stupendous photograph” of two pages that portrays a “young hero,” ostensibly unaware that he is being shot, presents the worker against a cityscape, documenting the danger he faced by working at such heights without safety equipment (Photo 32). Mayo’s social concerns are here contrasted to López’s aesthetic interests. It is revealing that, a half-century later, the Mayo photo has retained its cogency, incorporated as the key image in the important 1992 exhibition Asamblea de ciudades, while Nacho’s imagery has been relegated to the museum of art.90 Perhaps the fates of these two photos are related to the difference between photographic documents, symbols, and metaphors. López’s photo is artistic, but it does not go beyond being an aesthetic symbol, because the workers are extrapolated from their situation. The problem may lie in López’s fine-art photojournalism, which led him to shoot in a way that ignored the informational aspects of the scene, leaving a historical vacuum; it is a symbol rather than a document, or—to

32. Faustino Mayo, Construction worker, Latin American Tower, Mexico City, 1951. Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo Mayo, Chronological Section 5479. Reprinted with permission.

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take the question another step—a metaphor. The Mayo image documents the historical context, fusing information and expression in such a way as to produce a metaphor. One way of describing different forms of photojournalism is in terms of the continuum between the poles of information and expression. Traditional photojournalism is more concerned with information, its images are documents that are predominantly limited to presenting particular situations; as such they often lack the expressivity to transform themselves into statements that transcend the individual case. Conversely, fine-art photojournalism leans more toward the expressive pole, and its images are often symbols that can fail to adequately present the particularity of specific situations, because they lack the information with which it could be constructed. Although I am conscious of the risks of such gross generalizations, I might say that, in general, fine-art photojournalists make photos that tell us more about the photographers than the photographed, whereas traditional photojournalists take images that tell us more about what they are photographing than about those who have taken them. Perhaps the best photojournalism fuses information and expression, document and symbol, in such a way as to create a metaphor: an image that retains the particularity of its referent but, at the same time, stands for a broader truth that transcends that immediate context. I do not know if the photojournalists were instructed by Mañana to take photos that would show a clear difference between them, but the essay does note that they were there to “eagerly search out rare and distinct angles.” Hence, the article points to the intentionality of photojournalists at the same time that it affirms that their portrayal of reality is “objective.” A central contradiction of the documentalist aesthetic is the idea that, on the one hand, photojournalism is presumed to simply and objectively record events, while, on the other, photojournalists are recognized in terms of individual expressivity. With that in mind, could we consider “Pasos en el cielo” to be self-reflexive? That is to say: To what point might we think of “Pasos” as an affirmation of photojournalism’s subjectivity, as well as an essay on the construction of the Tower and the dangers faced by graphic reporters? After all, in this, the supreme moment of photojournalism, it was well worth the effort (given the magazines it sold) to underline the intentional expressivity of “our aces . . . accustomed to doing the unspeakable in order to get ‘their’ photo.” With the retirement of Enrique Díaz at the end of 1950, Mañana’s masthead changed and Nacho López was placed in the first position among those listed under “Graphic Services,” from 6 January 1951 until 24 May 1952, after which he suddenly and permanently disappeared from the directory. The reasons behind his abrupt exit from the magazine are unclear, but some of the images included in the first issue after his departure offer intriguing possibilities. In the 31 May issue, Mañana published four photos by López—two of workers on the Latin American Tower, one from his essay on Day of the Dead in Janitzio, and another on Tonantzintla—

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without crediting them to him! Can there have been a disagreement between the photographer and the editors around the question of rights, which was resolved with his resignation? Could the fact that the magazine published four images without credit be an attempt by the editors to prove who had the rights to the images? Although the mystery has not been cleared up, the incident indicates some of the limitations within which photojournalists must function.91 Nacho López published some photoessays in Mañana during 1953, 1954, and 1956, but he never returned to collaborating as he had previously. He contributed illustrated articles to Hoy during 1952 and 1953, but he probably felt constrained by the publication’s resistance to initiative on the part of photojournalists. In spite of calling itself the “Supergraphic magazine,” Hoy evidently failed to allow photographers the latitude that Mañana sometimes permitted. Probably the best photoreportage that López did for Hoy dealt with the carpa theaters, “Cuando el pueblo compra en la carpa una ilusión” (When the people buy their illusion in a carpa).92 A little-studied form of entertainment that has been of considerable importance in Mexican culture, the carpas are the theaters of the poor that take their name from the tents that are often their home, although some have lodgings more permanent, if equally rudimentary.93 A Mexican equivalent of vaudeville, the carpas offer variety shows in which comics, singers, dancers, magicians, puppeteers, and other performers appear, and some of Mexico’s most renowned artists have begun their careers there, the best example being Cantinflas. López’s focus on the underdogs comes immediately to the fore. On the photoessay’s opening page a photo of “los humildes,” who wait in line for their tickets, appears next to that of a small boy who stares through the fence that separates the humble from the “expensive” seats. In another image, the title, “without hope,” refers not to the poor in the audience, but rather to the photographed singer, Betty Gabby, and by extension to all of those who toil in the tents. The carpa’s performers are at one with the down-on-their-luck public, and López comments on the divergent forms of entertainment that are attended by Mexico’s different social classes: This is how the humildes enjoy themselves. Those who don’t go to the opera or visit art exhibits. As melancholy as Mexico City’s dwellers, the carpa is a temple where dreams of wealth and hope are fabricated. The carpa Bombay—a name that suggests the humble lands of fantasy—is a rickety miracle of optimism, which brings a bit of happiness to the worker, the newsboy, the traveling salesman, the servant girl.

Among the more interesting photos are those of children pushing against the fence that divides them from the better seats, and gazing enraptured at the scenes unfolding before their eyes. Here, López is utilizing what in cinema is called a “reaction shot,” pointing his camera away from the “action” in order to capture the effect on the spectators’ faces. Alfred Eisenstaedt was known to employ this strategy,

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33. Nacho López, Children in a carpa theater, Mexico City, 1952. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 375397.

as in his 1963 image of children watching a puppet show in Paris.94 An earlier instance of this technique is another group of Parisian children, photographed in the Luxembourg Gardens in 1928 by André Kertész.95 In neither of these photos is the class issue addressed; this López carried out by including the fence, an intention reiterated in the cutline: “obstacle. The fence that divides the preferred seats is also the obstacle that symbolically detains the humildes” (Photo 33). Nacho López Directs

Nacho López collaborated with Siempre! from the first issue, and he was given the red-carpet treatment to which he was accustomed. Although he did not occupy a privileged position in its masthead, the magazine published at least one photoessay by him in its first six issues. His premiere, “Cuando una mujer guapa parte plaza

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por Madero” (When a beautiful woman walks down Madero Avenue), appeared in the inaugural issue, and the theme fit perfectly into Siempre! ’s sexploitation of women’s bodies to sell magazines.96 As noted in the preceding chapter, José Pagés Llergo founded Siempre! after he was threatened with censorship by Hoy’s owners for having published the photo of Alemán’s daughter in the Parisian cabaret. Pagés Llergo always attempted to give the impression that the problem was the seminude dancer rather than Beatriz Alemán. With that excuse, he found a way to place scantily dressed women in almost all the issues of Siempre!, representing himself as a Don Quixote who fought against the puritanism of the Ruiz Cortines regime. Of course, no explicit reference was ever made to the president or the moralizing campaign carried out by him and his appointee, the “Iron Regent” of Mexico City, Ernesto Uruchurtu.97 There is no doubt that the “Mujer guapa” essay is directed. The model is an actress, Matty Huitrón; she had appeared in “obscene” men’s magazines—such as those being burned in the Zócalo by religious right-wingers egged on by Uruchurtu—and was described in a 1956 article as “an until recently famed prostitute [bataclana].”98 In this essay, López’s desire to control the action went beyond the strategies he had utilized in Mañana of having people pose, or of constructing essays from archive photos. He created scenes by having Huitrón walk by men in order to produce the expected piropo.99 Although Huitrón’s role was staged, the men’s reactions were nonetheless entirely veridical, an effect provoked by the “catalyst” of Matty’s appearance. As we shall see in the final chapter, this is a procedure that has been used by documentary cineasts, who argue that it is capable of producing events that are more “real” than those captured by “candid” film or photography. In “Mujer guapa,” Nacho López deliberately incited a common response by Mexican men to an attractive woman in the street. However, the fact that the piropo is so characteristic of Mexican machismo makes it difficult to understand why the text affirms, “This phenomenon is so universal and human that it could just as easily have occurred in Madrid’s Calle de Alcalá or the Champs-Élysées of Paris.” There is little question that giving women a piropo was not untypical in Madrid during the 1950s, but I have serious doubts as to whether that was the case in Paris. Where it was (and may still be) a practice is Italy, above all in Rome and the south of that country. Why, then, is Paris mentioned rather than, for example, Rome? Could the answer to this question be found in the existence of a similar photo, made two years earlier in Rome by Ruth Orkin?100 In 1951, Orkin was in Italy, where she began collaborating with a woman she had met in her hotel, Jinx Allen. While Orkin photographed, Allen reenacted the problems women encountered traveling alone: asking directions, dealing with unfamiliar currency, ordering food, “and, of course, the peripatetic, impetuous young men.”101 As Orkin recounted, “The idea

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for this picture had been in my mind for years, ever since I had been old enough to go through the experience myself. In order to recreate it I knew I had to have the right crowd, lighting, background, angle, and, above all, the right model.”102 Orkin described Allen as a “great natural actress” who participated in staging the scene, walking by a group of men lounging on the corner of the Piazza Della Repubblica, while Orkin ran ahead of Allen and stood in the middle of the intersection to shoot. The photographer says she spoke only to the two men on the motor scooter, asking them to tell the others not to look at the camera. She took one photo of Allen passing the men, and then asked her to back up and repeat the scene, of which she took a second. Orkin’s photo, now titled An American Girl in Italy, was eventually published in an article, “Don’t Be Afraid to Travel Alone,” in the Cosmopolitan issue of September 1952, after several other magazines rejected it. It is difficult to know whether Nacho López had seen Orkin’s picture when he created his photoessay. I do not believe that the possibilities are very great that López would have seen the photo published in Cosmopolitan, a women’s magazine devoted to feminine advice and styles. Nonetheless, Orkin’s image has been republished on many occasions, although it did not really begin to become famous until the late 1970s, when the photojournalism of the 1950s was being reassessed, and revalued as art. Daniel Mendoza, a student of López in Xalapa, told me that when he discovered Orkin’s image in 1985 or 1986, he confronted López with it, taking advantage of the situation to rib his mentor for having plagiarized her. Mendoza says that López was shocked, asserting that he had never seen Orkin’s photo, and asking whether Mendoza knew the exact date of its publications in order to compare it to his.103 I tend to think that someone saw the Orkin photo in Cosmopolitan, and mentioned it to José Pagés Llergo, who then suggested the idea to López without letting on what its source had been. Certainly, Orkin portrayed with more clarity the oppression that the piropo is for women. Her slight high angle traps Jinx Allen among a street crowded with men and looming gray buildings. Thinner and frailer than Matty Huitrón, Allen seems much more bothered by the attention, pulling her shawl over her breast as if to protect herself from the gaze of men who lean into her space aggressively, one lewdly grabbing his crotch. Orkin’s incisive portrayal of this ritual is no doubt owing to being a woman, although, as Naomi Rosenblum comments, “Its gentle irony is far different from the anger later expressed in response to such behavior.”104 Jinx Allen concurs, “Women look at that picture and feel indignant, angry. They say, ‘That poor woman. We should be able to walk wherever we want to and not be threatened.’ As gently as I can, I explain I was not feeling fear. There was no danger because it was a far different time.”105 In Nacho López’s images, the men do not seem to harass the woman. This is true in even the most famous photo, which is always radically cropped when published, thus reducing the woman’s space in the frame (Photo 34).106 Shot from a

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slightly low angle, Matty Huitrón stands out from and above her male admirers, who do not intrude into her space. López gives her a sense of power, despite finding herself in the midst of machismo. Nonetheless, the title, “she, indifferent,” goes a bit too far in defending the piropo, claiming that Huitrón is unaffected by the men’s actions. A sharp contrast to the annoyance that Allen displays, Huitrón’s “indifference” could be offered as a justification for the piropo: on the one hand, if women are indifferent, this means that they are not bothered by such aggression; on the other hand, women’s “indifference” is a rejection of men, whose belligerent response is then understandable. In general, the position of Huitrón in the frame is defined by the male presence; in one published photo, she is visually trapped between a sailor and another man. It could be that López wished to use this image structure to comment on how

34. Nacho López, Beautiful woman walking down street, Mexico City, 1953. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405648.

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women’s situations are determined by men, a motive that could explain the unusual framing in two unpublished negatives, where a man’s elbow looms over Huitrón, who stands with some women outside a market (Photo 35). Whether López intentionally included the elbow or not, his tactic of having Huitrón pose with the women was probably intended to capture their response to the model, for it is certainly very different from the men’s; the women look at her as if she were from outer space. I do not know why this scene was not published, but one can imagine that the vital and critical expressions on the women’s faces would not have gone so well with an essay that essentially praises the piropo.

35. Nacho López, Beautiful woman in market with other women, Mexico City, 1953. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO— Fototeca Nacional 405661.

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Nacho López directed scenes for several quasi-journalistic photoessays during Siempre! ’s first few issues. In the second issue, he constructed one around the drama that resulted from leaving a five-peso bill on the street as a test to see who would return it to the “shill” who had dropped it. The essay was titled “Sólo hubo una persona honrada” (There was only one honorable person), though in fact two people evidently returned the bill rather than keeping it; naturally, they were poor, an old woman and a garbageman.107 The photoessay praised the honest needy, but it did not romanticize the poor: eight of the photos were of a fight, obviously staged, between two indigent paperboys “still lacking the concept of honesty.” Nevertheless, it reserved its most stinging criticism for members of the middle class who assumed “ridiculous postures” on bending over to pick up the bill and furtively hide it. The fourth issue of Siempre! contained another photoessay of this type; it showed people looking up as a result of being fooled by a trickster (engaña-bobos), who was intently staring skyward.108 One of Nacho López’s most famous photos was a result of his explorations in directed photography. A man sits in a cantina drinking pulque; next to him stands a naked, white female mannequin; above them, the portrait of a torero seems to stare down at the dummy (Photo 36). Much reproduced, this picture first appeared in the photoessay “La venus se fue de juerga por los barrios bajos” (Venus went partying in the poor quarters), where López directed a scenario in which a deliveryman carried the mannequin from a repair shop in a poor barrio to a ritzy boutique in the city’s wealthier area.109 The only image given an entire page by Siempre! ’s editors in the photoessay, it later became the cover of Yo, el ciudadano, presumably chosen by López as his best photo (or, at least, his favorite vertical image). The picture left a legacy: photographing deliverymen carrying mannequins around the city has become a micro-genre of Mexican photojournalism, most recently represented in pictures by Francisco Olvera and Guillermo Sologuren published in the newspaper La Jornada.110 The confrontation of three seemingly incongruous elements—mannequin, man, torero—in this image makes it appear to be what Mike Weaver and Anne Hammond have conceived as a “cipher.” These photography theorists describe a cipher as an image that “uses heterogeneous relations between objects for ends that are not easy to describe, but yet seem meaningful.”111 Forms of fortuitous juxtapositions discovered by the photographer, photographic ciphers embody patterns of contemporary existential contingency that are apparently significant. For Weaver and Hammond, the images made by William Eggleston of configurations within a house are an example of ciphers: a light fixture and bulb, and the white electric cords leading in to it from the corners, stand out against the crimson surface of the ceiling in a room painted a deep red.112 Other images may also fit into this category; for example, in The Americans, Robert Frank explored the ambiguity of photography in pictures such as that of a waitress in Hollywood’s Ranch Market who

36. Nacho López, Man drinking next to mannequin, Mexico City, 1953. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405647.

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stands in front of an image of Santa Claus, her sour expression in sharp contradiction to the facade of holiday festivities, or that of a parade in Hoboken, where the U.S. flag covers one of the windows, and parts of the people standing behind it.113 I would argue that Nacho López’s image of the man and mannequin is not a proper cipher because the juxtaposition is directed, rather than a coincidence that he discovered. It is a visual event that was constructed, not found. Although knowing that it is a directed photo takes away some of the image’s spark, it still demonstrates López’s search for existential contingency, and incorporates the Surrealist notion of recontextualization by placing an object (the mannequin) in an inappropriate context. What seems to me to be most interesting in “La venus” is not this particular image but rather the tactic that Nacho López utilized here, as in “Mujer guapa,” of provoking reactions as part of his strategy of “previsualization.”114 However, though several of the photos show men laughing at the ridiculous situations produced by the mannequin and her handler, the only really interesting image is that of the old lady who stares at the man and the dummy with evident disdain (Photo 37). The text equates the woman with censure, linking her to the moralism of this sexenio: “The old woman [anciana] is alarmed by such immorality.” However, the real play here is in the contradiction between the old, dark woman, so covered with clothing that her head is concealed by a rebozo, and the naked white mannequin whose slim body serves as a model of youth. The juxtaposition between the ancient mestiza and the not-very-Mexican mannequin may be a veiled commentary on neocolonial culture, and its effects on the working class. The mannequin is blond, with “light eyes,” and the text asks: “Could she be the dream of the men from the poor barrios?” The text is generally problematic in relation to both class and gender issues. The man’s mission is to deliver the mannequin to a boutique in a wealthy part of town, but he takes her partying to show “how people from the poor barrios enjoy themselves.” Although the essay does not victimize the poor, and certainly could not be construed to be critical of class relations in Mexico, it does attest to their existence, something always progressive in Alemanista times. Notwithstanding, the essay’s manifest machismo is painful. “The girl of men’s dreams” and “the ideal companion,” the mute mannequin’s silence makes “a man’s sentiments grow.” She accompanies her “boyfriend” while he plays pool “with his buddies,” and he takes her to “the ladies bar of the poor”; he reflects on her advantages: “She’s not like the one who . . .” Although the photoessay is replete with López’s humor—including a trip by the messenger to a shoe repairman for new soles before making the journey—its curious treatment of class and gender relations leaves today’s reader a bit disconcerted. Perhaps the skewed depiction of social class was behind the decision of Nacho López not to sign “La venus,” for the same difficulty may also have occurred with another photoessay published one issue earlier, “México acostumbra echarse una

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37. Nacho López, Man with mannequin in crowd, Mexico City, 1953. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405642.

copa a las dos de la tarde” (Mexico is accustomed to having a drink at two in the afternoon).115 Although it is a visually attractive photoessay on a fascinating aspect of the quotidian, the article ultimately disguises the existence of class relations by alleging, “This custom of wetting one’s lips with something more than combined hydrogen and oxygen has nothing to do with social classes or economic conditions.” Given the importance that López assigned to the question of class in many of his other works, I can only conclude that the essay’s politics must have made him uncomfortable and, for that reason, he did not sign it. The myth of social homogeneity appears in the opening image’s cutline. There, one of the downtrodden raises a bottle of beer to his lips: “it tastes like glory. There are no differences of social classes or economic conditions for this ancient custom. If the rich drink their ‘highballs’ or their ‘martinis’ in elegant bars, the poor also savor their tequilas with lime or, at the very least, a well-chilled beer.”116 It is difficult to imagine that Nacho López would have been at ease with this camouflaging

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of the patently unequal experiences imposed by class, even for so simple an act as having a drink.117 The imagery chosen for publication contributes to the masquerade: six of the seven photos are of the poor, while only one is of a bar, the “Ritz,” which seems to be a place where people gather who are better off than the paupers in the other images. The numerical imbalance between the pictures of rich and poor makes it meaningless to compare their drinking environments, but this is even more complicated by the fact that the Ritz photo is the smallest of the essay and, taken at some distance, contains little detail. Thus, the situation of the different classes in their respective “watering holes” cannot really be contrasted because of the lack of information in the Ritz photo. In fact, López may well not have taken the Ritz photo, as I have never been able to find the negative in his archive. This might indicate that someone else authored the essay, for there are many negatives of upperclass bars in López’s file on “Restaurantes y cantinas” that he could easily have employed. It may be that at some point during the layout it became apparent that the manifest inequalities would be immediately visible; the way out of visually contradicting the photoessay’s thesis—that the rich and the poor savor essentially analogous experiences—was to utilize photos with which such a comparison could not be made. The use of nationalism and machismo to create uniformity makes Nacho López’s relation to “México acostumbra” even more peculiar. Affirming equality through shared cultural traits, the essay maintains that it “is a Mexican custom” to tipple at midday: “So, when Mexico takes its drink at two in the afternoon, both the millionaires and the poor enjoy that privilege; in the end, they are all Mexicans.” However, although drinking in the middle of the day may be “an old Mexican custom,” it obviously comes from Spain, and not from the Indian civilizations that generally restricted alcohol consumption. In fact, the drink of the different classes reflects, though in a very veiled manner, their relation to national culture. Aside from beer, the poor imbibe pulque, a pre-Conquest beverage that was still popular in the 1950s, although industrial spirits such as beer and tequila were replacing it “with alarming speed.”118 The rich sip whiskey, imported liquor pushed in the illustrated magazines as a way for the well-off to join modernity. One of López’s best photos, that of the drinker with a glass of pulque in his hand, addresses the varied fare of the wealthy and the indigent, but finally ends by turning machismo into the national essence: “yeah, and so what? A Mexican expression. The challenging gesture—a friendly challenge—and the word of the muy macho. But don’t think that this gesture is only seen in ‘Las Glorias de Gaona’ [a cantina]. Also in the most exclusive bars, where in place of pulque they drink whiskey and soda at two o’clock” (Photo 38). In making this essay Nacho López did not intervene in the photographic act to the extent that he had in other Siempre! setups. However, he evidently worked closely with the poor, for a number of negatives survive of them; they posed willingly for

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38. Nacho López, Men in cantina, Mexico City, 1953. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 382935.

him, no doubt in exchange for the beers they imbibe. The fact that the essay is composed of close-ups of the poor, while there is only one long shot of the wealthy, is an articulate representation of the distinct degrees of proximity that the respective classes allow a documentary photographer. One might argue that the images of the poor personalize and individualize them, while the rich are treated at an arm’s length. But, I fear that once again we find ourselves confronted by the dilemma of a photojournalist with a social conscience: limited by the relations of power in the society that he wishes to criticize, he ends up reproducing those relations, and “victimizing the victims.” Hell Is for the Humble

After appearing in each of Siempre! ’s first six issues, Nacho López disappeared from its pages until the following year. In June of 1954, he created the most critically powerful photoessay ever published in the Mexican illustrated magazines, “Sólo los

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humildes van al infierno” (Only the poor go to hell), a reportage on Mexico City’s delegaciones (police stations and holding cells).119 López was solely responsible for the text as well as the photos, a rare privilege anywhere, but one that he had enjoyed on former occasions. The freedom he was given convinced him to experiment: he parted company with the magazines’ traditional narrative format of “beginning, middle, end”—one that he himself had employed in prior photoessays—to construct an account that, in going nowhere, mirrors the fate of those caught in the morass of Mexico’s unjust, corrupt, and Byzantine legal system. The photoessay was born in 1936, together with Life magazine. Life’s founder, Henry Robinson Luce, defined this graphic innovation, both commercially and formally, as “a new trick in the world which pleases people, namely, the strip of photographs in narrative sequence”; for the editor, the photoessay would supplant a classic literary form: “Fifty or twenty years ago, people used to write ‘essays’ for magazines. . . . The essay is no longer a vital means of communication. But what is vital is the photographic essay.”120 However, if the photoessay had invigorated the relationship of images and words during the 1930s and 1940s, it had become stale and predictable by the 1950s. In part, this was owing to the exclusion of photographers from the decision-making process: photoessays originated with writers, and photographers had little to say about their development and no control over the use of images.121 The very structure of the photoessay was another element that robbed it of its vitality. As Robert Frank, the Swiss immigrant who redefined U.S. photography in the 1950s, stated, “I developed a tremendous contempt of Life magazine. . . . I hated those goddamned stories with a beginning and a middle and an end.”122 Nacho López recognized that telling the stories of those trapped in the delegaciones required a different narrative technique than he had usually employed. He had already experimented with formal stasis in “Prisión de sueños,” in order to communicate the sensation of those with “no exit.” In “Sólo los humildes,” he refined that style, first recounting the story in a traditional manner, and then stopping the narrative, leaving it as dead in the water as the poor souls who inhabited it. In refusing to provide closure at the end, he left the resolution of injustice to the society as a whole. The critique that “Sólo los humildes” makes of the police, and by extension of the Mexican class system, was as innovative as the formal experimentation. The title itself is explicitly critical, for “only the humble” end up in the hell of the delegaciones. It is well known in Mexico that those with money bribe the police in the street so they are not taken to these infernos; moreover, they have the social and economic resources that make it unnecessary for them to recur to the police in order to settle problems. The text underlines class difference in relation to who ends up in these hellholes: “The cement [of the delegación’s floor] is not for those who commit the real robberies and frauds for thousands and millions of pesos, nor is it for those

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who hand out bills to avid hands, nor is it for those who have ‘influence’ and count on lawyers who defend them.” There are very few precedents of such denunciation in the mass culture of Mexico; cinema, for example, presented the police as “apolitical guarantees of justice.”123 The fact that this was López’s last critical “live” photoessay leaves one with the impression that he may have been advised that such censure of the existing powers was not acceptable. The list of prior disapprobatory discourses about the police is short. Más published three articles about police corruption in issues six, seven, and fifteen, during 1947; and, while José Pagés Llergo was the director, both Hoy and Siempre! published editorials calling the police a “cancer” of Mexico, with Siempre! ’s appearing a couple of months before “Sólo los humildes.”124 I have found no other articles critical of the police published in Hoy, Mañana, or Siempre!—or any other Mexican illustrated magazine—during the period 1937–60. One immediate forerunner of “Sólo los humildes” was “Noches con huella” (Nights that leave a mark), a photoessay published in Hoy about six months earlier, which focused on “The seven circles of hell in the police delegaciones.”125 However, though the delegaciones are there described as an inferno, the solution is ultimately religious: the problem is sinners, not the society. Nacho López must have entered into this project with great enthusiasm: evidently the photoessay to which he gave the most of himself, he wrote in the article’s subtitle that he had dedicated “Four weeks to visiting delegaciones in order to show readers a hell that Dante forgot.” The key opening picture presents an unconscious man, probably the result of an alcohol overdose, slumped against the delegación wall. Other men hold his head up, apparently so that López can take his photograph. The image’s cutline sets the stage for what appears to be officialist reportage on the difficulty of dealing with public problems such as drunkenness: “They arrive with reason and dignity lost.” Next to this picture is a silhouette of a man’s face, cut out from one of the photos not employed in this article—other than for this detail, where the original image’s meaning was manipulated. The face of the man (see the uncropped version in Photo 39) was turned slightly to make it appear that he is observing the sordid scene with the drunk. This silhouetted head functions as an anonymous onlooker, a witness of the “people” who disapprove of such immorality. The choice of these images to begin this reportage is meaningful. Luc Boltansky has argued that the opening photographs are the most symbolic, as well as a summation, of the pictures that make up an illustrated article.126 Although the opening images of “Sólo los humildes” provide an interesting reflection on the leitmotiv of looking and photographing in the delegaciones, they are not at all a summary of the story that will follow. Rather, they are expressions of the official ideology that the police are imparters of justice, whereas the photoessay’s aim is to

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39. Nacho López, Man and women in delegación, Mexico City, 1954. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405668.

document the sufferings of the helpless at the hands of the constabulary. By utilizing these photos to begin the reportage, Nacho López is indicating that the problem is not only the corruption of the police, but the mistaken expectations that exist about them. The first photo on the third page, and its cutline, introduce what is to be a main theme of the essay, while feeding into the now-established officialist expectations (Photo 40). The larger title reads “desamparo” (without protection, forsaken), and it is followed by the caption “Every night, a thousand different stories with the same common denominator: hunger, ignorance, defenselessness. Men and women with no succor except a weak, inconsistent hope. A mother whose child has been beaten by a vicious father. This is when justice wants to be implacable.” Here, rather than an image of a public menace like the drunk, López shows us a woman carrying a baby in her arms. The image and the text work together, representing the delegación as a place that offers aid and justice to the helpless and the

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40. Nacho López, Battered woman and child in delegación, Mexico City, 1954. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO— Fototeca Nacional 405674.

humble. This woman fled from a depraved husband who beat her tiny child. At the same time, however, the first sentence of this cutline has introduced the social element, beginning the process of cutting back against the officialist point of view that blames individuals for their problems. As the story develops, its central thread is revealed: the “common denominator” that binds all who find themselves in the delegaciones is “hunger, ignorance, helplessness.”

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The next photos continue to work off of, and then against, the officialist perspective. In Photo 41, the essay reiterates the theme of expecting justice in the delegación. “illusions” is the large title printed above a couple evidently at odds, and the cutline describes love’s deceptions: “Hell’s waiting rooms also have scenes of sentiments, love, and sex. Abduction, sprinkled with illusions, promises, and projects. Later, repentance, deceit, and, finally, the brutal accusation that offers no other alternative than the church or jail.” Of course, as in the preceding photo, López is here dealing not only with love’s disappointments, but with illusions about justice in the delegación: the woman is huddled over the logbook as if pleading with the letter of the law for aid, while her “abductor” turns his back on her. In the following image, we are presented with the criminal, rather than the civil, side of law enforcement. The large title states “routine,” and beneath a prisoner accompanied by a policeman the cutline tells us, “For others, the nocturnal

41. Nacho López, Man and woman in delegación, Mexico City, 1954. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405676.

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visit to a delegación is now a customary and periodical step. For many—the professional thieves, the degenerates, the pickpockets, the drunks—it means confronting what they believe is their inexorable destiny: it is part of their lives, an unchangeable routine.” The expressions of boredom on the faces of both men indicate that it is as much a routine for the police as it is for the criminal, and may be an intimation by López as to the interchangeability of these roles. The stream of prisoners entering jail in the next photo takes us from the delegaciones, which are temporary holding tanks, to the prison: “Interminable lines of men and women arrive day after day to the El Carmen, the City’s Prison, from all the delegaciones. They are all humble, helpless, people.” In these first photos, López traced a narrative path through the expectations and experiences of the poor souls who end up in the delegaciones. Those who go there fleeing injury, and with the illusion of seeking redress (Photos 40 and 41), are surrounded by the professional criminals and degenerates who people the other images. In the end, so the constructed story asserts, they all receive the same treatment, for all are treated as if they had broken the law. With these steps from the delegaciones to the prison, López could have terminated the tale. However, it was not his intention to construct a closed narrative, but to demonstrate that this is an ongoing and unending experience for the poor. It is a story without an end, and above all, without a happy one. Nacho López then proceeds to recount some of the chronicles of every night. The first is about a man who has evidently been involved in an automobile accident. He is relatively well dressed, but is depicted as someone whose lack of education will hinder his attempts to provide a convincing explanation of the occurrence: “‘But it was just a scratch, boss . . .’ The reduced language, an unconvincing and fearful gush without force in front of the judge. There are neither words nor hope. It is as if a permanent curse existed for these humble people from which they cannot escape” (Photo 42). The following image—a woman lying on the floor next to a basket with shoes in it—apparently attempts to provide a counterpoint to the sordid atmosphere of criminality, domestic violence, and emotional betrayal. The cutline recounts the story of a mother’s love: “Together with the spectacle of the born, unscrupulous criminal, we find the sweet and loving gesture of a mother who pardons all. On top of the cold floor she waits in anguish with an old pair of shoes, witnesses to a trip without a destiny.” It may have been López (or Siempre! ’s editors) who lacked scruples here, at least in relation to photojournalist ethics. In his archive of negatives, this image is identified as a woman who has been hit by a car. It could be that the original intention was to relate this photo to that published immediately above it, of the man from the car accident, as if he had hit the woman (although it is unlikely that the images are related, because the negatives are from two different cameras). Perhaps the “accident”

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42. Nacho López, Man and police in delegación, Mexico City, 1954. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 375742.

seemed too forced to carry off, or López may have felt that what was missing from the essay was solidarity among the dispossessed (a topic to which we will return shortly), and so created a typically self-sacrificing Mexican “mother” in order to infuse the essay with what is lacking in the published photos. In the fourth page of the essay, López continues to break lances in favor of the humildes, and to condemn their treatment. Photo 43 presents a woman in jail, behind the bars that she grips fervidly.127 The large title, “pain and tears,” describes her anguish, and the cutline speaks of society’s indifference:

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What does society know of the humildes ? What does it know of the hunger, the solitude, and the conflict of these people? Nothing. Society doesn’t know about these dirty, denigrating, uncomfortable, and offensive things. It is as if the delegaciones, the jails, were made only for the desamparados [the unprotected]. How many interminable nights will these women who have been marked forever cry and weep!

43. Nacho López, Woman in cell, Mexico City, ca. 1950. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 374891.

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Another of the “marked” is a suspect who attempts to explain something to a suited man in front of him (Photo 44). A uniformed policeman moves toward this individual in such a brusque manner that his image is blurred, leaving the impression of belligerence. The cutline describes the accused as “Another sort who lives at the law’s margins, because of ignorance and necessity. The barrio’s ‘gigolo,’ a permanent dweller of the dance halls, pool rooms, bars, etc.” It is unclear why this man is labeled a “gigolo,” given the fact that he was identified on the negative envelope as a “young pachuco.” It could be that using the concept of pachuco would have created problems that could not have been resolved in a limited space. In the 1950s, pachucos symbolized the breakdown of traditional values, and a rejection of the stifling nationalist homogeneity of Alemanismo; they were “a demonized group both linguistically and socially.”128 Nonetheless, if this figure has been decontextualized by the period’s prejudices, the theme of social marginalization is maintained, and linked to the lack of opportunity as a result of educational deficiencies.

44. Nacho López, “Pachuco” or “gigolo” in delegación, Mexico City, 1954. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405687.

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In the following section, López proceeds to an explicit critique of the Mexican police. “nothing moves them” is the large title that introduces a series of photos that will make this denunciation both visually and textually. In the first image, we see the feet of the downtrodden, standing at the bar of justice. The negative was cropped so as to eliminate its upper half, and so emphasize the feet. López’s aesthetic strategy is here similar to that of the image of worn shoes that appeared in the photoessay “Virgen india,” but the cutline’s message has a bit more bite: These feet of the humildes and the desamparados have their own spirit and their own language. It is as if they had dignity and were ashamed of having to step in centers where—it is said—justice is imparted. There are feet without shoes—some— fatigued, untiring, ignorant of comfort; feet that carry the weight of ignorance, hunger, misery, passion. But, elegantly shoed and covered feet are never found here.129

The problematic of victimization comes to the fore in the next photo. A woman appears in the foreground, her hand covering her face (Photo 45). The cutline refers to the insensitivity of the police, and infers that the woman is crying: “The police and the judges in the delegaciones seem to have lost all human sentiments. Nothing moves them, not even a woman’s tears.” However, it is not at all clear that the woman is crying; she may well be hiding her face from the camera. This impression is substantiated somewhat by López’s own annotation on the negative envelope: “Woman covering her face with her hand.” Whether the woman is crying or hiding her face, the photo still raises the issue of victim photography. Here, in his role as photojournalist, López has reproduced, and taken advantage of, these individuals’ vulnerability. In this sense, his accusation of the police and judges—“nothing moves them”—could be extended to include a photojournalist (or a magazine) who may have invented a woman’s tears in order to disguise the aggression of sticking a camera in the face of someone who, evidently, did not wish to have her picture taken. In the image published next to the “crying woman,” López shoots down upon an individual sitting sadly with his hand against his face (Photo 46). The caption links the immediate world of the delegaciones to the broader universe of hopelessness: “For this man—as for so many others—it’s all the same to him; they can lock him up, they can let him go. As if life, his life, were just a jail anyway.” The negative is even more off-center than the photo published in Siempre!, indicating that López was utilizing an unbalanced frame as a metaphor for a social system so out of symmetry as to create these situations of despair and pessimism. The fact that this image was not printed in all its radical imbalance demonstrates some of the limitations on aesthetic expression within photojournalism. In one of the essay’s more moving images, a very young woman stares at the camera, her hand partially covering her face, while two policemen loom over her. The cutline describes her tale, just another of “the city’s stories” (Photo 47):

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45. Nacho López, Woman covering face in delegación, Mexico City, 1954. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405685.

Finding herself in the delegación’s hostile, dirty, threatening atmosphere is not a new experience for this poor woman. But even so, the ambience destroys her, as it destroys all who end up here. It is the hell most feared. Her crime? A neighborhood row of no importance. But—we must ask—is that the real origin? The sociologists would certainly disagree.

The annihilating ambience to which the cutline refers is marvelously reproduced in the form of policemen who hover over her in the frame, visually crushing her. Nevertheless, the fact that she is returning the camera’s gaze gives her an element of vitality lacking in the other published photos, and it rescues her as a person capable of acting, even if her activity is no more than recognizing the photographer’s presence.

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46. Nacho López, Man seated in delegación, Mexico City, 1954. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405678.

López’s criticism of the police reaches its culmination in Photo 48, with his image of the sleeping officer. His caption is as damning as the photo: Even in hell these “little angels” sleep, indifferent to and detached from the pain of the humildes. Later, they will wake up insolent, insulting, and ill-humored to take out their bad mood on the victims who have come to the delegaciones. The person hit by a car or stabbed, the vicious, the drunks, the irresponsible husband, the public nuisance, the thief, the pickpocket, the individual who had the bad luck to get caught breaking a law. They will fall on all of them equally.

The cutline makes it clear that the police treat as criminals all who have the misfortune to enter into the delegaciones. His reference to the police as “angelitos” is an allusion to the fact that some of the humildes come voluntarily, seeking aid from a higher power. That they will suffer the same fate there as they do in the larger society

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47. Nacho López, Young woman and police in delegación, Mexico City, 1954. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO— Fototeca Nacional 405677.

is demonstrated in Photo 49, a truly Dantesque image of a woman and child who seem to have been brought up from the lower depths. Once again, it is a battered woman who, having fled from her assailant, will presumably receive similar treatment at the hands of the “angelitos.” It seems significant that the photoessay includes several images relating to domestic violence, and the emphasis given this aspect of delegación life can be seen in the fact that two of the photos are of the same woman.130 The issue of battered wives does not appear in López’s other photoessays, or in any of his writings, and there is no evidence among the period’s publications that its inclusion here was a result of contemporary concerns. I am therefore led to believe that his experiences in the delegaciones, where he was constantly confronted

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48. Nacho López, Policeman sleeping in delegación, Mexico City, 1954. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405663.

with the effects of male violence, must have been influential in his decision to make and publish several images on domestic brutality. The first photos of “Sólo los humildes” gave a deliberately misleading impression as to where it was going; the last image articulately sums up the essay’s message, and incarnates its narrative transformation. We see a woman staring ahead, as if she were gazing upon the open book of laws before her (Photo 50). Behind her, the police have their backs turned and look in the opposite direction. Through this construction, Nacho López seems to assert that the law is an open book the common people can consult, but the guardians of this order act, not only in opposition to the interests of the pueblo, but contrary to the law as well. Now, however, López takes the question out beyond the police, to indict the nation as a whole: But that’s the way society is. And because of that, in this suffocating and depressing atmosphere the parade of passions continues: hate, rancor, anger, love, tenderness. Every night in the lugubrious delegaciones is written a bitter, short, and unknown history of the humildes who inhabit a beautiful, modern, and progressive capital.

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49. Nacho López, Battered woman and child in delegación, Mexico City, 1954. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO— Fototeca Nacional 405684.

This essay—politically biting and formally innovative—is a landmark in the history of Mexican photojournalism. Nonetheless, the question remains: What stories were not told? This is an appropriate question, for “Sólo los humildes” has the highest ratio of negatives conserved to photos published among all López’s essays: the photographer preserved 150 negatives from the reportage, of which 21 were published, a ratio of 7 to 1.131 The unpublished negatives point to the existence of untold tales, and the most important of them recounts the way out of this

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50. Nacho López, Woman standing before book in delegación, Mexico City, 1954. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO— Fototeca Nacional 405670.

depressing situation—through dignity, resistance, and solidarity among the humildes. Although this narrative is to some extent implicit in the text, it is absent from the published photographs. Suggestively, it is clearly present in some of the unpublished photographs. For example, the woman of Photo 40 (and another published image) also appears in a different negative taken at approximately the same time; there, however, her head is held high with dignity. Images of resistance either were not published or they were cut out and recontextualized. For example, there are two negatives where the “gigolo” and the “abductor” are shown arguing with the police, vehemently insisting on their rights (Photos 51 and 52). This aspect of the “gigolo” did not appear in the magazine, though one was included in which he was considerably less vehement (Photo 44). The image of the “abductor” in a defiant attitude was published, but in a form that manipulated its meaning: his silhouette was cut out (as with the man in Photo 39), and placed beneath the picture of the man appealing to the police (Photo 42). In that context, a challenge to authority was converted into a plea for mercy.

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There are also unpublished negatives where people glare at the camera, asserting themselves as subjects instead of being captured like objects. Perhaps the strongest of these is a well-dressed individual in suit and tie, who must be “the influential man who stared threateningly” at the photographer when he noticed the camera (Photo 53). According to the text, he asked López not to publish the image and offered him fifty pesos. The photojournalist replied, “Save your money, your photo didn’t come out.” Whatever the reason may have been, his image did not appear in the reportage, a fact that leads us once more to reflect on photographic victimization: the women in Photos 45 and 47 were not offered the same opportunity to avoid having their pictures published. The primary shortcoming of “Sólo los humildes” is its failure to depict the dialectical response to oppression: solidarity among the downtrodden. In remaining at the level of a denunciation of the police and an expression of sympathy for the hu-

51. Nacho López, “Pachuco” or “gigolo” protesting in delegación, Mexico City, 1954. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH– SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405667.

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52. Nacho López, Man protesting in delegación, Mexico City, 1954. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405680.

mildes, the published imagery reflects liberal attitudes, rather than oppositional politics. As Alan Sekula has observed about photojournalists such as Eugene Smith, “The subjective aspect of liberal esthetics is compassion rather than collective struggle. Pity, mediated by an appreciation of ‘great art,’ supplants political understanding.”132 Lack of solidarity is expressed graphically through the visual structures of the photoessay’s images. In all of the published pictures, the humildes are either alone or in the company of the police. When they do appear with others of their condition, they usually stare in opposite directions, evidencing alienation. Images of them together, which would be the visual equivalent of solidarity, are absent. Despite the discourse that was constructed with the published photos, it is clear from the archive negatives that López must have intended to include images of solidarity. Some 20 percent of the negatives depict humildes in situations of mutual aid, an indication that his objective was to get beyond denouncing individual

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53. Nacho López, Middle-class man in delegación, Mexico City, 1954. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405671.

problems, in order to graphically represent the collective struggle that is, at any rate, a fact of life within the delegaciones, where families and friends flock to help. Why they were not published is difficult to say. López may have believed that they were aesthetically less interesting than those chosen for publication, although I would disagree: pictures of intently preoccupied groups, huddled together to face their difficulties, offer convincing imagery. He may have felt that they would distract from the central point of criticizing the police and the larger Mexican social system; we often see instances in photoessays where complexity has given way to simplicity. Perhaps the mystery is solved on noting that the two silhouettes published in “Sólo los humildes” were cut out from two of the negatives that demonstrate soli-

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darity and resistance: the “onlooker” of Photo 39 appears together with family members, and the “abductor” of Photo 52 defiantly responds to the police. Their appearance in the essay could indicate that they were preselected by López for incorporation in the article, but were then used in a way that dramatically transformed their meaning. This would suggest that the decision was not his to make: it may have been taken from his hands by the magazine’s editors, who decided that it was one thing to criticize the problem of police corruption and impunity—which everybody in Mexico knew then (and knows still) to be intolerable—but quite another to propose the organized resistance of the humildes. Whichever the reason— and whoever made the decision—the effect of the published images is to portray the downtrodden as helpless, alienated objects of society, instead of representing their capacity to be the collective subjects of their own histories. In the end, “Sólo los humildes”—the most critical photoessay in Mexican journalism prior to the 1970s—displays the individual brilliance of Nacho López; it also illustrates the complex constraints of a world he was beginning to abandon in order to try his luck in cinema. Nacho López’s last consistent burst of activity in the illustrated magazines took the form of a collaboration with Luis Suárez to produce three photoessays for Mañana during 1956: “El drama de los niños desválidos” (The drama of destitute children), “El lastre humano de las mujeres abandonadas” (The human burden of abandoned women), and “¡Asalto a la corte de los milagros!” (Assault on the Court of Miracles).133 All three essays painted the same picture: Mexico City’s homeless are picked up and taken to shelters by the Jeeps belonging to the city’s government, thanks to the programs of Regent Ernesto Uruchurtu. In proposing a social problem and then offering a solution devised by the government, these articles differed greatly from both the usual fare of the illustrated magazines and Nacho López’s photoessays. Illustrated articles on Mexico’s poor usually limited themselves to documenting misery, and López’s most important essays never intimated that the grave difficulties of poverty were solvable, much less through official programs. These three articles were almost certainly a result of Regent Uruchurtu’s intervention, either in the form of a direct payment or through the suggestion that undertaking this project could prove beneficial to the magazine. The articles present the sad case of Mexico City’s destitute, which is particularly difficult during the months when “you can cut the cold with a knife.” “Drama de los niños” is especially wrenching and, considering the current plight of street children, quite contemporary. It opens with the most powerful photo of the three articles, that of a boy in tears (Photo 54): There’s a small commotion at the Shelter’s door. A boy is crying in a strange way. “It’s the little mute boy,” we hear. A man tries to calm the filthy child, who emits the most primitive cries and moves his hands rapidly. The little mute boy is known in

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the Shelter. He’s been picked up several times in the doorways of San Juan Letrán. Later they come and take him home, but he always reappears in the street. He cries all the time.

“Drama de los niños” converts the description of the children’s fate into a critique of Mexican society, although its references to the dangers kids face is a bit veiled: When night comes to the city, the children step up their pace. Many abandoned kids flee the night because they know that they could end up bathed in sweat, and they go to the Shelter. Others, in the street, continue to be exposed to the cold of

54. Nacho López, Boy crying, Mexico City, 1955. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 381403.

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the night and the cold of a society that has margins of vice and corruption. It exploits beings who are like men in boys’ bodies: they sell magazines they can’t read, illusions they can’t know, gum they don’t chew, or they beg when there are no clients.

This last phrase takes us into what is the hidden agenda of the three articles: the government’s program against begging. Although Nacho López probably had less input into these three articles than Luis Suárez, or Regent Uruchurtu, he was evidently not a proponent of mendicancy (much like Luis Buñuel). He had published a photoessay three years before in Siempre!, “La vida privada de un mendigo de tantos” (The private life of one beggar among many).134 There, he was taken into the confidence of a mendicant, and had followed him about for several days in order to know his story. Lázaro Huitrón García was a “young and strong ex-woodsman from Pachuca” who immigrated to Mexico City, and had recently lost his shoeshine kit. “His story is the product of ignorance, the medium, and misery. Without money, unprotected, he found no other way to live than public charity, where things go pretty well for him.” As the afternoon falls, Huitrón García leaves his post in the street and returns to his home to prepare for the night. A change of clothes leaves him looking like “an ordinary citizen,” and he goes out on the town, where he “gives himself the luxury of satisfying his vices and his pleasures, squandering the pennies acquired through people’s generosity and sentiments.” Having discovered the beggar’s “double life,” Siempre! gave him two hundred pesos to buy another shoeshine kit so that “he could become reintegrated into a normal life”: “From that moment on, Lázaro Huitrón García disappeared in the streets of Mexico City.” It is hard to say whether Nacho López was more repulsed by beggars or by providing images for the three Mañana articles in 1956 to illustrate what was essentially government propaganda. Only a couple of the thirty-six photos published in these articles are worth reproducing, and one image in “Drama de los niños,” that of a family that has apparently come searching for a lost son, was evidently made for “Sólo los humildes.” López would later use a picture from “Corte de los milagros” in one of the photoessays on Mexico City that marked the end of his collaboration in the illustrated magazines, “Las mil caras de la ciudad” (The city’s thousand faces).135 It is instructive to compare the different cutlines in the two articles. In the 1956 essay, the caption clearly identified the shelter in which the photo was made, and alluded to the governmental program that would aid these indigents: “The court in full. This must be what hell is like. Before, they spread their evil ways all over the city; now they have been brought to the old Rivadavia mansion where all will be given treatment.” When López republished this photo in “Mil caras,” he invented a context that allowed him to allude to the increasing U.S. presence in Mexico, and the powerful impact of new ways:

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the citizen who accelerates his nervous sytem to earn a peso. One is two, or three, or five, or an indivisible five million. The announcement said, “Men wanted, between 25 and 35 years, for very remunerative work in a U.S. company.” But many are now too old. And the sorcerer’s apprentice learns to shut up, to be discreet, to celebrate the gestures of his transitory master. Meanwhile, both the ads in English and the “servyrself ” tell them how to live better to the rhythm of “rock and roll.” But you have to figure out how to eat, and they know that arranging life is not easy.

Mexico City

After “Sólo los humildes,” López’s own life began to be rearranged and his contributions to the illustrated magazines became increasingly sporadic. He wrote that he had left photojournalism in 1957, and was working in weekly newsreels, “with the perspective that I will soon be making important documentary films.”136 Notwithstanding his departure from the periodicals, the theme of Mexico City called to him, and every once in a while he produced photoessays on the great metropolis. In 1958, he kicked off an ambitious project, “Nacho López Presents Mexico City,” that was to be made up of a lengthy photoessay series in Siempre!, as well as a book and a photo exhibit, all titled “México, D.F.” 137 The first fruit was the reportage on the notorious costume ball in the Academy of San Carlos, which was said to be the beginning of “a series that initiated with this reportage.”138 López was apparently going to develop a “multipolar theme” that would reveal “A vision that knows how to discover the grandeur in its proper proportion, the nobility of the small, the constant and the transitory, the positive and the contradictory, the quality of the man and woman of the federal district.” López did not make another reportage on Mexico City for this project, and the reasons for which the thematic series did not develop are unknown. However, his interest in reflecting on Mexico City led him to produce two photoessays around this time, “Un día cualquiera en la vida de la ciudad” (A day like any other in the life of the city) and “Las mil caras de la ciudad” (The city’s thousand faces).139 They are called “reportage,” but—as he had done with prior photoessays—they were constructed with images from his archive, several of which had appeared in earlier works. Varied aspects of the quotidian in Mexico City are represented: the poor, the rich, children, religion, family, drink, love, music, and dance. The emphasis on the common and ordinary is immediately portrayed in the way “Un día cualquiera” opens: the first image is of a garbageman who sweeps the street at dawn. Here, the photojournalist celebrates the most mundane of chores: “awakening. It’s six in the morning. The great capital stretches and, even in the mist and fog, the nerves jump, the passions awaken. Activity begins to beat on all sides of the city. The first buses cross the avenues and the street sweeper, eternal early bird, is almost at the end of his hygienic task” (Photo 55).

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55. Nacho López, Street sweeper, Mexico City, ca. 1955. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 382802.

Nacho López’s interest in children was demonstrated in several images. One that captures some of Mexico City’s nitty-gritty reality is that of boys in a street fight. This was evidently an important photo for López, because he included it in both essays on Mexico City. No doubt, he felt that it conveyed the universalizing message he incarnated in the cutline: “This same scene is occurring, at the same time, in all the world’s cities.” The photojournalist does not romanticize the boys, but rather emphasizes how they have been formed by what they have been taught: “With their intuition and forebodings, boys become men through that which their elders make them live.” In contrast with many other images of children—as dolls or types or social problems—López captures their vitality (Photo 56). In a full-page reproduction from “Mil caras,” two children hold hands (Photo

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56. Nacho López, Boys fighting, Mexico City, ca. 1955. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405758.

57). The cutline celebrates friendship: “In the beginning, when everything is clean and ingenuous, the help necessary for a long road is offered mutually without reticence.” The photo is not unattractive, but the real question is whether it represents an attempt on López’s part to produce his version of one of the era’s most circulated photographs, that by W. Eugene Smith of his two children, The Walk to Paradise Garden. A major influence on López, Smith had made Walk in 1946, and Edward Steichen printed it in U.S. Camera Annual, 1947/1948. The Annual was one of the few places it appeared in the 1940s, but during the 1950s it became “probably the most famous photograph in the world,” and “one of the most published and celebrated images of our age.”140 It had clearly achieved icon status by the time López produced his essays on Mexico City, for Steichen inaugurated his famous exhibit, The Family of Man, in January of 1955, and Smith’s was accorded the honor of being the closing photograph.

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57. Nacho López, Children holding hands, Mexico City, ca. 1955. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405764.

Smith’s image was so well known that Nacho López must have made this photo as a deliberate allusion. Both are staged scenes (undoubtedly) of children holding hands; in each case, the faces cannot be distinguished, thus making them universal symbols. The two photographs also rely on a play with light, though the meanings they develop with it are different. Smith’s image is idyllically optimistic: in a natural setting, the low camera angle gives the children power as they march toward the future along a dirt path in the midst of leafy trees—out of darkness, and into the dawn of a new age. López’s photo is tenebrous: the boys stand statically, shrouded in obscurity, while the photographer utilizes a sharp backlighting to silhouette and foreground them against the inky urban setting by which they are enveloped. The

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only light falls on their clasped hands. The difference in illumination may well represent the two cultures’ distinct visions of the future. Although Smith rooted his perspective in a nostalgic reference to the mythical U.S. countryside as the source of good, he had reason to believe that an era of light awaited the new generation in his country; the United States was leaving behind a Depression and a world war, and entering into a period of unparalleled prosperity. For López, the incessantly urbanizing universe of Mexico City was becoming a dark, dangerous place where it was increasingly difficult to photograph, though personal relationships were fundamental in holding off the obscurity of underdevelopment.141 The page facing the children’s image in “Mil caras” is occupied by a picture of a man in the arms of the police, one of López’s best street photographs (Photo 58). The photoessay links the two images through the theme of hands, and makes an oblique, generalized, critique of the policemen’s, which have been turned into manacles: “Hands are not always friendly. If there are those that serve as a help in the beginning, there are also those that try to stop the most legitimate aspirations. If there are those that symbolize a strong relation of coexistence, there are also those that close like shackles before the impotent gesture of someone dominated by force.” The context of this photo is not identified in “Mil caras,” but it is of the Henriquista repression, when police attacked the followers of Miguel Henríquez, an independent presidential candidate in 1952 and the strongest opposition to the official PRI nominee, Adolfo Ruiz Cortines.142 Believing that they had won the election, the Henriquistas celebrated on 7 July 1952 in Alameda Park. Alemán was not disposed to tolerate opposition, however, and he declared the meeting illegal. The police and army attacked the Henriquistas, and they were dispersed violently with tear gas and rifle butts; some five hundred people were arrested. I have seen this man’s image only in this photoessay and the book Yo, el ciudadano.143 The strict control exercised over the press was no doubt the reason it was not published at the time it was taken. The government’s iron hand in the velvet moneyed fist was probably also responsible for the fact that the context is not clearly identified in “Mil caras.” When the photo finally appeared, readers may well have assumed that it was related to the 1958–59 strikes, a widespread uprising of workers that rocked the country such as nothing had since the revolution, or would before the 1968 student revolt. However, publishing a photo without an indication of its referent is a generalized strategy of the Mexican press that turns historical images into abstractions, rendering them inoffensive; another example has already been alluded to (in chapter 2): Julio Mayo’s powerful photograph of the mother grieving over her dead son. Nacho López’s construction of the contrast between the lives of those in different social classes was imbued with irony in these essays on Mexico City. A rich woman buying a fur stole offered an easy target, and her image was used in both essays.144 In “Mil caras,” she appears on the same page as a photo of a poor woman in

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58. Nacho López, Man grabbed by police during the repression of the Henriquista movement, Mexico City, 7 July 1952. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 405702.

a church, while the title comments sarcastically: “the city demands a great effort from women too in order to be able to live.” The cutline focuses on her leisure-time activities: “A fur stole, charitable works, and feathers to show off idleness’s insolence are, among others, the fundamental motives for living of the women who inhabit the elegant zones.” This picture of the woman buying the stole was also published in “Un día cualquiera,” but there the photographer pointed out the contradictions of class within the image by drawing attention to the men in the background, and the juxtaposition of classes in Mexican society was further developed by placing her picture on the same page as the wonderful image of the man and his pig bound for market (Photo 59): she goes to buy and he to sell. In this city there is everything under the sun. Above: the lady buys an expensive fur in a modern luxurious store, while two guys, far from the city’s accelerated rhythm, observe, envy, and desire her. Below: And he

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goes to market to sell a fat and comfort-loving pig, like those in Cri-Cri’s songs.145 Ignorant of his destiny, the animal meanwhile enjoys the tour of the capital’s streets in his special coach. This spectacle is exclusive of Mexico.

The most direct comparison of class in “Un día cualquiera” is situated around the question of drink and, as in the photo of the woman with the fur stole, López set up the contrast along gender lines: women are rich, men are poor.146 Hence, two photos occupy one page: the one above is of two well-off women in a tea salon, and the cutline reads, “as i was saying. Teatime; the hour, as they say, for secrets

59. Nacho López, Man pulling pig to market tied to a cart, Mexico City, ca. 1955. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO— Fototeca Nacional 405858.

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and gossip. In the barrio’s small salon or on an elegant main street, without indiscreet witnesses, revelations are made and secrets stop being that. The rich chat between the women is sprinkled with a cup of tea, to divert attention.” The photo below is of two men from a class less favored than that of the women. One raises a bottle of beer to empty it; the other appears to have drunk his share, to judge by his cap set backward on his head. The cutline makes an explicit comparison with the women in the photo above: “take it easy. And as everyone drinks what they can, this simple citizen—also at the tea hour—puts away his well-chilled beer in the door of a business like any other. More sincere than the ladies, he does it in front of witnesses and that’s it, none of these stories or gossip or telling secrets. We are what we are in this blessed city.” The critique of social class that Nacho López creates within images, as well as between them, is curiously dissonant with the cutlines of another photo that appears in both Mexico City essays. The picture is of two women waiting in line in a supermarket. The woman in front is light-skinned, well dressed, and obviously better off than the woman standing behind her, a mestiza servant dressed in the apron common to her class. Notwithstanding their evident differences, the cutlines treat the women as if their lives were the same. In “Mil caras” it says, “The daily domestic chores tire both those who carry them out for their own house and those who do it professionally.” The cutline in “Un día cualquiera” goes even further in making the women’s situations appear analogous: “equals. Fat and thin, ugly and pretty, rich and poor, servants and bosses are the same at the hour of market. Identical in the search for the cheapest item of the best quality; similar at the time of paying and totally alike in the bargaining that has disappeared in the so-called supermarkets” (Photo 60). Obviously, the cutlines for this image are not what we might expect from Nacho López, and when Shifra Goldman analyzed this image as part of her work on Mexican art, she had little doubt about what it was documenting: “López’s social realist vision is apparent in the contrast between the rich and poor of Supermarket.”147 Of course, the cutlines may simply be the result of intervention by the magazines’ editors, or of self-censorship on López’s part, rather than an anticipation of the later feminist argument that gender is a more important determinant in social oppression than class. The constraints within which Nacho López worked are starkly illustrated by the subsequent manipulation of images that had originally been published in “Sólo los humildes” and “México acostumbra echarse una copa.” In 1959, Siempre! produced an article, “Mientras México duerme el vicio anda suelto” (While Mexico City sleeps, vice runs free), which gave no credit to either the author of the text or the photographers.148 Its purpose was to applaud the measures taken by Ernesto Uruchurtu on closing the cantinas and cabarets at one o’clock in the morning, an

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60. Nacho López, Women in supermarket, Mexico City, ca. 1955. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 380228.

expression of the “high doses of morality” that the Regent, described by actress Margo Su as “the genius of censorship,” shared with his boss, President Ruiz Cortines.149 However, the death of Uruchurtu’s brother, who left a famous cabaret in the early morning hours only to crash against a post, must have influenced his

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decision as well.150 Whatever the immediate cause, the magazines generally followed the moralist line and, despite Siempre! ’s peccadilloes and licentious centerfolds, any decision by Uruchurtu was unquestionable for José Pagés Llergo.151 Whether the closing of nightspots was necessary or not, the 1959 article convincingly demonstrates how Nacho López’s images were used contrary to his intentions. Consider, for example, the photo of the man giving an explanation in the delegación (Photo 42). In “Sólo los humildes,” López had emphasized the “reduced language” that left the man without words or hope, trapped in a permanent curse. A very different meaning was given this image five years later by “Mientras México duerme”: “It’s always the same and inevitable end: the delegación, the jail. That’s where the tragic night comes to a close. There where dawn ends the longings for coarse triumphs. The excuse given to the authorities, the justification of the crime committed.” In “Sólo los humildes,” this image was a conduit for López’s identification of the problem’s social roots: ignorance, poverty, and helplessness. In “Mientras México duerme,” it serves simply to illustrate the case of a criminal attempting to escape from his personal responsibility. Comparing the cutlines that accompany the image of the woman behind bars provides yet another example of the magazine’s strategy of recontextualization (Photo 43). López’s cutline had clearly accused society for its deliberate ignorance of these women’s sufferings. However, “Mientras México duerme” emphasizes how the authorities are acting to protect Mexicans from degradation: The jail, great final point of the night and the adventure, both born in the shadows of a tavern, a cabaret, a hovel. With the closing of these establishments at one in the morning, on the order of the Department of the Federal District, the authorities have given vice a great blow: they have taken away five or more hours of immorality, of destruction, of poisoning.

The two images from “México acostumbra echarse una copa” that were utilized in “Mientras México duerme” demonstrate similar manipulation. In the original photoessay, the image of the man drinking pulque had been cropped in order to focus on that individual (Photo 38). The cutline mentioned his “challenging gesture,” but lessened the threat by calling it, “a friendly challenge.” In the 1959 article, “Mientras México duerme,” the image is reproduced in a larger format to include two other individuals who had been cropped out of the earlier version. Perhaps the intention was to provide someone who could be intimidated by the pulque drinker, because the cutline underlines the threat, and its consequences: “What’s your problem? The challenge arises, offensive, boastful, macho. And there arises with it the possibility of the quarrel, the brawl, the fight between drunks. Finally, the crime. There are hundreds of men and women who day after day write pages

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with blood in the great metropolis.” An image of a woman drinking pulque was subject to the same process. In López’s 1953 essay, the photo was cropped to focus on the woman, and the cutline affirmed, “The women elegantly drink the delicious nectar, blood of maguey.” But the 1959 panegyric for Uruchurtu gives it a very different tone: the entire negative is published, because it includes people ridiculing the woman, and the scene is described as one of “pain and misery, drama and anguish.” I have attempted to situate some of Nacho López’s imagery within the illustrated magazines for which it was made, and it is apparent that his work was marked by the constraints of being a photojournalist. Nonetheless, it seems to me that his photography was not only limited by the restrictions imposed by the government, and the different publications, it was affected as well by the self-censorship that is the first mediation of photojournalistic aesthetics. After all—as we see in López’s photoessays on Anastasio Somoza, Rafael Ávila Camacho, and Miguel Alemán—if you are certain that they are not going to publish your images, why take them? We do not know the details of the fetters that Nacho López confronted, nor to what degree he was directly affected by censorship. Given the veiled nature of Mexican journalism, and the fact that almost fifty years have passed, it will be difficult to explore these issues. Neither do we know if these limitations were determinant in his decision to leave photojournalism. However, it is clear that his interests ran ever more toward cinema, where he worked in newsreels and advertising, in the hopes of eventually making critical documentaries. It could be that his decision was a result of finding himself limited as much aesthetically as politically in the magazines, and feeling that cinema would offer more opportunities to express his creative needs. He was no doubt aware that the day of the picture press was drawing to a close, and opportunities to work the way he wanted to were drying up. Perhaps his journalistic career finally succumbed to Alemanismo’s policy of pan o palo (the carrot or the stick). He was certainly at the “wrong end of the stick” during the furor over his 1956 exhibit in the OAS, and the scurrilous newspaper attacks to which he was subjected must have left him rather disillusioned with the press. However, he may also have been tempted by the enticements of the new order. He had begun working for film companies around 1955, making newsreels, industrial shorts, and advertising, but the adiós to all he had fought for and resisted during the 1950s was not to come until 1960, when he decided to direct and photograph the documentary Peldaños, on the student life of President Adolfo López Mateos (1958–64).152 Perhaps he had tired of swimming upstream. López was an aesthete, in the best sense of the word. He was married to two dancers, and directed films and produced photoessays on dance, as well as having photographed the ballets in the Palace of Fine Arts. He was finally an artist, and friends remembered him as “very Bohemian,” driving around in an MG sports car, and dressed in a matching cap and coat.153 Of course, none of us can any more escape our historical context

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than we can leap over our own shadows. We all have to find a way to live, with dignity, in the time we have been given to live in. But it is tempting to ask what sort of a photojournalist Nacho López might have been under Cardenismo, the era by and for which he had been formed, and to whose ideology of social commitment he would enthusiastically return in the 1970s.

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4. Thinking about Documentary

Nacho López Reflects

The daily and weekly tasks to which photojournalists are usually assigned leave them little time to meditate on their work. Moreover, their forte is images, not words; what they have to say, they say with pictures. Some few photojournalists have written about the practice of their craft, or offered historical overviews of press photography in particular situations.1 However, if they have put words to paper, it has generally been in the form of the autobiographies; among those who have reflected on their experiences in book form one finds Margaret BourkeWhite, Robert Capa, Kent Cooper, David Douglas Duncan, Arnold Genthe, Otto Hagel, John C. Hemment, Dmitri Kessel, Felix H. Man, Don McCullin, Hansel Mieth, Carl Mydans, John Phillips, Bill Tovey, and, surely, others.2 When we think of the thousands of photojournalists who have engaged in this work, however, it is clear that very few have attempted to meditate in a critical way on their role in modern media. In Mexico, the only photojournalist I know of who has written a book about his activities is Cándido Mayo, who published an autobiography of sorts, Yo soy la opinión pública (I am public opinion).3 Once again, we encounter Nacho López’s singularity because he began to write on photography as a young man, producing a pamphlet, “22 lecciones sobre la fotografía” (22 lessons about photography), for his students at the School of Journalism of the Universidad Central de Venezuela during 1948.4 While working as a photojournalist during the 1950s, he did not publish much in the way of ruminations about his work. But when he began to teach again in the 1970s, first at the Universidad Veracruzana, and then in the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos of the UNAM, his unquiet character led 163

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him to reflect on photojournalism, and communications in general. Giving classes in these universities prompted him to put his thoughts in an organized form, and in the UNAM he offered workshops on the topics “Analysis of the Image,” “Criticism of the Mass Media,” and “Photographic Expression,” teaching many of the more important photojournalists of today, including Elsa Medina, Andrés Garay, and Guillermo Castrejón. The different texts he produced for classes and public lectures not only have left us a legacy as to his thoughts, they also permit us to compare what he said about photojournalism with how he had practiced it some twenty years earlier. López’s photojournalism and his reflections on photography occurred at some temporal distance from one another: he collaborated in the illustrated magazines during the 1950s, but the vast majority of the manuscripts and articles in which he articulated his thoughts were written in the decade from 1975 to 1985. Moreover, there is a fundamental difference between these two historical periods. The 1950s in Mexico, as in the United States, were a markedly conservative era during which culture was largely stifled by the Cold War against communism. The 1970s in Latin America reflected the intellectual and cultural blossoming that followed the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, of which the New Latin American Cinema was only the most apparent manifestation. In Mexico, the 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco was another watershed, tearing off the mask of “revolution” behind which lurked the PRI’s party dictatorship. Marxism became the lingua franca in the universities, and a pluralist press began to develop in the 1970s with the founding of the magazine Proceso and the newspaper Unomásuno.5 The social commitment López had brought to photojournalism during the 1950s was uncommon, but in the 1970s his Lukácsian leanings were a staple fare in the new climate of opinion that reigned throughout Latin America.6 As a Cardenista who suffered through the lengthy winter of Alemanismo, López must have felt that he had come home again. Nacho López noted the difficulty of establishing a correspondence between the theory and the act of photographing, but he nonetheless felt that photographic technique could only be dominated by first knowing theory, and then putting it into practice.7 Always interested in thinking critically about his work, López’s selfconception was that of a photojournalist rather than an artist.8 In interviews, he explicitly distinguished his work from that of Manuel Álvarez Bravo, for the fact of having been a graphic reporter.9 López did speak at times of the “critical artist’s” duties—praising the “combative art” of José Clemente Orozco, José Guadalupe Posada, Francisco Goya, and Honoré Daumier for its “graphic vitality”—but in general he preferred to avoid the use of the word art.10 For López, the social responsibilities of a photographer took precedence over the question of whether photography is an art or not:

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To photography corresponds, among other tasks, that of denouncing contradictions, aiding the poverty-stricken majorities, and rebuilding our nationalism (not chauvinism) in order to strengthen ourselves against the flood of economic pressures, and the commercial images that condition us. Afterwards, we can think about whether photography is an art or not.11

López was ever conscious of the problem of making a living as a photographer. He knew that to be allowed to use one’s mind and hands creatively was a great reward; having to limit their possibilities just to be able to survive could be a heavy burden.12 However, there was no real market for photographs in Mexico during the 1950s, and people did not really think about buying them.13 Shifra Goldman attributed this to the fact that photographs lacked the singularity of paintings, and so were not in demand by galleries because the sales commissions were low.14 In an interview with Goldman, López confirmed her supposition, stating that much of his work was done for periodicals because photographs did not sell in galleries. López had no airs of being an artiste: for him, photography was like any other product in the market, and he expressed no political objection to selling photographs through galleries and museums—although he did at one point mention that they would there be isolated from their contexts.15 He also advocated competitive exhibits in which the winning pictures would be given monetary prizes, arguing that the lack of such rewards was one element that kept the value of photographs down.16 He was prepared to take advantage of any forum in order to stimulate greater respect for photography, and thought it important for photographers to enter into the art market, not so they would become “praised and famous,” but so they could earn their daily bread in a creative and critical activity that also enabled them to realize themselves as people.17 López was aware that the disdain for photography was not simply because it lacked painting’s uniqueness. He recognized the long-standing disrespect and indifference for things related to daily life, as well as obvious objections to decorating the family home with images of “man’s ancestral cruelty.”18 Critical photography was a real political problem, because bourgeois clients would find it offensive and refuse to put it up on their walls.19 Photojournalism offered the possibility of making a living while allowing for personal expression, and, being deeply committed to its political implications, López argued that his craft was the most appropriate instrument for dialectically comprehending the world’s contradictions, for demonstrating class struggle, and for presenting people as individuals.20 He insisted that his work—and the photography of individuals such as Héctor García, Rodrigo Moya, los Hermanos Mayo, Chucho Cervantes, and Enrique Bordes Mangel—was born out of their uninterrupted contact with daily life, with people’s problems, and with important as well as mundane events.21

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His respect for photojournalism was made patent when, asked to list the “ten greatest photographers,” six of those he named were photojournalists of one kind or another—Agustín Víctor Casasola, W. Eugene Smith, André Kertesz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and Walker Evans.22 On different occasions he asserted that the best and most valid photography grew out of the practice of photojournalism.23 In fact, at one point, he appears to have argued that this is the highest form photography could take: “The possibility remains of being not only a photographer, artist, and interpreter, but a graphic reporter, an informant of the society in which we live, a witness who utilizes the apparatus as an instrument, like a typewriter, paintbrush, or pencil, to sketch, insinuate, and discover the concise event, with all the risky implications that implies.”24 He felt that photojournalists were not respected, and offered as an example the problems of W. Eugene Smith, a singular influence on López, who was marginalized for defending his honesty, and reduced to simple survival despite the admiration his work provoked.25 López experienced this disdain firsthand in his interview with Miguel Ángel Mendoza, president of the Organizing Commission of the National Journalism Awards. There, Mendoza refered to photojournalism as a “subgenre” of the press, while talking to a graphic reporter!26 Since López was distinctly aware that photography was generally considered to be a second-class art— a poor relative that had to struggle for recognition—the attitude embodied in Mendoza’s remarks left him feeling that he was perceived as working in something that was second-rate as both art and journalism.27 The powerlessness of photojournalists within the media was reflected most clearly in the fact that the product of their labor did not belong to them. López cited a dramatic example: the massacre at Tlatelolco Plaza on 2 October 1968, where hundreds of unarmed students were killed by the army. There, the many photojournalists took dozens of photos that were never published; instead, they were confiscated by the government, which used them to indict participants in the protest.28 The Tlatelolco massacre was a watershed of Mexican history, and for Nacho López. Despite the social focus of his photojournalism during the 1950s, and the leftist rhetoric evident in his later reflections on photojournalism, he did not photograph the 1968 movement. In a letter written in 1980—a response occasioned by an interview of López in Xalapa—he spoke of the crisis of conscience provoked by Tlatelolco: My origin and professional activity is graphic journalism. Nonetheless, and unfortunately, I did not participate in 68. At that moment I was filming a commercial for watches. When I found out about what had happened, I suffered a severe blow to my conscience, and resigned forever from the advertising work that had represented a period during which I had hoped to make a cinema of social concerns firmly based on our realities. Since then I returned to my true passion: journalistic photography.29

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López commented on the physical dangers and economic difficulties photojournalists face, risking their hides in fires, protests, and repressions, with low salaries or sporadic earnings, and without either copyrights or life insurance; in Mexico, moreover, they also have to resist the pressure of government bribes.30 Further, if they attempt to criticize the reigning social structure, they are grabbed and thrown out of events, after their cameras and film have been confiscated.31 For López, this was a result of the fact that realism offends the established order, by demanding changes in favor of the oppressed; as a result, many of the photographers who portrayed the uglier realities were beaten and killed.32 The physical dangers photojournalists face are only the most obvious of their problems. Their pictures are manipulated by the mass media in concert with the dominant power structure, and critical images of the rich and powerful are censored.33 The words that are joined to images become one of the more important constraints placed on photojournalists, for they can transform a picture’s meaning into something other than that the photographer intended.34 As López pointed out: “It has been said that photography can lie. What lies are the texts that accompany them, and the scissors’ mutilation that isolates the theme from its context. The director intervenes, modifying insolent images.”35 To avoid such manipulation, photojournalists must produce their own texts, even, says López, if they have to teach themselves to write. Through developing such a skill, they will emerge as authors, as well as witnesses of a society who do not have to rely on people who were extraneous to the original project.36 López was to follow his own advice in this regard on several of his most important photoessays, for example, “Noche de muertos” and “Sólo los humildes van al infierno,” though the magazines also used his images in ways he probably did not like. López stressed constantly the need to struggle against the alienation common to photojournalists, insisting that the only path for graphic reporters was to take the initiative and produce work that is an expression of their own creeds and sensitivities, even when they are confined to covering stories not of their choosing.37 López’s optimum, though, was the creation of some alternative to the oligarchy’s media machine, for example, a group effort to rebel against such control by establishing collectives in unions, schools, and communities where photographic communication could assist in uncovering the ways that class oppression functions.38 The place of photojournalists in the class struggle is clear to López: workers themselves, they ought to be on the side of labor. In one interesting metaphor, López likened press photographers to the waiters at social functions; not invited guests, they sit in the kitchen, where they drink and stuff down hors d’oeuvres.39 However, photojournalists have a double obligation: to their work and to their social class, though this latter duty is contradictory because photographers belong to one class, but serve another as employees of the mass media.40 At the same time, López asserted, photographers necessarily film from their particular social perspective, whether

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consciously or unconsciously, and their ideology is disclosed in the way they see the world, and the images they make of it.41 Hence, perhaps echoing Lenin’s famous critique of spontaneity, López believed that the so-called intuition of photographers is really the ideological perspective either of the social class to which they belong or of that which they represent.42 López asserted that the most important reason to take photos was to explain reality.43 He carried this position to what we might call the techno-essentialist extreme, arguing that the informational type of image innate to photojournalism was the essence of photography: “The photograph is information.”44 For López, the central issue for a photographer is to have something to say about reality.45 The degree to which photographers are capable of contributing to the analysis of reality is related to the strength or weakness of the information present in their images, because photographic meaning is essentially derived from information. A press photograph is one of strong information, because it documents concrete facts; an abstract or subjective photograph is one of weak information.46 López’s emphasis on information and “reality” is directly related to his argument that, in photography, art comes from finding rather than creating: “Why has photography been given the status of art? Simply because the artistic in it resides in the constant rediscovery of reality by the photographer. Rediscovery, not invention; rediscover juxtapositions, metaphors that are already existent and waiting to be captured by the photographer’s intelligence.”47 In his writings, Nacho López seems to emphasize that having something to say in photography is, to a large degree, a result of the information generated by contact with the material world, that is, from discovery rather than invention. Here we encounter the greatest contradiction between his theory and his practice, for he was an enthusiastic practitioner of photographic direction, often posing his subjects, and at times actually staging scenes. In fact, of the total number of 255 photographs published in what I consider to be his more important articles, it appears that more than half, some 150, reflect his intervention in the photographic act to some degree. It is then curious that there is no mention of this in his writings. Moreover, interviews with his disciples and friends—among them Rodrigo Moya, Alfonso Muñoz, Elsa Medina, Francisco Mata Rosas, Fabrizio León, David Mawaad, Pedro Valtierra, and Eleazar López Zamora—indicate that he never discussed this strategy with them, though one Nachito, Guillermo Castrejón, affirms that he did talk about this tactic on some occasions, mentioning the controversies that had arisen around Robert Capa and W. Eugene Smith.48 The general image that López appears to have projected of himself as a photojournalist could be summarized in the description that he once recounted to his wife, Lucero Binnqüist: “You see something out of the corner of your eye. You turn and shoot, ‘click.’ But you don’t know what you have until you develop the film in your darkroom.”49

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Why would he not have written about or spoken more of an aesthetic strategy so fundamental to his work? Generally speaking, intervention in the photographic act seems, to a certain extent, inevitable. The very presence of a camera often modifies a situation, and if we consider that some two-thirds of all photographers are taking pictures of family functions (where posing is de rigueur), it is clear that the vast majority of photographs are affected by the intervention of the image maker.50 Directing Photojournalism

López’s silence on the subject of direction is no doubt attributable to the fact that credibility is tied intimately to the belief that the photographer has had no influence on the event; “the primary illusion” of photojournalism is that no stranger had to be present for the image to exist at all.51 Nonetheless, photojournalists have long accepted the need to direct images, and the well-known combat photographer, Bert Hardy, “recalled scores of ‘news’ photographs he staged.”52 The editors of Life recognized the danger to their magazine’s credibility occasioned by posed pictures, and its editors were capable of “killing” a photo or making a photojournalist repeat a shoot if they feared it had been a setup.53 Nonetheless, David Scherman, who worked for Life from 1939 to 1947, had a different take on the question: My concept of photojournalism is that it’s pictorialism with a meaning. If you were lucky enough to get the exact instant of a guy being shot, as Robert Capa did during the Spanish Civil War, you couldn’t beat that. But if you didn’t get the picture at the exact instant, you kept the meaning in mind, and you faked the picture, or reframed it. This was considered bad poker by many of my colleagues, who were artistic types who hated that sort of thing and felt that if you missed, forget it, don’t try to do anything about it. I was enough of a journalist to realize that you invent a good picture. . . . During the war I did nothing but fake pictures.54

In a research project, some of Mexico’s New Photojournalists were asked how they felt about direction.55 Many are conscious that the camera can transform an event. “From the moment you frame something, you’re manipulating it,” argued Omar Meneses. “You raise the camera and people change.” Those New Photojournalists who studied with Nacho López, or were directly influenced by him, recognize the need to acknowledge the camera’s effect, and to work within that reality. Daniel Mendoza affirmed, “You have to incorporate this fact consciously in your work. Photographers have always been participants in the event and their presence affects the image. Photography lies, it’s not reality.” And, although Francisco Mata noted the resistance to direction within photojournalism, he nevertheless considers it to be one of the instruments of his trade:

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The idea of directing a situation collides head on with time-honored beliefs about photojournalism: in the traditional view, if you direct you are manipulating reality and adulterating the information. But, calling direction “manipulation” assumes that there is no intervention in the photographic act. I don’t feel that you’re manipulating the photographic act so much as you’re using it as a basis for creating. It’s a tool that every photojournalist ought to carry in his backpack, like a wide-angle lens, a telephoto, a flash or filters. Whether to pose or not is like whether to use flash or natural light; it’s an option you ought to have and, above all, ought to know how to use, because directing a scene is more complicated than taking a direct photo. You need great capacity to be able to do it, but it can be incredibly powerful. The only problem with a directed photo is when it doesn’t work.

The road traveled by Guillermo Castrejón in dealing with the question of the directorial mode may well be one many of the New Photojournalists have followed: When you begin in photojournalism, you think it ought to be completely spontaneous, and that posing people is false. Later, you see it’s not so: you know photojournalists who have made wonderful directed images precisely because they did so consciously. I think it’s valid: if you can’t capture the image spontaneously, direct it; sometimes you get much better results from directing than from trying to pull it out of thin air. I think that both forms are equally honest. Of course, the spontaneous photo is preferable because it’s better to get exactly what you want without posing it; but if you don’t, make it up.

For Castrejón, and other New Photojournalists, it is preferable not to direct, except consciously, in certain situations, and with a clearly defined intention. Many defend the directorial mode in theory, but they are reluctant to admit to it in relation to any of their photographs. This is not surprising, for photojournalists throughout the world employ strategies of direction, while pretending that their images are spontaneous. It is clear that photojournalists have often had recourse to this form, and many of their most famous pictures have been produced through intervention in the photographic act. In order to avoid judging this genre before we have adequately described it, perhaps we should employ a word other than the oft-heard accusation of “manipulation.” One critic, A. D. Coleman, proposed the term directed: “Here the photographer consciously and intentionally creates events for the express purpose of making images thereof. This may be achieved by intervening in ongoing ‘real’ events or by staging tableaux—in either case, by causing something to take place which would not have occurred had the photographer not made it happen.”56 Nigel Warburton, a theorist of photography, disagrees with Coleman’s concept of “direction”:

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I find his category rather misleading. What he concentrates on in his article, “The Directorial Mode,” is the photographer’s deliberate staging or intervention in events causing something to happen that would not have occurred had the photographer not made it happen. This, however, as Coleman himself acknowledges, does not distinguish a photograph such as Bayard’s self-portrait from much studio photography of still lifes, nudes, and most portraits, all of which clearly involve directorial activity. In other words, Coleman’s category of the directorial groups together rather heterogeneous images.57

What Warburton offers as an alternative is “quasi-documentary,” a notion that indicates that such images play upon the viewer’s expectations of documentary photographs. I would offer a slight variation, calling the genre explored by Nacho López (and many other photographers for the press) “quasi-journalistic,” as these individuals are working within the belief systems of noninterference and credibility that reign in news imagery. Notwithstanding the problems Warburton has identified in relation to the concept of “direction,” it is useful to consider the terminology used by a working photojournalist in what may be the only extensive written argument explicitly advocating this strategy. In his 1943 essay “Direction in the Picture Story,” Arthur Rothstein indicated clearly his preference for how to describe this act, and I will follow his lead, using the term direction as a shorthand way of talking about this form, rather than the more awkward quasi-journalistic.58 Rothstein openly called for active involvement in the photographic act: The photographer [must] become not only a cameraman but a scenarist, dramatist, and director as well. . . . Providing the results are a faithful reproduction of what the photographer believes he sees, whatever takes place in the making of the picture is justified. In my opinion, therefore, it is logical to make things happen before the camera and, when possible to control the actions of the subject.

It is revealing that Rothstein felt that a directed photograph would be most powerful when the photographer’s intervention was not perceivable: “In conclusion, the idea of direction on the part of the photographer has its greatest value when its processes are least discernible to the spectator.” His disregard for what might be considered the traditional approach to photojournalism can be appreciated as well in his remarks on “distortion.” Rothstein believed that “it is sometimes desirable to distort or accentuate with lenses of various focal lengths,” arguing that “deliberate distortion may actually add to its reality.” I want to make it clear that I am here concerned with photojournalism, rather than with what would be considered openly manipulated photography. Photojournalism’s credibility is based on the belief of nonintervention in the photographic

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act, and its discourse is structured into “codes of objectivity” that veil the effect of the photojournalist’s presence.59 Constructed photography explicitly “announces the fact that it has been shaped by an imagination,” thus establishing itself-thephotograph as a reality, while asserting that it is an illusion to believe that a photograph can show the real world.60 It appears that O. G. Rejlander and H. P. Robinson made the first overtly fabricated photographs in the 1850s, and this genre has enjoyed a rich history as what might be called a “constructivist” alternative to the dominant “realist” aesthetic. Among its many manifestations can be found the Pictorialist school of the 1890s, the photomontages of artists such as John Heartfield, the photograms of László Moholy-Nagy, the Dada-Surrealist experiments of Man Ray, and, the Conceptual, Neo-Surrealist, and Constructed imagery with which we most often associate artists such as Duane Michaels, Les Krims, Cindy Sherman, and Joel-Peter Witkin.61 The very thrust of this tendency is to critique the idea that a photograph is a window on the world. Photojournalism is the medium that most embodies this ideology, so artists such as Nic Nicosia have focused their efforts on exposing the illusions of graphic reportage by staging scenarios such as Like Photojournalism (1986), which re-create the violent and sanguinary scenes in which press photographers sometimes appear as part of the narrative.62 Digitalization offers the most recent means of liberation for lens artists who feel that they have been “strongly cornered by reality,” and we will consider later the contributions of the Mexican pioneer Pedro Meyer.63 In attempting to disentangle the complexities of representation within the genre of directed photojournalism, I have opted for a thematic approach, organized in a rough chronological order. Some of the categories I employ are well known within the study of art history, and have been utilized by scholars of constructed photography: the strategies of staging and/or restaging narrative tableaux vivants, as well as arranging and/or rearranging still lifes.64 Other groupings have been suggested by photojournalist practices: the intervention in “real” events, and the use of “catalysts” to provoke reactions that the photographer has reason to expect will occur in “reality.” Narrative Tableaux Vivants

The predominant form that directed photographs take, and have generally taken, is the construction/reconstruction of narrative tableaux vivants. The U.S. invasion of Mexico (1846–48) marked the first extensive use of photography in picturing a newsworthy event, and was also the site of what is almost certainly the first instance of re-creating a scene that, in later years, would have constituted a photojournalistic episode.65 One daguerreotype shows us a group of kneeling Mexican soldiers who are aiding a surgeon during an amputation. Two medics support a reclining wounded man who has had his leg removed below the knee; a third holds

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the stub at the knee, displaying it for the camera.66 Standing above, an officer points to the amputation with one hand, while in the other he holds what appears to be the amputated limb. Bayonets on the ends of rifles intrude into the scene, pointing at the doctor and patient. The daguerreotype is a restaging of an incident that occurred near Xalapa, Veracruz, during April of 1847. A doctor, Pedro Vander Linden, had been amputating the leg of a wounded soldier when the U.S. forces overran the Mexican position; he found himself suddenly threatened by soldiers who, aiming their weapons at him and his assistants, cried out, “Death to the Mexicans!” According to Vander Linden, he turned to face the weapons; raising his hands dripping with blood and holding the amputated leg, he yelled, “Respect humanity, this is a hospital and we are surgeons.” As he recounted: “My words were magic. Immediately, an officer moved aside their rifles with his sword, and those men who had been so animated by vengeance were suddenly our protectors.” Vander Linden’s interest in reconstructing the scene was unrelated to photojournalism, as photographs could not be published in newspapers until some fifty years later.67 However, his re-creation of the event he had lived is composed of the same sort of aesthetic realism that would be characteristic of the many narrative representations that would follow in its tracks. The numerous instances of reconstructed tableaux offer fascinating tales. It appears evident that Jacob Riis, perhaps the first real photojournalist, staged scenes in which “Growler Gangs” of young men in New York re-created their technique, for Riis’s camera, of rolling drunks in alleyways during the 1880s.68 New York was also the backdrop for the archetypical tabloid lensman, Weegee (Arthur Fellig). On at least one occasion in 1941, he evidently convinced a mother to participate in a scenario that replicated the ways in which the city’s inhabitants attempted to avoid the summer’s heat. Weegee had the woman take her scantily dressed children out on the fire escape, where they lay on top of sheets and pretended to sleep while he photographed them, as if the city were trapped in a heat wave.69 Joe Rosenthal’s image of the flag raising over Iwo Jima in 1945, probably the only directed photo to win the Pulitzer Prize, is also somewhat of a re-creation. A small flag had been raised earlier, under fire, and a Marine Corps combat photographer had made a picture. As the first group came down Mount Suribachi, Rosenthal went up with a Marine detail carrying a larger flag and pole. This was hoisted in relative safety and, although Life’s editors initially hesitated to publish it—convinced that Rosenthal had posed the image—this picture became perhaps the most pervasively distributed icon in history. In order to maintain the myth that the second flag was the only one to be raised during combat, the men who participated in both groups were “repeatedly made to lie about the event.”70 Robert Doisneau would often see something he wanted to document but, unable to capture it, he would later stage what he had observed.71 The perfect example is his famous image The Kiss at l’Hôtel de Ville (1950). When this image became a stock item on the walls of students’ quarters and in advertising

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campaigns throughout the developed world during the 1980s, he was contacted by at least fifteen couples who alleged that they had been les amoureux. One couple filed suit to prove their claim, and the matter was even further complicated when the woman who had modeled for the mise-en-scène also sued for a share of the royalties. In 1994, the case was resolved in Doisneau’s favor when he proved that the model had received payment for acting in the Life photoessay of 1950, where it had been claimed that these were “unposed pictures.” The contradictions of directed photojournalism—which trades on the credibility of the camera as an objective and nonintervening witness but depends on the control of the photographer over the scene—are manifest in the most renowned narrative images produced under the Farm Security Administration (FSA).72 Roy Stryker, director of the FSA, defended with almost his last breath what he considered to be “the picture” of that project, Dorothea Lange’s image of the Migrant Mother (1936): “People would say to me, that migrant woman looks posed and I’d say she does not look posed. That picture is as uninvolved with the camera as any picture I’ve ever seen. I’ll stand on that picture as long as I live.”73 Stryker’s denial notwithstanding, research by James Curtis has uncovered the degree of direction that went into creating this universal icon of suffering and dignity.74 In the sort of brief encounter that seems to have been typical of FSA photography, Lange took six pictures of the woman and her children in the space of ten minutes. Comparing the various pictures makes it clear that Lange had the woman and two children pose in different positions until she had the photo she wanted: the mother’s face is framed by her hand, reflecting her anguish, and the children look away from the camera so as not to distract. Further, in order to create an image acceptable to the urban middle-class readers who constituted the audience for FSA imagery, the woman’s husband and four of her seven children were excluded. Dorothea Lange never publicly acknowledged the direction that had gone into making Migrant Mother, but Arthur Rothstein’s famous FSA photo Fleeing a Dust Storm (1936) had a different history. In this image a father and his two sons struggle to reach home, apparently trapped in one of the blinding, suffocating dust storms that devastated the Midwest in the 1930s. The father labors against the force of the wind, and the older child keeps pace with him, looking up as if for guidance as they seek shelter. The younger child has straggled behind, arms upraised as if he were pleading not to be abandoned to his fate. A magisterial document of life on the plains, and a powerful synecdoche for the splitting asunder of the family by the dust storm qua Depression, it was also a product of direction.75 Rothstein evidently worked with the man and his sons to achieve the picture he envisioned, probably assuring their cooperation by appearing with a government bureaucrat whom the local residents knew, and to whom they may well have been beholden. The photojournalist had probably walked the family through their parts, having the older son turn toward the father in order to hide the large bill of his cap, and placing the

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younger child a few steps behind so that he could be cropped out easily if he forgot his instructions and looked at the camera. In his 1943 essay, Rothstein described how he had realized the scene: “The picture of a farmer and his sons in a dust storm was controlled in this way. The little boy was asked to drop back and hold his hand over his eyes. The father was asked to lean forward as he walked.”76 Rothstein later repented his candor, recognizing that the effectiveness of his pictures depended on their “believability,” and he claimed, in an article published some forty years after the fact, “The photograph was unposed, not staged, the action and location were not changed.”77 Credibility is the underpinning of photojournalism, and doubts that have arisen around “authenticity” are at the heart of the most controversial case surrounding a narrative tableau, that of the Death of a Republican Soldier (1936), made by Robert Capa during the Spanish civil war.78 In the midst of a bitter civil war, propaganda and commitment had priority, and today’s concerns about photographic honesty took a decidedly second place to the immediate utility of images in battling for the allegiance of Spaniards, as well as in recruiting the outside aid on which both the Republicans and the fascists depended to a large degree.79 According to a seasoned photojournalist who covered this cataclysm, P. H. F. Tovey, it was common to stage pictures: “Faking was the order of the day, even a tumble down cottage was used as a background and bodies placed in heaps to look like casualties of war. Men carefully rehearsed in their parts would fall as though shot at the blast of a whistle.”80 A glance at the newspapers of the period, and the photography produced by the foremost Spanish photojournalist of the war, Agustí Centelles, confirms the notion that many images were posed.81 When Capa’s picture was first published during 1936 in the French magazine Vu, it appeared together with another photo taken some minutes before or after, of a different man falling in exactly the same spot. This “coincidence” almost immediately opened up the suspicion that Death of a Republican Soldier had in fact been a training exercise staged for Capa’s benefit, and one recent scholar feels that the second picture is probably the decisive bit of evidence that the scene was posed.82 The question as to this photo’s authenticity as an index of the event depicted would appear to have been resolved recently by the research of a Spanish historian.83 Mario Brotons Jordà determined by the cartridge belt of the soldier that he had been a member of the Alcoy militia; Brotons then discovered the name of the only man from that town killed at Cerro Muriano on 5 September 1936: Federico Borrell García. When he showed the picture to Borrell’s brother, and compared it to family albums, the mystery seemed solved. I say “seemed” because some of the pictures evidently taken before the famous photo show Borrell and other men in “battle” scenes that appear to be posed; in one, three men are bunched together in what could only be described as a dangerously exposed position, and one of them holds the rifle in a way that will guarantee a sharp kick to his face.84 This may be

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because these soldiers were the “fanatical but ignorant fighters” that Capa described when recounting the story of making this photo to John Hersey, or it could be that the pictures were taken during a training exercise, as the war correspondent O. D. Gallagher has argued on different occasions.85 Whether Gallagher is right about the exercise or not, he opened up the issue of aesthetic realism by recounting how Capa had told him that good action shots were a result of moving the camera slightly during the exposure, and being a bit out of focus.86 We will probably never know whether this was the tactic that Capa utilized, but it appears that photographers of the Spanish civil war such as David Seymour (Chim) and the Germans Hans Namuth and Georg Reisner did experiment with creating movement within the frame as a way of making it appear that their photos had been taken in the midst of combat.87 W. Eugene Smith was one of the most renowned photographers in the world during the 1950s, and is considered to be the master of the photoessay.88 As the photojournalist Nacho López most admired, his position in relation to the creation of narrative tableaux is particularly relevant. Smith asserted, “I almost never pose a picture. I would rather mingle quietly, letting the world happen, in its honest complexity—photographing as the nearly unobserved observer, or, as in several of my essays, to become an intimately accepted participant.”89 However, for Smith, directing was evidently somewhat different than posing, for he had also argued, “The majority of photographic stories require a certain amount of setting up, rearranging and stage direction, to bring pictorial and editorial coherence to the pictures.”90 One example is offered by the photoessay “Country Doctor,” published in Life during 1948, and considered to be a watershed in the development of this genre.91 There is little question but that Smith steeped himself in the activities of Dr. Ceriani during the four weeks he spent with him, feeling that he had “faded into the wallpaper . . . [and] let the ideas come from the subject itself.”92 Nonetheless, the essay’s closing shot, a powerful image of the doctor at 2 a.m., exhausted from operating all night and downhearted at having lost both the mother and the baby during a cesarean section, appears to have been directed, for the negatives that follow this image show the physician standing in an impossibly awkward position.93 Smith’s penchant for setups was particularly manifest in the photographs he made in Europe during 1950. Life wanted to publish a story supportive of the Conservatives, who were attempting to take power from the Labor Party. Although Smith was partisan to Labor, he rented a cement truck, which bore a sign stating “under free enterprise British Cement is the Cheapest in the World,” as well as a bunch of cows that were placed in the middle of the land, blocking the truck’s passage.94 Although the story was never published, the message of the image was pretty clear: an antiquated herd mentality had stymied capitalism, which needed an open road if it was to arrive before it hardened into uselessness. Doing the story

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on the British elections was a bit of a trade-off for Smith, who had accepted the assignment in order to later go to Spain for an exposé on “the poverty and fear brought on by Franco.”95 Conscious of the role played by the Guardia Civil in Franquist repression, Smith got three members of that police force to pose for him, working with them until he had them facing the sun, and their grimaces could be taken for the hard-edged arrogance he wished to portray.96 However, Smith’s need to direct scenes went beyond this. His assistant, Ted Castle, later recounted how they created the essay’s opening shot: We spent damn near a whole day getting that action right, and the shot took almost three hours. I had to drag people around, motioning to them, “You walk here.” “You walk there.” “I want you to walk along with your mule.” “I want you to stand.” He’d finally say, “Okay,” and I’d dash into a doorway and he’d click. Then he’d say, “Let’s do it over again.”97

Still Lifes

Although (re)constructing narrative tableaux vivants has been the staple expression of directed photojournalism, the act of arranging and rearranging still lifes has also provided instances worthy of commentary. Perhaps the first recourse to this quasidocumentary form can be found in The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855), considered by a writer at the time to be one of “the two most striking pictures” made by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War. This early photography critic described how the scene’s “terrible suggestions [were] . . . actually brought materially before the eyes, by the photographic reproduction of the cannon-balls laying strewed like the moraines of a melted glacier through the bottom of the valley.”98 There is little question but that it required a good deal of initiative on Fenton’s part to go to the Crimea, and that the four months he spent there contributed to the vision he depicted of that struggle. And, there can be little doubt about the courage required to make this image.99 Nonetheless, although the risks Fenton undertook to photograph this scene were very real, recent scholarship has questioned whether he might have shifted cannonballs into the line of sight in order to enhance the effect.100 After all, Fenton had studied painting in Paris during the 1840s, and the Orientalist photography that he undertook in the late 1850s was composed in his London studio, often using family members as sitters for his cartes de visite.101 All of the photography he made in the Crimea was apparently “carefully arranged,” so he would probably have felt little compunction about moving the cannon shot in the Valley of Death.102 Whether Fenton’s image was composed is still an open question, but there can be no question about the still life that has come to be known as “The Rearranged Corpse” of the U.S. Civil War.103 In July of 1863, Alexander Gardner was working

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with his assistant, Timothy O’Sullivan, in photographing the Gettysburg battlefield. There, they evidently came across the body of a Confederate soldier lying in the grass where he had fallen when killed while advancing up a hill; both Gardner and O’Sullivan photographed him in that spot. In his 1866 work, A Photographic Sketch Book of the War, Gardner titled this image A Sharpshooter’s Last Sleep, and implied that this was a Federal soldier.104 After making three exposures of the corpse where they originally found him, the photographers were apparently inspired by the imagistic possibilities of a sharpshooter’s position some forty yards away, built up by Confederate snipers in “Devil’s Den.” This offered an ideal location for photographing, as the embankment of flat stones made into a wall between two boulders provided a wonderfully textured backdrop. No bodies happened to be found in the pictorial setting, so Gardner had the soldier laid on a blanket, and carried the forty yards uphill to “Devil’s Den,” where he was deposited against the photogenic background.105 The photographers placed the rifle against the rock wall to draw the viewer’s eyes to its contours, and turned the corpse’s head to face the camera. Moving the body cannot have been an easy or pleasant task: Marianne Fulton notes that the identical postures of the limbs indicate that it was probably in a state of rigor mortis, and “shows signs of advancing decomposition.”106 The corpse must have been difficult to manipulate and, on a hot July day, rather odorous; but burial operations were drawing to a close and this may have been one of the last bodies available.107 In his book, Gardner titled the image made in Devil’s Den (actually taken by O’Sullivan), Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, and placed it immediately after A Sharpshooter’s Last Sleep, thus constructing a face-off between the armies, based on the myth that the first had been a Northerner, and that they were two different men.108 The FSA produced its share of directed still lifes, and the furor aroused by one reveals, once again, how much credibility we invest in photographs. Arthur Rothstein was working in the South Dakota Badlands during 1936, when he discovered a “prop” that placed him at the center of political polemics. As he later recalled, “I found a sun-bleached skull and photographed it against the cracked earth . . . I took many pictures and then moved the skull about 10 feet to a grassy spot near some cactus where I could get another effect.”109 Rothstein contends that the five exposures he made of the skull in different places were a result of the fact that he was essentially using it as a prop to experiment with textures and shadows.110 However, opponents of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs took exception to what they considered government propaganda, and a North Dakota newspaper labeled the image “a wooden nickel.” Controlled by conservative corporations, the U.S. press was largely opposed to Roosevelt, and reporters unearthed all the negatives Rothstein had made of the skull. A scandal ensued, and the Resettlement program was attacked by many publications as a “ghastly fake.”111 A powerful symbol of drought and death later acquired by art museums, Rothstein’s

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images of the cow skull entered into history as an example of “manipulation.” Its notoriety was such that fifteen years later, in 1951, Republicans returned to the attack and Rothstein’s photographs were waved about on the Senate floor as an example of fake government propaganda. There they were compared to the infamous hoax concocted by the McCarthy forces in creating a composite photograph of Senator Millard Tydings and Earl Browder, the head of the Communist Party USA. Beyond the immediate motivations of politicians, the “skull” images have become a lightning rod in discussions of the limits of documentary. Thus, in one of the finest studies on 1930s culture, William Stott contrasted Rothstein’s strategy with that of Walker Evans. Stott argues that the term documentary had a very specific connotation for Evans, which allowed for no intervention whatsoever: Documentary, he says, is “stark record.” Any alteration or manipulation of the facts, for propaganda or other reasons, he considers “a direct violation of our tenets.” He was shocked when his FSA colleague Arthur Rothstein was found to have moved the cow’s skull, because “that’s where the word ‘documentary’ holds: you don’t touch a thing. You ‘manipulate,’ if you like, when you frame a picture—one foot one way or one foot another. But you’re not sticking anything in.” For Evans, documentary is actuality untouched.112

Stott’s argument articulately embodies the classical perception of documentary photography, and the transparency of Walker Evans’s imagery is such that it seems the exterior world is so “shaping, molding and exhaustively filling his pictures, that style, technique, and pictorial form seem irrelevant.”113 Unfortunately, Evans comes up a bit short as the torchbearer for unmanipulated recording of reality. James Curtis compared Evans’s images with the detailed descriptions provided by James Agee, and revealed how Evans rearranged the interiors of the tenant farmer family homes while they were working in the fields, in order to construct harmonious scenes of dignified poverty.114 Thus, in an image of the bedroom, he apparently pushed a bed out from the wall to create a diagonal form that crosses like a sash from the top left to the bottom right, and he removed a dirty white suit that hung disconcertingly from the wall. In another, the photographer evidently cleaned the kitchen table of the clutter of dishes that had been set on it in the morning by the family, leaving only an oil lamp that gracefully reflects the light; in the background, Evans placed a butter churn to resonate visually with the lamp, despite the fact that this valuable object would not have been put in such danger within a house occupied by small children. The still lifes rearranged by Evans created a different world than that inhabited by the farmers; he photographed picturesque order instead of the tumbledown chaos in which they lived. James Agee reflected at one point, “The reason I love the camera is just this. . . . It is . . . unlike any other leverage of art, incapable of recording anything but absolute, dry truth.”115 Being neither

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entirely truthful nor at all dry, the aesthetic fabrications of Evans gave the lie doubly to his partner’s notion of photography. Live Interventions

The still lifes and narrative tableaux vivants created by photojournalists are believable; however, intervening in “real,” live events would seem to ratchet up the credibility of images a bit more, at least theoretically. Here, instead of recruiting people to take part in scenarios—or moving furniture, skulls, or corpses about—living human beings are utilized in scenes without their conscious participation. Although this would seem to be part of what I have defined as narrative tableaux vivants, there is a fundamental difference: in the tableaux, people knew they were performing a part in setups; here their very ignorance of what is really going on heightens the effect of the image. One instance, mentioned earlier, is offered by W. Eugene Smith’s conscription of the Guardia Civil, who were used by him in a way to which they would surely have objected. Another example, certainly one of the more amusing, is the most famous of Weegee’s photographs, The Critic (1943), in which bejeweled and fur-covered women are confronted, on their arrival at the opera house, by a New York City “bag lady,” who seems to comment on the social inequality between them.116 Although Weegee always maintained that it was only after developing the negative that he “discovered” the derelict looking at the opera patrons, his assistant, Louie Liotta, tells a different story. Weegee evidently had Liotta pick up a habitué of their favorite bar, Sammy’s on the Bowery, and bring her to the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera. There, they waited for the limousines, passing the time away with cheap wine. When these well-known socialites appeared, Weegee had Liotta hold the “model” close to their path and release her in time to get out of the frame, hoping that she would be able to stand long enough to take a photo. Totally involved with Weegee’s camera, the wealthy women seem unaware of the “critic,” whom they no doubt took to be part of the crowds that formed to watch celebrities arrive. A variation in the genre of directed photojournalism is the creation of setups that provoke a “real” response on the part of unsuspecting collaborators. Two examples of this strategy can be found in the Ruth Orkin and Nacho López photographs of women the photographers used as catalysts to provoke the infamous male harassment in the street that is a common phenomenon of Latin cultures.117 Both the Orkin and the López mise-en-scènes are produced by the sort of instigation similar to that later carried out by the documentary filmmaker Jean Rouch in Chronicle of a Summer (1961).118 In that film, Rouch attempted to incite his subjects to “moments of revelation,” both through the question he asked—“Are you happy?”—and by the camera’s presence. Rouch believed that these were “psychoanalytic stimulants,” which caused people to act in ways that were somehow more

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real than an unintervened reality. Rouch described his strategy as cinéma vérité, and the scholar of documentary film Erik Barnouw differentiates that style from what he calls direct cinema: “The direct cinema documentarist took his camera to a situation of tension and waited hopefully for a crisis; the Rouch version of cinéma vérité tried to precipitate one.” Of course, in Rouch’s version the veil of the fimmaker’s “illusory absence” is torn away.119 In photography, at least insofar as it was employed by Orkin and López, the illusion is preserved that no photographer was present. It would appear that Ruth Orkin only utilized this tactic for the one image she made in Rome. However, it held a certain fascination for Nacho López, who photographed the “beautiful woman” in several different situations, and then employed the strategy in a later photoessay, “La venus se fue de juerga por los barrios bajos.” When mounting his exhibit of 1956, he reflected on his experiences in making “La venus”: I was walking through the area of San Rafael and saw a small mannequin factory. I was impressed by the variety of bodies, arms, and legs that hung from a cord at the door. I went in and caught sight of a man with a saw cutting through the naked back of a female mannequin to repair it. This seemed both grotesque and comic, and I thought of the possibility of using this material to make a reportage. It wasn’t until two weeks later that the idea had matured. It occurred to me that the simple act of having the employee leave the factory with a naked mannequin under his arm could provoke psychological reactions among the people who encountered him in the street. It was only a question of being alert with the camera and following the employee at a prudent distance so that people wouldn’t notice me. The nude woman and the serious employee produced a strange and incongruent sensation in the street. He walked ahead as if nothing, while all around him occurred interesting incidents: surprise, repudiation, admiration, shame, reserve, strangeness, etc., and even an indecent, unpublishable act. I think that this reportage can serve as an example of the result of a “previsualization” organized by anticipating the human reactions provoked by objects, gestures, or sensations.120

Forms of Documentary

Nacho López’s notion of “previsualization” offers a useful jumping-off point for understanding how directed photojournalism has differed from what might be considered to be the “metaphysics” of classical modern photography. Gretchen Garner argues that the paradigm for photography from the 1930s up until relatively recently might be encapsulated under the term spontaneous witness, and she asserts, “The act of photography has been cultivated by most modern practitioners as one of openness and alertness to chance and hardly ever with a mind-set of directing the

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world or, most of the time, even directing the picture.”121 Garner bases this assertion on an overview of the ways in which different photographers of the twentieth century related to the question of direction versus discovery, citing Edward Weston, for example: “I never try to plan in advance. . . . I start out with my mind as free from an image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive. . . . One becomes a discoverer.” Garner also quotes Minor White, another important photographer and thinker about photography: “The state of mind of the photographer while creating is a blank. . . . It is a very active state of mind really, a very receptive state of mind, ready at an instant to grasp an image, yet with no image preformed in it at any time.” The invention of the small, light, and portable 35 mm camera led to the development of an aesthetic based on attention to what was happening around one, receptiveness to chance, and commitment to revelation; this resulted in a “hands-off authenticity” grounded in the belief that fakery was not acceptable within this convention. Of course, setups have clearly been based on the credibility created by this aesthetic, just as they have taken advantage of photography’s new and unique status as an authentic index of the phenomenal world. The supposition that the impulse behind the photographic act has been one of discovery and noninterference is particularly relevant to photojournalism, which combines the apparently transparent veracity of photography with the seeming objectivity of journalism. A classical formulation of how photojournalists are expected to work can be found in “The News Photographer’s Bible,” the stylebook produced by the Associated Press: “As for photojournalism, and I emphasize the word journalism, we make photographs from the circumstances we are given and we don’t try to alter those circumstances.”122 Now, there is certainly a difference between what is permitted in “hard news,” where the event largely controls the photographer, and “features,” those slices of everyday life and human-interest stories in which photojournalists feel freer to intervene.123 Almost all of the directed images we have seen would come under the category of features, and their credibility is, to some extent, a result of a certain “seepage” from the faith generated by “hard-news” imagery. Although the public may be somewhat tolerant of staging in features, they—and the editors of periodicals who know that their sales depend on the credibility of the stories they print—have little patience with direction in “hard news.”124 Notwithstanding the direction present in many of the greatest of its images, photojournalism has a particular relationship to “reality.” Although a discussion of what constitutes reality is beyond the scope of this essay, let it suffice to say that there is a real world independent of our perception of it. Although our ways of seeing this universe are mediated by a priori constructs—“I’ll see it when I believe it”—we are most aware of Otherness when we bump into it; as Fredric Jameson is fond of saying, “History hurts.”125 Photojournalism is involved with reality in at least two senses. On the one hand, there is a requisite interaction with the social world; as Julio Mayo stated, “We photographers are the infantry of journalism, be-

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cause we always march in the front line. We have to go to the news, they can’t tell us about it.”126 On the other hand, because photojournalistic images are indexes as well as icons, they offer evidence of presence that can be summed up in the words of Roland Barthes, “That has been.”127 As indexes, photographs are traces of material reality, deposited on film as a result of the collaboration of mind, eye, and camera: the real key to photojournalism is having the sharpness of vision to discover the world’s phenomena, and the technical capacity to capture them. If it is an art, it is—at least in the classical ideal—an art that attempts to find, rather than to create, the juxtaposition of the socially and formally significant. Henri Cartier-Bresson is the photojournalist who most readily embodies the classical approach.128 He concisely defined his pivotal concept of “the decisive moment”: “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.”129 The “decisive moment” is essentially a metaphor for hunting, the search for that confluence of content and form that the photographer must discover and be able to catch in an instant: “I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life—to preserve life in the act of living. I craved to seize, in the confines of one single photograph, the whole essence of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.”130 Cartier-Bresson has been explicitly critical of directed photography: “The fabricated photograph, or setup, does not interest me. . . . There are those who make photographs that have been composed beforehand, and there are those who discover the image and capture it.”131 Insisting that he “takes” rather than “makes” photographs, his very unobtrusiveness enables him to sneak up on “things-as-they-are,” and capture the reality that he believes is far richer than imagination.132 Cartier-Bresson’s respect for and interest in capturing the irreducible variations produced in the real world reflect the influence that Surrealism had over him. In speaking of Surrealism, this photojournalist is careful to insist that he was attracted to its ideas, above all “the role of spontaneous expression, of intuition, and especially the attitude of revolt,” and he distances himself from its aesthetics.133 However, despite Cartier-Bresson’s rejection of Surrealist photography, his own strategy is in fact quite in keeping with the importance of the “found object” in Dada and Surrealism, for example, the urinal that Marcel Duchamp entered in a 1917 exhibit under the title Fountain.134 A slice of ordinary life is picked almost at random, and acquires a new meaning by its recontextualization through the strategy of dépaysement. 135 The surreality of Cartier-Bresson’s photography is unrelated to the carefully orchestrated imagery produced by Man Ray or Hans Bellmer; instead, it is expressed in the capacity to uncover facets of everyday being that go unnoticed until the photographer reveals them through a process of intuition, and a mechanical reproduction that is akin to automatic writing.136 Hunting in the

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street for juxtapositions whose ironic contrasts would surprise people and make them see the world with new eyes, Cartier-Bresson carried forward the Surrealist project by linking it to the photojournalist ideal of the press photographer as a predatory animal lying in wait with a small 35 mm camera to capture its prey, the real/surreal, the ordinary/fantastic surprises offered by the world in its infinite variety.137 Today’s best-known photojournalist, Sebastião Salgado, has consistently taken issue with the importance that “the decisive moment” has acquired: “I have had many fights with Cartier-Bresson because I disagree with this idea and much of this kind of documentary photography.”138 Instead, the Brazilian asserts, “What photojournalism requires is something different, a density of experience which comes from the photographer’s integration into the context of what he is documenting.”139 Thus, in contrast to Cartier-Bresson’s formulation, Salgado proposes what he calls a theory of the “Photographic Phenomenon”: You photograph here, you photograph there, you speak with people, you understand people, people understand you. Then, probably, you arrive at the same point as Cartier-Bresson, but from the inside of the parabola. And that is for me the integration of the photographer with the subject of his photograph. . . . An image is your integration with the person that you photographed at the moment that you work so incredibly together, that your picture is not more than the relation you have with your subject.140

Salgado believes that the primary mediations of the documentary aesthetic are the rapport one has been able to establish with one’s subjects, and the knowledge that one has acquired about their situation.141 He represents the extreme example of the photojournalist committed to long-term projects. Among other undertakings, he dedicated himself from 1986 to 1992 to photographing labor around the world, an enterprise that resulted in a huge exhibit and a large book, both titled Workers.142 In 1993, he turned his cameras on the plight of refugees and emigrants, producing the enormous exhibition and book Migrations, published and exhibited in 2000.143 Through such extensive engagements, he avoids remaining at the surface of seeing only what he expected to see, and on various occasions, he has articulated the necessity of getting inside what one is photographing: When you work fast, what you put in your pictures is what you brought with you— your own ideas and concepts. When you spend more time on a project, you learn to understand your subjects. There comes a time when it is not you who is taking the pictures. Something special happens between the photographer and the people he is photographing. He realizes that they are giving the pictures to him.144

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Salgado’s conceptualization of the “Photographic Phenomenon” may be new, but the idea that depth in photojournalism comes from the time one has spent with one’s subject is not. Phillip Jones Griffiths expressed it well when, in speaking of his experiences in Vietnam, he said, “As a photographer you see things first hand, things that haven’t been filtered through some process of manipulation, so the more you see, the more—hopefully—you understand. The more you understand, the more you see, and in this process you become wiser.”145 Thus, it is no coincidence that the best photoessay by Nacho López is also the one in which he invested the most time, “Sólo los humildes van al infierno.” And, the depth in W. Eugene Smith’s “Country Doctor” is no doubt a result of the four weeks he spent working with the physician in Colorado. By the same token, criticisms that have been levied against the photography of the FSA often refer to the lack of investigation that characterized the approach of those photojournalists.146 Digitalizing Photojournalism

How does the development of digitalized imagery affect photojournalism? What impact does this new medium have on the credibility that is the lifeblood of the documentary? If so many of the photojournalist images have shown themselves to be directed, what are the differences between directing and digitalizing? There is little question but that digitalization is the future of photojournalism, and of photography as a medium.147 However, the issues of journalistic credibility opened up by digitalization have produced a sharp reaction among those whose livelihoods depend on the believability of their images. For example, the National Press Photographers Association of the United States issued a statement of principle at its annual Digital Imaging Workshop in 1990, asserting that, because accurate representation is the benchmark of the profession, “Altering the editorial content of a photograph, in any degree, is a breach of the ethical standards recognized by the NPPA.”148 The ethical issue here is really one of the range of tolerance within the variations of photojournalism. As is the case with directed photographs, editors are much more tolerant of altering feature photos or photo illustrations than they are of manipulating news images.149 And, the uproar that accompanied the discovery of digital alteration in celebrated cases such as National Geographic’s moving of the Pyramids of Giza or Time’s darkening of O. J. Simpson’s face indicates that the professionals connected to photojournalism are wary of this threat to their medium.150 Pedro Meyer, the Mexican harbinger of digital imagery, argues that such afterthe-act digital alterations are not significantly different from the anticipated coincidence of content and form of classic photographers: “The only difference is that they wait before the shutter clicks, and I wait till afterwards.”151 Certainly, altering

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photojournalistic images in the darkroom was a practice known long before digitalization. W. Eugene Smith inserted a saw handle—and a hand to grasp it—into the opening picture of his photoessay on Albert Schweitzer, perhaps a rather strained visual synecdoche for the doctor’s dedication to constructing a hospital.152 Yevgeni Khaldei (or Stalin’s censors) evidently removed stolen watches from the arms of the Soviet soldiers who were waving a flag for the photographer over the Reichstag in Berlin, after the army had taken the city in 1945.153 The excesses of photographic manipulation under the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy, the Soviet dictatorship, the reign of Mao in China, and McCarthyism in the United States are well documented.154 However, notwithstanding the history of photographic alteration, the ease with which digitalized images can be transformed is a difference that could make a difference.155 In one of the first essays to consider the impact of digitalization, Stewart Brand argued, “It is so easy to fiddle with the images that the temptation is overwhelming.”156 And, the fiddling may be done, not by those who were at the scene and experienced the event they photographed, but by computer technicians who have no sense of what really went on, and who alter pictures in line with a mentality increasingly governed by the conventions of advertising imagery.157 Of course, computers cannot manipulate images without human agency. As Meyer pointed out, “What is called ‘traditional’ photography can be produced either in an analog way using a chemical process or in a digital format, electronically.”158 Nonetheless, the facility with which digital imagery can construct a scene makes it tempting to avoid lengthy and costly investigative photojournalism such as that undertaken by Salgado, or Cartier-Bresson’s search for “the decisive moment” (that can now be constructed anytime in the computer), or even the interaction with unforeseeable social reality that was required for Nacho López to provoke the reactions of the men in the street to the beautiful woman. However, if digital imagery has—as Meyer argues—“liberated” photographers from “reality,” it nonetheless trades on the documentary aura of straight photographs when it reproduces what would be considered photojournalism.159 In this sense, digital images can take advantage of the semblance of having “been there”—apparently in accord with the photojournalist refrain, “F-8 and be there”—without having to invest the time and effort to learn about a situation, and/or to encounter the confluence of form and content that makes documentary photography important and moving.160 Fred Ritchin spoke to this concern: If you go to Beirut or Nicaragua as a photographer, you’re in the experience and you try to interpret the experience whatever way you can. . . . We’re borrowing from the credibility of the photograph to get something across that we haven’t earned in a journalistic sense. . . . We use the easy credibility of a photograph, even though we weren’t there, to pretend we were there or somehow to give ourselves the authority without having earned it.161

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Comparing images by Pedro Meyer and Dorothea Lange offers the opportunity to explore differences between digital images, directed photographs, and documentary pictures. These photos rely on the same strategy to construct their narratives: the juxtaposition of significantly ironic elements within a frame. Meyer’s image Mexican Migrant Workers, California Highway (1986/90) was produced to highlight the experience of inequality: men labor at agricultural tasks, stooped over in a field beneath a billboard advertising “Caesars,” an inn that offers “free luxury service from your motel”; in the sign, a Roman gladiator stands in wait by the fancy private taxi, opening its door for prospective customers who, presumably, will not include the poor souls straining below.162 Meyer stated, “I had no intention of waiting a week, ten days, or the time necessary so that something would happen, so that I could get the ‘decisive moment’ looked for so often by photographers. . . . The specific ‘decisive moment’ wasn’t to be found, it had to be created.”163 Somewhat similar images had been produced by Dorothea Lange while working for the FSA. She discovered billboards publicizing Southern Pacific Railroad, with advertising based around the slogan “next time take the train.” In one image, made in California during March of 1937, two men walk along the road with their backs to us, carrying their luggage; ahead of them is a billboard for Southern Pacific Railroad. Here, the Southern Pacific motto, “next time take the train,” is accompanied by a call to “relax,” and the image of a man riding on a train, leaning back in a comfortable chair.164 About a year and a half later, again in California but during November of 1938, Lange came upon three families of migrants camping underneath another billboard with the same slogan (“next time take the train”), but this ad showed a man sleeping with a broad grin on his face, and an appeal to “travel while you sleep.”165 Of these three scenes, it is the image of the families camped beneath the billboard that most closely fulfills the classical documentary ideal of finding a “reality” in the world, and providing evidence of its existence as well as information about it. We see the broken-down cars, the pitched tent, and the emigrants’ ragged clothing, among other elements. Though FSA photographers were not noted for carrying out extensive research on their subjects, the picture does include a significant amount of visual data, in addition to Lange’s intentionally ironic capture of the spatiotemporal coincidence of such unequal sleeping accommodations. Lange’s earlier photo, of the men walking along the highway with their baggage, is probably directed. The caustic comparison between the ways of traveling—some people lie back in comfort, others trudge along with bags in hand—is a powerful representation of class difference, but there is little information beyond that. The counterpoint between the agricultural workers and the sign in Meyer’s digital image was created, rather than found or staged. As he noted, “I saw the Mexican migratory laborers at some kilometers from the site of the billboard. I had made the association between the two scenes in my mind, but they were separated in space. The photos

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were taken in predigital times, before the existence of instruments to link these two moments.”166 Meyer asserts that his interest was not just that of constructing a discourse about migratory workers, “although it is inevitable that it is also that.” But, he would insist, it is more concerned with the experience of observing, and the ways of seeing opened up by digitalization: I would argue that this image has much to do with the memories through which we perceive. As we walk from point A to point B, we continually make associations between the things we see during that walk. Thus, it is not just a question of what presents itself immediately in this image, the “social” commentary inherent in the inevitable irony of the billboard and the workers, but, what is more important, a new discourse about photography. Though the “style” would seem to fall within the genre of documentary photography, I am utilizing that in a way to subvert that genre. This is exactly the contrary of what documentary photographers do in their obsession to maintain the credibility of their images. The more they want to convince us of the photograph as a referent, the more convinced we are of the contrary. The subjectivity of the author is necessarily at the root of any photograph.

Now, in part, Meyer’s position is an important call for the development of a critical perspective on photographic imagery, be it produced by chemical or computer processes. And, there is a certain ambiguity of “presentational contexts” in Meyer’s project: he is working as an artist in a field where, like advertising, manipulation is not only accepted but encouraged and rewarded.167 Nonetheless, he has extended his argument on occasion to documentary photography.168 Here, though he could have limited himself to noting that digital imagery does not necessarily produce a different sort of picture than does chemical photography, he actively argues for alterations that “enhance the veracity of an image.”169 Meyer believes that “photography per se, is tantamount to manipulation,” and he questions: “What is the difference between my computer alteration, and the photographer who chooses his or her angle to place a camera? Or when the photographer asks, sometimes by nudging ever so lightly for those depicted to move their location to a more favorable light or position.” He believes that “luck” has been the fount of photography: I am of course not questioning the validity of patience that some great photographers have exerted in order to get at exactly the image that they imagined, but even when patience was at the core of such endeavors an element of chance would inevitably crop up here and there. I personally dislike the notion that my work would be determined mainly by luck.170

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It strikes me that Meyer is here setting to one side the difference between photography as a technical image, whether produced by chemicals or computer, and other forms of representation. Photography offers an approach to the real world that is somehow different from creative manipulation, whether a decisive moment is “found” by the straight/digital photographer in a coup of timing, positioning, and technical virtuosity, or whether an image results from the rapport established and the knowledge acquired, or even whether a “real” scene is provoked. By conflating all forms of expression into subjective representation, we lose sight of what is unique about photography. As Barbara Savedoff has articulately argued in relation to Cartier-Bresson’s classic picture Behind the Gare St. Lazare (1932): The leap might have been staged or the location misidentified; nevertheless, on the basis of this photograph, few of us would hesitate to say that the leaping man, puddle, ladder, and posters existed, if only for an instant, in proximity to each other. . . . Instead of the photograph being a happy confluence of reflected leaping figures caught at the decisive moment by the photographer, the possibility of digital manipulation would make the work seem much more contrived, and I believe it would give us less delight, or at least a delight of a different kind. . . . Those who grow up in an age where the photographic image is seen as fluid and manipulable may have trouble appreciating the aura of evidential authority surrounding traditional photographs.171

But, evidence of what? Evidence, most importantly, of a world beyond and apart from our belly buttons. Although he was writing before the events of 11 September 2001, Fred Ritchin believes that the development of digital imagery is wound up in a larger shift in paradigm: Already the photographer as eyewitness, the photograph as history and memory, are becoming somewhat like the post-automobile horse. . . . With this technology [digitalization], the photograph can be newly orchestrated, made to fulfill any desire. The viewer cannot tell what is being depicted and what projected. The world, rather than speaking to us in the dialectic of the conventional photograph, imposing itself on the image as it is simultaneously being interpreted, becomes more controllable, and we become more capable of projecting and confirming ourselves and our own world in our own, or any other, image.172

Nacho López’s Mexico

Of course, inventing a world in one’s own image did not begin with digitalization. The Mexican illustrated magazines of the 1950s certainly constructed a self-enclosed

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universe of the rich, famous, and powerful, which revolved around the president and excluded the vast majority of the country’s inhabitants. Using photography as a witness, Nacho López’s imagery testified to the existence of the humildes that the mass media worked so hard, and was paid so well, to deny. If there were the rare occasions when he seemed to fall into a common failing of photography that denounces—at times victimizing those who were already victims of the larger social process—they were the exception. His project was clearly dedicated to employing photographic verisimilitude, and the credibility it provoked, to rescue the dispossessed and the downtrodden from their marginalization under Alemanismo. However, though López’s belief in photography as an encounter with reality was absolutely fundamental to his work, he did not espouse a simple documentarist position. For him, the potential to create one’s own way of seeing rests in the capacity of the photographer to utilize his or her vision to penetrate reality and, surmounting the temptation to imitate it, create another reality—the photograph.173 Was his insistence in directing photographs expressive of the need to go beyond the passive “looking at” of classical documentary, in order to reach a different level of creativity? Perhaps the desire to create something new, rather than gaze upon that which is, has particular significance in a neocolony such as Mexico. López shows that Mexicans are capable not only of being seen—their traditional position in this equation—but of seeing. And, to take it to another level altogether, Mexicans are not only able to see, they have the power to create the seen. Is it coincidence that the photographer, Pedro Meyer, who has taken this position to its logical extreme—digital imagery— is also a Mexican? Although López was not completely alone in revealing the poverty and oppression that lay behind the mask of the PRI’s “Revolutionary Nationalism,” he appears to have been the only photojournalist willing, or able, to grapple explicitly with the theme of Mexico.174 The images and text of the essay “Mexico: Pain and Blood, Passion and Soul” portray the enormous variations in the country, and its extraordinarily unequal class relations: “Lights and shadows of Mexico! The permanent contrast of its people; misery and opulence, serenity and violence in their hearts, the present and the past in daily life. Passion, blood, pain. All are part of the Mexican essence.” The essay’s key photo is a portrait of “bent hero” in a particularly afflicted version of the stereotypical pose, his jacket in tatters, and his hands clutching the crown of his ancient sombrero as if pressing it down into his head: “It is as if the Indian tried to hide, beneath his wide sombrero, the shame of his misery and neglect.”175 Although it was certainly valid to critique the poverty in which the Alemanista state had sunk the campesinos, this image is too insistent in making the agachado into a model of mexicanidad. Actually, the “Indian” (who resembles a poor urban dweller, or a friend of López who has put on an old jacket and sombrero for the picture) is part of a rather elaborate scenario the photographer staged in front of a house of weathered wood that provides a nicely textured backdrop.

61. Nacho López, Couple being photographed, Villa de Guadalupe, Mexico City, 12 December 1950. Fondo Nacho López, CONACULTA–INAH–SINAFO—Fototeca Nacional 374278.

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Behind the “Indian,” López posed a boy who mirrors the agachado’s anguish: the child leans against the house, his head bent down on his arm as if distressed. This boy was cropped completely out of the magazine’s image, probably because the direction is too apparent. Obviously, the héroe agachado was a powerful influence in conceptualizing Mexico, and even López found this colonialist icon representative of his culture. Among the seven photos in this photoessay, two are of poor children: one of a girl who lives in “misery and humility,” and the other of a boy who reads in “the street, his school.” In the text accompanying the image of the boy, Nacho López slammed the picturesque nationalism pushed by a mystifying press, noting that the boy was reading an exoticizing tract about the “Nooks and landscapes of marvelous Mexico.” In another photo, two women are portrayed working in an “old modernized tortillería,” which is described by López as a synthesis of the pueblo. And, in yet another picture, “humble people” are presented as the makers of fireworks, an “ancient Mexican figure.” The remaining two photos do not contain human figures, but they represent mexicanidad in an image of “expressive Mexican sombreros charros” placed against an adobe wall, as well as in a picture of candles, of which “every Catholic man and woman is a potential buyer.” However, the candles serve not only as a reference to Catholicism, but, moreover, as a metaphor for Mexico’s underdevelopment: “In towns that have still not benefited from electrical power and progress—but has it really reached anywhere?—making candles is a big industry.” In sum, however much he was marked by his time and place, no other photojournalist defined mexicanidad in terms so unambiguously pluralist, nor so unmistakably critical. The Mexico that Nacho López portrayed in his best photoessays was not that of the presidents or the politicians—nor the bankers, the businessmen, the celebrities, the actors and actresses—all of whom were so made to the measure of their era, creators of and created by the needs of the sentimental nationalism that bound them all together, for the benefit of the very few. López’s fatherland was many Mexicos, made up of the varieties he found in the country he photographed. The Virgin of Guadalupe is a pillar of Mexican nationalism and, in one of his first essays, López graphically reflected on the act of imaging this revered figure.176 Among the pictures he took is one of a couple standing in front of the Virgin’s image, in which López included the photographer who is making their souvenir. In the backdrop provided for taking portraits of visitors to the Basilica of Guadalupe, we see the use of prefabricated symbols to instill official identity. But, by incorporating the photographer, Nacho’s image goes beyond a simple censure of kitsch. He pointed to the responsibility of photography in fomenting a reverential, homogeneous, and exclusive nationalism that weighed heavily on the Mexican soul. Obviously, his own photographic act demonstrated the possibility of using this art in alternative ways (Photo 61).

Notes

1. Documenting Mexico 1. According to López, he worked in photojournalism from 1949 to 1957. See the letters of 21 January 1957 and 8 February 1965; the first was sent to José Gómez Sicre and the second to the Mexican Association of Press Photographers. However, as some of the photoessays that will be considered here were published after 1957, it seems appropriate to refer to the period as the 1950s. The letters can be found among the documents that are part of the Archivo Documental Familia López Binnqüist, currently maintained by the widow of Nacho López, Lucero Binnqüist, and their daughter, Citlalli López Binnqüist. All future references to this archive will carry the note ADFLB. The other collection of López papers is found in the Fototeca of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), the owner of his photo archive, which is composed of some thirty-two thousand negatives. 2. Manuel Álvarez Bravo is without doubt the leading photographer in the history of Mexico. However, he would be considered within the realm of art rather than documentary photography, though he did produce one or another photoessay for the illustrated magazines. 3. Mexico through Foreign Eyes, ed. Carole Naggar and Fred Ritchin (New York: Norton, 1993). A good selection of foreign photography on Mexico, the book nonetheless fulfills the usual expectations by opening with an Indian maiden naked to the waist. 4. Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 88. 5. La Vida Norteña: Photographs of Sonora, México, photographs by David Burckhalter, essays by Gary Nabhan and Thomas E. Sheridan (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998). The essay by Gary Nabhan is titled “The Visual Celebrations and Laments of David Burckhalter.” 6. Other Americas was published simultaneously in English, Spanish, and French in 193

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1986. The U.S. publisher was Pantheon Books (New York). On Salgado (the Brazilian who is the leading photojournalist in today’s world), see my essay “Sebastião Salgado: Ways of Seeing Latin America,” Third Text 58, vol. 16, no. 1 (March 2002): 15–30. 7. I am here discussing photography that trades on the documentary aura, not imagery that is explicitly constructed, for example, that of Gerardo Suter. On Iturbide and Garduño, see Graciela Iturbide, Images of the Spirit (New York: Aperture, 1996), and Flor Garduño,Witnesses of Time (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1992). University presses have been particularly resistant to publishing Mexican photography; see my review essay “Photographing Mexico,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 17, no. 1 (winter 2001). 8. The charro is the Mexican cowboy, the China Poblana is, in a certain sense, the female counterpart. The exotic dress of both was, until recently, a core element in picturesque photography and cinema. On the China Poblana, see Jeanne L. Gillespie, “Gender, Ethnicity and Piety: The Case of the China Poblana,” in Imagination Beyond Nation: Latin American Popular Culture, ed. Eva Bueno and Terry Caesar (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998). 9. Mariana Yampolsky was an emigrant photographer from the United States who lived most of her long life in Mexico. 10. Conversation with Eleazar López Zamora, 1990. 11. This would appear to be one of Garduño’s signature images; for example, it opens the section on her work in Image and Memory: Photography from Latin America, 1866–1994, ed. Wendy Watriss and Lois Parkinson Zamora (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 193. The featured Mexican photographer in this massive tome is Flor Garduño, yet another instance of the exotic imperative in picturing Mexico. Olivier Debroise also gives this image a high profile, using it to open one of the sections in Mexican Suite: A History of Photography in Mexico, trans. Stella de Sá Rego (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 113. 12. See the image by Álvarez Bravo in Susan Kismaric, Manuel Alvarez Bravo (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1997), 123. 13. Garduño also has a woman holding small iguanas in Image and Memory, 198. 14. A couple of experiences I had while living in Barcelona during 1992–93 might suffice as illustrations. The first occurred when I attempted to interest the curator of La Caixa, Marta Gili, in exhibits on Mexican photography. (La Caixa is the leading Catalonian bank, and its large cultural program includes an important photographic component.) Gili immediately and rather cavalierly discarded options such as Tina Modotti, Nacho López, or the Casasola Archive, indicating that the only Mexican photographer she really wanted to exhibit was Graciela Iturbide. In another instance, the Dean of Art at the University of Valencia, Pep Benlloch, invited me to lecture on Mexican photography, requesting specifically that I talk on Graciela Iturbide. I responded that I was neither prepared for, nor much interested in, that topic, and he accepted another option on the history of Mexican photojournalism. However, when I arrived I discovered that the large posters advertising my lecture were superimposed over the image of the Señora de las iguanas! 15. Graciela Iturbide and Elena Poniatowska, Juchitán de las mujeres (Mexico City: Ediciones Toledo, 1989), 57. The Señora de las iguanas appears on the cover and first page of this

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book, indicating its centrality to Iturbide’s work. See the penetrating analysis of the book by the anthropologist Leigh Binford, “Graciela Iturbide: Normalizing Juchitán,” History of Photography 20, no. 3 (autumn 1996), an issue dedicated to Mexican photography. 16. Graciela Iturbide, En el nombre del padre (Mexico City: Ediciones Toledo, 1993). 17. See Bernice Kolko, fotógrafa/photographer (Mexico City: Ediciones del Equilibrista, 1996) for a biography and examples of her imagery. Kolko’s books Rostros de México (Mexico City: UNAM, 1966) and Semblantes mexicanos (Mexico City: INAH, 1968) were published, respectively, by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM, the national university of Mexico) and the INAH (National Institute of Anthropology and History). Rosario Castellanos (1925–74) is still one of the best-read women novelists in Mexico. Antonio Rodríguez was a Portuguese communist who arrived in Mexico as a political refugee, and was the first cultural critic to deal seriously with Mexican photojournalism; he is discussed in chapter 2. 18. See John Mraz, “The Revolution Is History: Filming the Past in Mexico and Cuba,” Film Historia 9, no. 2 (Barcelona, 1999). I will normally use the word campesino in line with the position John Womack took in his classical work Zapata and the Mexican Revolution: “It seems to me that ‘peasant’ generally sounds exotic, suggests a creature that properly fits in an exotic society; and if I were writing the history of a society essentially foreign and out of our time, in the past or the present, anyway strange to us, I would use the word to indicate a particular kind of country person. But I doubt that since the 1860s Mexico has developed in a dimension different from ours. I do not deny that there were and still are peasants in Mexico, but only affirm that by 1910 most families outside the cities there probably were not peasant; certainly most families in Morelos were not. What they were is clear in Spanish; campesinos, people from the fields [campos]” ([New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968], x). 19. See, for example, those published in Hoy 89 (5 November 1938): 33. 20. For examples of Brehme’s photography, and some biographical information, see Hugo Brehme, México pintoresco (Mexico City: Porrúa-INAH, 1990—a reedition of the 1923 work). See also Hugo Brehme, Pueblos y paisajes de México (Mexico City: Porrúa-INAH, 1992) and México: una nación persistente. Hugo Brehme, fotografías (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes and Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1995). 21. The Spanish and German editions were published in 1923, and the book appeared in English during 1925. 22. Rosa Castro, “Hablan a Hoy los ases de la fotografía,” Hoy 724 (6 January 1951): 28. I have taken some liberties in combining phrases to make this translation. 23. I have discussed this history of picturesque versus antipicturesque photography in Envisioning Mexico: Photography and National Identity, Working Paper no. 32 (Durham/ Chapel Hill: Duke-University of North Carolina Program in Latin American Studies, 2001). 24. Edward Weston on Photography, ed. Peter Bunnell (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1983), 48. 25. These photographs by Weston can be seen in Amy Conger, Edward Weston in Mexico, 1923–1926 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), 35, 63, 67. 26. Ibid., 24.

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27. The bibliography on Tina Modotti seems to grow daily. See, among others, Sarah Lowe, Tina Modotti: Photographs (New York: Abrams, 1995); Margaret Hooks, Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary (New York: Pandora, 1993); Andrea Noble, Tina Modotti: Image, Texture, Photography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000). 28. Tina Modotti, letter of 17 September 1929. Amy Stark, “The Letters from Tina Modotti to Edward Weston,” The Archive 22 (January 1986): 67–68. 29. El Machete, 1 September 1928, 1. 30. This image also raises the intriguing question of the possible relation of Modotti’s photography to that of Lewis Hine. His denunciations of child labor in the United States had been fundamental in reforming child labor laws in the period 1910–15, and it is difficult to imagine that Modotti was ignorant of Hine’s work. Nonetheless, to the best of my knowledge, no one has yet pursued this question. The little girl can be seen, among other places, in Hooks, Tina Modotti, 153. 31. Álvarez Bravo’s work was consecrated by the 1997 exhibit in New York’s Museum of Modern Art; see Kismaric, Manuel Álvarez Bravo. 32. Roger Bartra, “Method in a Cage: How to Escape from the Hermeneutic Circle?” Transculture 2 (1996). Gregory Bateson has considered this epistemological paradox in his discussion of “play” in animals. Lacking a language of words, animals have no way of unambiguously stating “no.” Hence, fighting and playing take on very similar appearances, as the latter activity is one in which they are “engaged in an interactive sequence of which the unit actions or signals were similar to but not the same as those of combat.” In that situation, Bateson constructs the “message” as being the following: “‘These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those action which these actions denote.’ The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite” (“A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind [New York: Ballantine Books, 1972], 179–80). 33. Diego Rivera wrote in 1945, “The photography of Manuel Álvarez Bravo is Mexican by cause, form, and content, in it anguish is omnipresent and the atmosphere is supersaturated with irony” (reprinted in Diego Rivera. Textos de arte, ed. Xavier Moyssén [Mexico City: UNAM, 1986], 327). 34. I am here differentiating between “Indianist” (indigenista) photography (which I define as that made by people who are not Indians, regardless of the quality of their imagery or their connection to the official Indianist project of the Mexican state) and “Indian” photography (which by definition, is that made by Indians). This photo can be seen in Kismaric, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, 88. 35. Edward Said has described the Orient as offering to Europe “one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.” Orientalism constructs identities through a relationship of power in which the Other is invariably the subjugated element, and Mexico provides precisely this sort of exotic otherness for the United States. See The Edward Said Reader, ed. Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 68. 36. The politics of Álvarez Bravo is always talked about in relation to his most famous photograph, Striking Worker, Assassinated, Oaxaca, 1934. Nonetheless, although it is certain-

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ly true that he rejects officialist nationalism as completely as he does pintoresquismo, this image is problematic, and will require further research. To begin with, its meaning is determined by the title ascribed to it. Were we to change that to “Deliveryman hit by a truck, Mexico City” (as is rumored among Mexican researchers to have been the case), its immediate significance is transformed, though it would still remain an articulate comment on the dangers workers face. The fact that this is the only image of this photographer that demonstrates a manifest social commitment makes me question whether its caption was not a result of the photographer’s involvement with LEAR (Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios [League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists]) during this period; perhaps having once given the image this title for political ends, he may have become the captive of his own myth. When I once asked Álvarez Bravo if he had not taken other “political” photographs, he referred me to Los agachados. 37. García’s photography can be seen in Escribir con luz. Héctor García (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultural Económica, 1985); Héctor García. México sin retoque (Mexico City: UNAM, 1987); Héctor García. Camera Oscura (Veracruz: Gobierno del Estado de Veracruz, 1992); Héctor García. Iconos (Mexico City: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1998). 38. Mexico lived under the party dictatorship of the PRI from 1929 to 2000. When the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa described the situation as a “perfect dictatorship” during an official 1988 colloquium, he was immediately and discreetely hustled out of the country. 39. On the Hermanos Mayo, see John Mraz and Jaime Vélez Storey, Uprooted: Braceros in the Hermanos Mayo Lens (Houston: Arte Pública Press, 1996); John Mraz, “Foto Hermanos Mayo: A Mexican Collective,” History of Photography 17, no. 1 (spring 1993); John Mraz, “Close-up: An Interview with the Hermanos Mayo, Spanish-American Photojournalists (1930s–present),” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 11 (1992). 40. I believe that the publication within daily newspapers of what we would normally think of as documentary photography (as distinguished from standard graphic reportage) may be unique to what I have described as the New Photojournalism. See John Mraz, “The New Photojournalism of Mexico, 1976–1998,” History of Photography 22, no. 4 (winter 1998): 362. This text was published in Spanish as La mirada inquieta: nuevo fotoperiodismo mexicano, 1976–1996 (Mexico City and Puebla: Consejo Nacional para las Cultura las ArtesCentro de la Imagen-Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1996). On identity and essence, see Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), 346. 41. Thus, the most important reflections on national character are those that question the very construct itself. See Roger Bartra, The Cage of Melancholy: Identity and Metamorphosis in the Mexican Character, trans. Christopher J. Hall (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992). 42. James Faris has indicated how this functions in photographing the Navajo: “As Navajo change, so, too, does the photographic subject, but because the West only has a limited series of ways in which it accepts Navajo images, photography must, in most circumstances, continually repeat itself ” (James C. Faris, Navajo and Photography: A Critical

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History of the Representation of an American People [Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996], 20). 43. Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 105. Few Mexicans have really “looked back” at the United States or Europe, but at least some have really looked at their own culture. Pedro Meyer’s would have to be among the more interesting photos made by a Mexican of the United States; see “Inside the USA,” in Between Worlds: Contemporary Mexican Photography, ed. Trish Ziff (New York: Impressions, 1990). 44. There are some exceptions. Eniac Martínez (1989), Francisco Mata Rosas (1993), and Antonio Turok (1994) received the Mother Jones International Documentary Photography Award, and José Hernández-Claire (1992) and Pedro Valtierra (1999) were both given the King of Spain Award for the best international news photo of the year. In 2001, Antonio Zazueta won the World Press Photo prize for the best individual picture in the category “People in the News.” 45. Little research has been done on the Casasola Archive. Among the works available, see Flora Lara Klahr, Jefes, héroes y caudillos: Archivo Casasola (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985), and her article (with Marco Antonio Hernández) in El poder de la imagen y la imagen del poder: Fotografías de prensa del porfiriato a la época actual (Chapingo: Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, 1985). In English, see ¡Tierra y Libertad! Photographs of Mexico 1900–1935 from the Casasola Archive (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1985) and The World of Agustín Víctor Casasola, Mexico: 1900–1938 (Washington, D.C.: Fondo del Sol Visual Arts and Media Center, 1984). 46. See Ignacio Gutiérrez Ruvalcaba, “A Brief Revision of the Casasola Archive,” History of Photography 20, no. 3 (1996). The fact that we cannot identify the authorship of the Casasola images precludes their photos of daily life from the discussion here on Mexican photojournalism and quotidian existence. 47. On Díaz, see Rebeca Monroy Nasr, “Fotografía de prensa en México: un acercamiento a la obra de Enrique Díaz, Delgado y García,” Ph.D. diss., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1997. 48. Antoniorrobles, “En la ruta de Paco Mayo,” Mañana 449 (5 April 1952): 42. 49. Shifra Goldman, Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), xx. This book is a study of Los Interioristas, also known as Nueva Presencia. 50. Despite the acceptance enjoyed by Nacho López’s photography of Indians (as witnessed by both the continuing interest for his exhibits and the number of books reproducing his Indianist images), I have chosen not to deal at length with this aspect of his career. Although his later imagery of Indians does demonstrate a sympathy for this people, his portrayal is not exceptional when compared to that of, for example, Julio de la Fuente or Gertrude Duby Blom. His work as a photojournalist is, to the contrary, quite extraordinary within the context of the 1950s. 51. See Mraz, “The New Photojournalism of Mexico.” 52. “Río de Luz,” Aperture 153 (fall 1998): 2; Yo, el ciudadano, text by Fernando Benítez (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1984).

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53. Artes de México 58/59 (1964). 54. Among others, see Nacho López. Fotoreportero de los años cincuenta (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1989); Nacho López. Los rumbos del tiempo (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1997); Los pueblos de la bruma y sol (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1981); Los chontales de Tabasco (Tabasco: Gobierno del Estado de Tabasco, 1982); Viaje a la Tarahumara (Mexico City: Era, 1960); and Yo, el ciudadano. The best recent exhibit of López’s photography was curated by Alejandro Castellanos in 1996; see the catalog, Nacho López, antología de fetiches (Mexico City: INBA, INAH, FONCA, 1996). 55. Benjamin’s argument can be found in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 221. 56. The question of whether photography is an art or not seems to me to be important only to the degree that it conditions the discussion of this medium. I am essentially in agreement with the position of Tina Modotti (obviously influenced by Edward Weston): “To know whether photography is or is not art matters little. What is important is to distinguish between good and bad photography” (“On Photography,” Mexican Folkways 4 [October–December, 1929]: 196–97). 57. See Charles S. Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in The Philosophy of Peirce: Selected Writings, ed. Justus Buchler (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1940), 102. 58. Nacho López, “Condicionamientos actuales.” ADFLB. 59. Alan Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” in Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983 (Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 7. 60. See Sally Stein, “Making Connections with the Camera: Photography and Social Mobility in the Career of Jacob Riis,” Afterimage 10, no. 10 (May 1983); Peter Bacon Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839–1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); Peter Daniel, Merry A. Foresta, Maren Stange, and Sally Stein, Official Images: New Deal Photography (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1987); Documenting America, 1935–1943, ed. Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W. Brannan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); James Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Glenn G. Willumson, W. Eugene Smith and the Photographic Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 61. We are immediately confronted with a problem: Nacho López did not conserve his negatives in their original strips, as is common among photojournalists; instead he cut them up and saved some of the negatives in individual envelopes, throwing away those he did not want. This is a very different situation than that of the Hermanos Mayo or W. Eugene Smith, for example, whose habit of conserving their negatives in their original strips allows us to have an idea of how many images they took of an event, and in what order. We cannot know this in the case of Nacho López, as the number of negatives in his

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archive is too low to have been the only ones he took. For example, the largest number of negatives of the articles here analyzed is 150, those that he took during four weeks for the article “Sólo los humildes van al infierno.” Willumson says that Eugene Smith took some two thousand negatives during four weeks for his essay on the “Country Doctor” and some four thousand during the two months he spent photographing Albert Schweitzer (Willumson, W. Eugene Smith, 46, 203). Conversations with Citlalli López Binnqüist and Daniel Mendoza, who worked closely with López for years, have made it clear that it was a common practice for him to throw away negatives that he did not contemplate using in the future. Thus, we have to consider his archive negatives as a “preselection” of the images he made and not the totality of negatives he took for his articles. Nonetheless, although it is impossible to recover with any exactitude the relation between the negatives taken and those published, we can compare his preselection with the final selection made by the editors. 62. See Lorenzo Vilches, “Las zonas de preferencia,” in Teoría de la imagen periodística (Barcelona: Ediciones Paidós, 1987), 60–68. 63. In these cases, it is not clear who composed the cutlines. Nonetheless, I have not encountered notable differences between the cutlines of the photoessays that López authored in their entirety, and those in which he had collaborators, with some exceptions to which I will make specific reference. Thus, I tend to think that he had a good deal of input in the cutlines and, for that reason, I have assumed that it was he who wrote them. At the same time, I did encounter significant differences between the apparent intentions that Nacho López had for his images and the posterior manipulations of them in their republication at different times in these same magazines. 64. Antonio Rodríguez, “La glorificación de lo insignificante,” El arte fotográfico: Exposición de Nacho López (date and place of publication unknown, INAH Fototeca). 65. López stated to Anne Geyer in 1981 that he attempted to establish communication with his subjects beforehand, so that they could be photographed “as human beings, not as objects, not as models of human beings” (“Lopez Exhibit Expresses Contradictions of Life,” Mexico City News, 19 May 1981, 14). 66. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Who Is Speaking Thus? Some Questions about Documentary Photography,” in The Event Horizon, ed. Lorne Falk and Barbara Fischer (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1987), 203–4. See as well Alan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation), Massachusetts Review 19, no. 4 (winter 1978); Martha Rosler, “In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography),” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989); and Sally Stein, “Making Connections.” 67. Nacho López, “Conciencia óptica,” 3. ADFLB. 68. David Levi Strauss, “Photography and Propaganda: Richard Cross and John Hoagland in Central America and in the News,” Afterimage 15, no. 9 (April 1988): 16. 69. See the statement by López in Yo, el ciudadano, 11. 70. From October of 1951 to May of 1952, a series of twenty-one articles on Mexican photojournalists were published in Mañana. Significantly, the essay on López was titled “El

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esteta de la fotografía periodística” (Antonio Rodríguez, Mañana 431 [8 December 1951]). In these articles, the only other graphic reporter that is mentioned as having a particular interest in the aesthetic aspect is Héctor García. 71. Carlos Monsiváis asserted that “He was the first person in Mexico to create photographic series, extending individual discoveries into memorable stories” (Aperture 153 [fall 1998]: 40). Rebeca Monroy Nasr is an important researcher of photography in Mexico. Although she is concerned to claim a place for Enrique Díaz as the originator of the photoessay form, she herself admits that it was López who really developed the genre. See Rebeca Monroy Nasr, “Enrique Díaz y fotografías de actualidad. (De la nota gráfica al fotoensayo),” Historia Mexicana 190 (1998): 407. Antonio Rodríguez did produce some photoessays on the grinding poverty of the Mezquital, but his imagery is so lacking in expressive power that he could not really be considered a photojournalist. López’s photoessays have been an influential model for members of the New Photojournalism; see Mraz, “The New Photojournalism of Mexico: 1976–1998,” 316. The famous picture editor John Morris asserts, “At Life, the photographer was considered the ‘author’” (Get the Picture: A Personal History of Photojournalism [New York: Random House, 1998], 50). However, the only photojournalist who appears to have regularly written texts for Life is Carl Mydans. George Rodger, a Magnum founder, was so averse to being an illustrator of editors’ ideas that he got himself fired from Life, and went to work for Black Star, “where he even wrote his own captions” (Rudolf Janssens and Gertjan Kalff, “Time Incorporated Stink Club: The Influence of Life on the Founding of Magnum Photos,” European Contributions to American Studies 29 [Amsterdam, 1994]: 228). 72. The concept of “directed” photography is fundamental to this study, and is discussed at some length in chapter 4. 73. Interview by Luis Suárez, “Semblante del dolor y la alegría,” Mañana 640 (3 December 1955): 32. 74. The Night of the Magi (the Wise Men/Kings) is January 5. In Mexico of the 1950s, most children received their gifts on that night of the Epiphany rather than on 25 December. 75. For general analyses of Mexican photojournalism, see John Mraz, “From Positivism to Populism: Toward a History of Photojournalism in Mexico,” Afterimage 18, no. 5 (January 1991), and “Photographing Political Power in Mexico,” in Citizens of the Pyramid: Essays on Mexican Political Culture, ed. Wil Pansters (Amsterdam: Thela Publishers, 1997). 76. It should be noted that Nacho López did do a book of images for the 1981–82 presidential campaign of Miguel de la Madrid (1982–88), Los trabajadores del campo y de la ciudad (Mexico City: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, Económicos y Sociales, 1982). Nonetheless, Miguel de la Madrid does not appear in the book. 77. Carlos Monsiváis, “Sociedad y cultura,” in Entre la guerra y la estabilidad política: El México de los 40, ed. Rafael Loyola (Mexico City: Grijalbo and Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1990), 264. 78. The word photojournalist must originate around 1940, probably in recognition of the status acquired by the derring-do of individuals such as Robert Capa in the Spanish civil war and World War II. John Phillips, a well-known Life photographer, believes that

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the word was invented for him. He says that the Life editor or writer Hubert Kay said to him, “I’ve coined a word for you—reporter-photographer—because you send in written material with the pictures.” Phillips argues that, “With use the term became ‘photoreporter’ and eventually photo-journalist.” See the interview with Phillips in John Loengard, LIFE Photographers: What They Saw (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 55, and John Phillips, Free Spirit in a Troubled World (Zurich: Scalo, 1996), 569. The first use of the word photojournalist has not been established with precision. Webster ’s lists its appearance as 1938, while The Oxford English Dictionary notes that it was 1944. 79. I am here using photojournalist in what seems to be the accepted form within the guild. For example, Dirck Halstead differentiates “photojournalists” from “news reporters” (press photographers), arguing that the former are “people with a special gift for storytelling, those who learned to use the technology made possible by the 35mm camera, to go beyond the ‘decisive moment’ and illuminate the lives of people and the events surrounding them” (“Why We Chose Alfred Eisenstaedt as ‘Photojournalist of the Century,’” editorial, Digital Journalist (November 1999), www.digitaljournalist.org. The group with more authorial control than “photoessayists” would be “documentary photographers,” a category within which there are at least three possible ways to earn a living from photography. The first would be those photographers who work for institutions; in Mexico, one example would be the National Indigenist Institute (Instituto Nacional Indigenista, INI), where Nacho López was contracted for years. In the United States, the best instance would be the Farm Security Agency, and its photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. A second possibility is to link oneself to an agency that permits the opportunity to work on individual projects: the Magnum Agency is a perfect example. A third possibility is to be a “freelance” photographer who lives from grants and book royalties, as is the case of Graciela Iturbide. Sebastião Salgado would offer the extreme case of autonomy, in that he has constructed a photojournalist empire of his own. Although Salgado is contracted by magazines, he produces his own books and exhibits. 80. For a description of the different working conditions within Mexican newspapers, see Mraz, “The New Photojournalism of Mexico,” 353–55. 81. Interview with Phillip Jones Griffith, cited in Marianne Fulton, Eyes of Time: Photojournalism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 188. 82. The predominant notion of Nacho López as a graphic reporter can be seen in the title of the book Nacho López. Fotoreportero de los anos cincuenta, as well as in the exhibition with the same name that is mounted each year in September as part of the annual photographic activities of “Foto septiembre.” 83. See the unpublished interview with Héctor García, September of 1989, by Marina M. Hernández Aguilar, Departamento de Investigaciones y Exposiciones del Museo Rufino Tamayo. 84. Tina Modotti, letter of 23 May 1930. Stark, “The Letters from Tina Modotti to Edward Weston,” 74. 85. López made reference to his “pasión verdadera” in a letter written to Manuel Berman, 1 August 1980. ADFLB. 86. John Mraz, “Close-Up: An Interview with the Hermanos Mayo,” 213. The Mexican

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constitution contains the famous “Article 33,” which allows the government to expel foreigners for involving themselves in politics. In 1930, this article was applied to Tina Modotti, who was turned out of the country. 87. See the manuscripts written by López on Reuter, “Walter Reuter, un notable de la fotografía,” and on Heartfield, “John Heartfield.” ADFLB. 88. John Mraz, unpublished interview with Walter Reuter, 28 January 1992, Mexico City. On Reuter, see Walter Reuter: Berlin, Madrid, México. 60 años de fotografía y cine, 1930–1990 (Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, 1992).

2. Photojournalism and Photoessays during the 1950s 1. Prior to Stephen Niblo’s two recent books, the post-1940 period was the least examined in Mexican historiography. War, Diplomacy, and Development: The United States and Mexico, 1938–1954 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1995) and Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999) are pivotal contributions, though Niblo has yet to deal substantially with the domestic scene of the 1950s. Studying this era has been complicated by journalism’s voids, the silences in a press that, ironically, are as articulate as its words. Obviously, this feature of the press provides information in itself, as much about Mexican journalism as about the country’s general situation, although it is more of the type that Umberto Eco might describe as a “structuring absence.” Olga Pellicer de Brody and José Luis Reyna point out that “One of the characteristics of the Mexican press during those years is that of not offering a very transparent image of the country’s problems”; and they assert that the periodicals’ reporting “was almost always partial and veiled, as well as systematically lacking in profundity” (El afianzamiento de la estabilidad política, vol. 22 of Historia de la Revolución Mexicana [Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1978], 3). 2. Alan Knight, “The Rise and Fall of Cardenismo,” in Mexico since Independence, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 315. 3. On Cardenista education, see Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997). 4. “Conferencia, 3 de marzo de 1976. Museo de Arte Moderno.” ADFLB. I am grateful to Alejandro Castellanos for having indicated to me the importance of López’s socialist education. 5. Knight, “The Rise and Fall of Cardenismo,” 298. 6. José C. Valadés, La unidad nacional, vol. 10 of Historia general de la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1985 [1965]), 1. 7. José Agustín, Tragicomedia mexicana 1. La vida en México de 1940 a 1970 (Mexico City: Planeta, 1991), 52. 8. Luis Medina, Civilismo y modernización del autoritarismo, vol. 20 of Historia de la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1979), 110. 9. Tzvi Medin describes this as the “presidenciato” ; see El sexenio alemanista (Mexico City: Era, 1990), 44–103.

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10. The first official party, PNR (Partido Nacional Revolucionario) had been founded in 1929. In 1938, Cárdenas replaced the PNR with the PRM (Partido Revolucionario Mexicano) to facilitate his project. The definitive version of the official party, the PRI, was created in 1946 to nominate Alemán for president, and became his tool. 11. Medin, El sexenio alemanista, 44. 12. Peter Smith, “Mexico since 1946,” in Bethell, Mexico since Independence, 341. 13. Pellicer de Brody and Reyna assert that, though “entrepreneurs were formally excluded from the official political institutions,” they had a great influence on Alemán’s government (El afianzamiento de la estabilidad política, 8). Niblo notes that Alemán appointed a number of business people to top posts in his cabinet, and “ran a pro-business administration,” though “those links were generally kept out of public view” (Mexico in the 1940s, 170, 177, 365). 14. Medin, El sexenio alemanista, 96. 15. James D. Cockroft, Mexico: Class Formation, Capital Accumulation, and the State (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 153; Agustín, Tragicomedia mexicana, 18. 16. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s, 213; see 275–76 for a summation of Alemanista corruption. 17. Ibid., 256. 18. Niblo, War, Diplomacy, and Development, 151. 19. Carlos Monsiváis, “Sociedad y cultura,” in Entre la guerra y la estabilidad política: El México de los 40, ed. Rafael Loyola (Mexico City: Grijalbo and Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1990), 272–73; Agustín, Tragicomedia mexicana, 71. 20. See Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s, 27. Neocolonial attitudes have a long history in Latin America. Tulio Halperin-Donghi described the fetish for European consumer goods— French beds and dresses, English clocks and pianos—in early-nineteenth-century South America: “What is evident is the relationship between these innovations, in which the concept was frequently more important than the substance, and the deliberate tendency toward modernization. What attracted the consumers to English beer was not the dubious pleasure of a drink which can hardly have been improved by long and hazardous journeying over tropical seas, but the fact that to drink it was above all an implicit act of faith in the superiority of that which was foreign and modern over that which was traditional and local” (The Aftermath of Revolution in Latin America, trans. Josephine de Bunsen [New York: Harper & Row, 1973], 89). 21. Nosotros los pobres may be the most popular film in Mexican history. On Nosotros, see Emilio García Riera, Historia documental del cine mexicano (Mexico City: Era, 1971), 3:218, and Jorge Ayala Blanco, La aventura del cine mexicano (Mexico City: Era, 1979), 113–19. 22. Cited in Medina, Civilismo y modernización del autoritarismo, 133. 23. Blanca Torres, Hacia la utopía industrial, vol. 21 of Historia de la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1984), 34. 24. Agustín, Tragicomedia mexicana, 68. 25. Medin, El sexenio alemanista, 49. 26. Wil G. Pansters, Política y poder en Puebla. Formación y ocaso del cacicazgo avilacamachista, 1937–1987 (Mexico City and Puebla: Fondo de Cultura Económica and Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1998), 208.

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27. Valentín Campa, Mi testimonio. Memorias de un comunista mexicano (Mexico City: Ediciones de Cultura Popular, 1978), 275. 28. Medin, El sexenio alemanista, 17; Niblo, War, Diplomacy, and Development, 75, 91. 29. Agustín, Tragicomedia mexicana, 106. 30. Mary Kay Vaughan, “Transnational Processes and the Rise and Fall of the Mexican Cultural State: Notes From the Past,” in Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940, ed. Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 475. 31. Monsiváis, “Sociedad y cultura,” 272; Agustín, Tragicomedia mexicana, 39, 83. 32. James Guimond describes the “surge of sentimental, conservative populism” in the United States during and after World War II, when “academics and intellectuals produced books and articles about quintessentially American ideas and values such as ‘Democracy’ and the ‘American Creed.’” Guimond notes that “the American media frequently used photographs to illustrate populist themes celebrating the triumph of national unity over diversity” (American Photography and the American Dream [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991], 161–63). 33. Samuel Ramos, Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico, trans. Peter G. Earle (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969). 34. Tzvi Medin, “La mexicanidad política y filosófica en el sexenio de Miguel Alemán,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 1, no. 1 (January–June 1990): 13. The three books mentioned were published in 1952. 35. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1961). 36. These fictional constructions have sometimes been taken too literally by U.S. scholars. For example, Charles Ramirez Berg “shoehorned” Paz’s notion into a study of cinema, in which he asserts that “Mexicans are a nation of estranged survivors” who feel “isolated and abandoned . . . lost in their solitude” (Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967–1983 [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992]), 201, 1–2. The very idea that someone living in the United States would refer to Mexico as a society of loneliness borders on the ludicrous. 37. Roger Bartra, La jaula de la melancolía. Identidad y metamorfosis del mexicano (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1987), 21; my translation. (See the English translation in the bibliography.) The essentialism of many formulations around lo mexicano can be appreciated in the title of the chapter on Mexico, “The Search for Essence in Mexico and Elsewhere,” in the pioneering study by Martin Stabb, In Quest of Identity: Patterns in the Spanish American Essay of Ideas, 1890–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967). 38. Bartra, La jaula de la melancolía, 114. The importance of the héroe agachado in photography can be seen in Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s famous image Los agachados (1934, mentioned in chapter 1), and Nacho López’s portrait of an agachado as the central image in his photoessay “Mexico: Pain and Blood, Passion and Soul” (examined at the end of chapter 4). 39. Seth Fein, “Dicen que soy comunista: Nationalist Anticommunism in Mexican Cinema of the 1950s,” Nuevo Texto Crítico 21/22 (1998): 155.

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40. Mary Kay Vaughan, “Transnational Processes and the Rise and Fall of the Mexican Cultural State,” 475; Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s, 37. 41. See John Mraz, “Lo gringo en el cine mexicano y la ideología alemanista,” in MéxicoEstados Unidos. Encuentros y desencuentros en el cine (Mexico City: UNAM-IMCINE, 1996). 42. Jeffrey Pilcher, ¡Que vivan los tamales!: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 25. 43. Emilio García Riera, Historia documental del cine mexicano (Mexico City: Era, 1972), 4:208. 44. Desmadre might be translated as excessive and intentional disorder. It is term that expresses the centrality of the mother in Mexican society, for the literal translation would be “unmothering,” that is, undoing the sort of order a mother would create. 45. Antonio Rodríguez, the essays, and the exhibits are discussed later in this chapter. 46. The citations in this paragraph can be found in a manuscript probably written in 1956, which begins with the words “Una tempestad en un vaso de agua . . . ,” ADFLB. 47. Excelsior, 31 August 1956. ADFLB. This journalistic note remarks that the exhibit was “a great success.” 48. R. N., “The Mexico of Nacho López,” Américas (October 1956): 33. 49. See the correspondence between Nacho López and José Gómes Sicre in ADFLB. In a letter of 9 November 1956, the U.S. embassy in Mexico also offered to buy the photo of the hands under the prison door. Evidently, Life en español published a piece on López in the issue of 19 November 1956, in which it affirmed that “his lens has a heart.” ADFLB. 50. See the newspaper clippings and manuscripts about this scandal in ADFLB. The main complaints seem to have come from Novedades, a periodical in which Alemán had “direct interests” (Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s, 346). 51. Novedades, 3 November 1956. ADFLB. 52. All governments are sensitive to the image they project outside the nation. However, Mexicans are particularly thin-skinned about their representation. On the one hand, scenes of poverty are easily available, and have been a stereotypical subject of tourist photography. On the other, Mexico is often dependent on foreign loans, a situation that is not aided by the notion that its poverty is unsolvable. My own experiences with photographic exhibits of Mexico may be informative. In attempting to promote the exhibition of La mirada inquieta (New Photojournalism of Mexico, 1996), I was told by cultural attachés at European sites of Mexican embassies that, though they personally loved the imagery, they could not endanger their jobs by suggesting that it be shown. Efforts to circulate the exhibit Uprooted: Braceros in the Hermanos Mayo Lens (1996), through the Secretariat of Foreign Relations (Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores) ran into a stone wall. On those occasions when I have been invited by functionaries of this secretariat to produce photographic exhibitions, the talks founder as they describe the limitations within which I would have to work. An interesting example of Mexicans’ sensitivity to their portrayal in the United States is offered by the image of a boy pickpocket, who was photographed in the instant that he stole the wallet of a man who was carrying a torero from the bullring. Hoy had published the photo in its issue of 15 April 1950, and Life printed it as the “Picture of the Week” in its issue of 1 May 1950. Hoy had criticized the policeman nearby, who remained ignorant of the

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crime, “Just as happens every day in every section of the city,” and Life had quoted the Mexican publication. In one of the very few “letters to the editor” I have seen published in Mexican magazines, a Señorita Elena Gutiérrez complained, “What Life’s editors want to demonstrate is precisely what we see in the photo: A PERVERTED CHILDHOOD, AN APATHETIC POLICE, A SAVAGE PEOPLE, rather than a good, opportune photograph” (Hoy 690 [13 May 1950]: 4). As this was the only “Picture of the Week” Life dedicated to Mexico during the decade, perhaps Miss Gutiérrez had a point. 53. Novedades, 3 November 1956. ADFLB. 54. Raúl Flores Guerrero, “Las fotografías que ‘denigran’ a México,” México en la cultura (25 November 1956): 5. ADFLB. 55. Throughout his life, Nacho López held a total of seventeen individual expositions and participated in twenty collective exhibits. See the interview, “Nacho López,” in José Rovirosa, Miradas a la realidad. Ocho entrevistas a documentalistas mexicanos (Mexico City: CUEC-UNAM, 1990), 37. In general, his imagery of Indians has been much more acceptable to the Mexican establishment than his critical photography, and the Secretariat of Foreign Relations still continues to circulate these pictures outside Mexico. 56. Anne Rubenstein, Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 13. 57. Juan Manuel Aurrecoechea and Armando Bartra, Puros cuentos II: Historia de la historieta en México, 1934–1950 (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1993), 13. 58. Torres, Hacia la utopía industrial, 171. 59. Francisco Martínez de la Vega, “Libertad, si . . . para encadenarse,” Siempre! 18 (24 October 1953): 18. 60. Roberto Blanco Moheno, Memorias de un reportero (Mexico City: Libro-Mex Editores, 1965), 294. 61. Cited in Rafael Rodríguez Castañeda, Prensa vendida. Los periodistas y los presidentes; 40 años de relaciones (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1993), 15, 21. 62. Roberto Blanco Moheno, La noticia detrás de la noticia (Mexico City: author’s edition, 1966), 325. 63. Rodríguez Castañeda, Prensa vendida, 60. 64. Agustín, Tragicomedia mexicana, 72. 65. The Banco Cinematográfico was established in 1942 to produce Mexican films. It was successful both in expanding the industry and as a means to “control the purse strings of the industry and keep critical voices out of the new media” (Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s, 52). 66. Rodríguez Castañeda, Prensa vendida, 15. 67. Ibid., 31, 59. 68. Hoy 60 (15 April 1938): 4. 69. On bribes to reporters, see Blanco Moheno, La noticia detrás de la noticia, 125, 172, 188. 70. Miguel Ángel Mendoza, “Pagés Llergo: reportero estrella,” Mañana 392 (3 March 1951): 29. 71. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s, 169, 187; Pellicer de Brody and Reyna, El afianzamiento de la estabilidad política, 13, 17–18.

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72. Blanco Moheno, Memorias, 94. 73. Rodríguez Castañeda, Prensa vendida, 42. 74. Ibid., 54, 59. 75. Siempre! continues to be published. 76. Circulation figures for Mexican periodicals are notoriously inexact, and simply unavailable for the illustrated magazines. However, interviews with individuals in both Mexico City and various provincial capitals indicate that Hoy, Mañana and Siempre! were much read. For example, a letter from Luis G. Olloqui, librarian of Monterrey, Nuevo León, which was published on the back cover of Hoy, demonstrates the acceptance that the magazine had in that city: of the 142 magazines available in the library, Hoy was the most solicited, and had reached a total of 27,385 readers. See Hoy 49 (29 January 1938). Stephen Niblo provides figures from a 1954 U.S. State Department memo that show the following circulation for these three magazines: Hoy (17,433), Mañana (18,820), Siempre! (17,500). His source indicates that the magazine Todo had a circulation of 60,500 (Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s, 27). I am very skeptical about these or any circulation figures about Mexican periodicals. Even information about today’s publications is untrustworthy; see Raymundo Riva Palacio, “A Culture of Collusion: The Ties That Bind the Press and the PRI,” in A Culture of Collusion: An Inside Look at the Mexican Press, ed. William Orme (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1997). Perhaps the popularity that Life enjoyed might give an idea of the acceptance that Mexican magazines received: the inaugural issue of Life was sent out to 225,000 charter subscribers, and another 200,000 copies sold out within hours of appearing on newsstands; within three months it was selling a million copies weekly. Circulation reached a peak of 5.8 million subscribers, and market studies placed the total number of readers at 20,000,000. See Wendy Kozol, Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 35; Glenn G. Willumson, W. Eugene Smith and the Photographic Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 312; and Life 60th Anniversary (October 1996), 13. 77. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s, 14. The Hoy pitch is cited in Flora Lara Klahr and Marco Antonio Hernández, El poder de la imagen y la imagen del poder. Fotografías de prensa del porfiriato a la época actual (Chapingo: Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, 1985), 17. This text does not appear in Hoy 1 (27 February 1937); it must be taken from preceding materials, as Mexican periodicals often publish an issue “0” to announce a new magazine. 78. José Luis Ortiz Garza, México en guerra. La historia secreta de los negocios entre empresarios mexicanos de la comunicación, los nazis y E.U.A. (Mexico City: Planeta, 1989), 93. 79. Hoy 236 (30 August 1941): 4. 80. Julio Mayo asserted that Pagés Llergo never attended Press Freedom Day. Whether he did on occasion or not, his reputation is such that Mayo would say this (interview with Julio Mayo, 20 January 1999). Vicente Leñero describes how Pagés Llergo came to the aid of Scherer in Los periodistas (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1978), 272. 81. Carlos Monsiváis, “Pagés Llergo defendió la tolerancia y auspició la libertad de expresión,” Proceso 686 (25 December 1989): 47. 82. José Pagés Llergo, “Le entrego la bandera,” Rotofoto [new edition] 1 (4 August 1951): 8.

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83. Rotofoto 1 (22 May 1938); Rotofoto 9 (17 June 1938); Rotofoto 10 (23 June 1938). Even in the present climate of freedom granted Mexican photojournalists, they are forbidden to take images of the president while he is eating. 84. Rotofoto 9 (17 July 1938). 85. Rotofoto 6 (26 June 1938): “El señor senador Padilla resuelve aferrarse al hueso.” Aferrarse al hueso is a typically Mexican play on words. Aferrarse means literally to seize, grasp, or bite, but its figurative meaning is “to cling.” A hueso is a bone, but it is also Mexican slang for a position that is given to one through political connections. Hence, the title translates to an assertion that Padilla is intent on clinging to the privileged position he has received as a result of personal connections. 86. Rotofoto 3 (5 June 1938): “El general y diputado Miguel Z. Martínez, de quien se dice que es hombre de pocas pulgas, pero que, como se ve las posee en abundancia.” Again, it is necessary to translate Mexican slang. Tener pocas pulgas means to have little patience, and so here the play is between the figurative and literal meaning of the phrase. 87. The case of Ebert is discussed in Kiosk: A History of Photojournalism, ed. Bodo von Dewitz (Göttingen: Steidl, 2001), 110, 115. On press photography in the Weimar Republic, see Hanno Hardt, “Pictures for the Masses: Photography and the Rise of Popular Magazines in Weimar Germany,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 13, no. 1 (1989), and “Sites of Reality: Constructing Press Photography in Weimar Germany, 1928–33,” Communication Review 1, no. 3 (1996). 88. Rotofoto 2 (29 May 1938). 89. Rotofoto 11 (31 July 1938). 90. It is common to hear this in the world of photojournalism. 91. Alan Knight, “Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy?” Journal of Latin American Studies 26, no. 1 (February 1994): 79. 92. Monsiváis, “Pagés Llergo defendió la tolerancia,” 47. 93. See “Con Cedillo en las montañas potosinas,” Hoy 74 (23 July 1938). For the reaction against Hoy, see the photo of the banner in a CTM protest where the cover of Hoy on which Cedillo appeared is reproduced with the word “REACTION” written across it (Hoy 77 [13 August 1938]: 6). 94. Gregorio Ortega,“Rotofoto,” Siempre! 262 (3 July 1958): 45. 95. Pan o palo (the carrot [bread] or the stick) has been the usual option offered Mexican journalists since at least the reign of Porfirio Díaz. With Presente, the editor first got the stick, and then the bread. 96. He was described as such by the U.S. diplomat David Thompson; see Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s, 347. 97. Agustín, Tragicomedia mexicana, 86. 98. Julio Scherer García, Estos años (Mexico City: Oceano, 1995), 67. Scherer founded Proceso, the Mexican periodical most known for investigative reporting, in 1976. Before that he had headed Excelsior when it was the best newspaper in Latin America. 99. Blanco Moheno, Memorias, 292–93. 100. Scherer says that the editor was “sent to the hospital” (Estos años, 67).

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101. Rodríguez Castañeda, Prensa vendida, 22. 102. Blanco Moheno, Memorias, 293. 103. Ibid., 13, 86. 104. Ibid., 86. 105. See Niblo, War, Diplomacy, and Development, 6. 106. On the relationship of Maximino Ávila Camacho and Hoy, see Blanco Moheno, Memorias, 87–88. Maximino is also considered extensively in Pansters, Política y poder en Puebla, as well as in Agustín, Tragicomedia mexicana, 47, and Medina, Civilismo y modernización del autoritarismo, 17. Blanco Moheno recounts in various parts of Memorias that Hernández Llergo’s “craze for women” required him to earn enormous amounts of money. 107. See, for example, Mañana 355 (17 June 1950), which is composed of 310 pages on Alemán’s trip to the southeast; issues were normally around one hundred pages. Two months later, another entire issue was dedicated to Alemán’s tour of the north (Mañana 362 [5 August 1950]). 108. Mañana 366 (2 September 1950): 6. 109. “La Primera Dama regala 17,000 estufas el Día de las Madres,” Hoy 325 (15 May 1943): 2. 110. Kozol, Life’s America. 111. Ibid., 6. 112. See Stuart Hall, “The Social Eye of Picture Post,” Working Papers in Cultural Studies 2 (spring 1972): 70–120. 113. Interview by John Mraz, 20 January 1999. 114. These are commonly referred to as gacetillas, and even opposition newspapers continue to run them today. In La Jornada, for example, they are indicated by putting the headline in italics. On this form of “news,” see Joe Keenan, “La Gacetilla: How Advertising Masquerades as News,” in Orme, A Culture of Collusion, 41–48. 115. Because the gacetillas were disguised as news in Hoy and Mañana, and are essentially indiscernible even for a trained eye, I consider them together with other illustrated articles in this chapter. 116. On the enormous profits that could be made on the “special editions,” see Blanco Moheno, Memorias, 273. 117. Hoy 75 (30 July 1938) and Hoy 91 (19 November 1938). 118. Mañana 2 (11 September 1943): 18. 119. See the discussion on the use of corruption to break the unions in Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s, 276–80. 120. The term charro has become synonymous for the government-controlled leaders who dominate Mexican labor unions. It derives from Jesús Díaz de León, who liked to dress in Mexican cowboy garb, and was imposed by Alemán as the boss of the railroad workers’ union in the 1948 charrazo (the takeover of a union by a charro). See the interview with Guillermo Treviño in my videotape, Made on Rails: A History of the Mexican Railroad Workers (1986), distributed by the Cinema Guild (New York). Niblo links the nickname to charrería, the festival of horsemanship linked to the old rural aristocracy (Mexico in the 1940s, 62).

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121. Mañana 388 (3 February 1951): 4. 122. See Luis Reygadas, Proceso de trabajo y acción obrera: historia sindical de los mineros de Nueva Rosita, 1929–1979 (Mexico City: INAH, 1988), 119, and La caravana del hambre: Ismael Casasola (Puebla and Pachuca: Universidad Autónoma de Puebla and Fototeca del INAH, 1986), 60. A great exception were the two photoreportages published in Hoy, with José Revueltas’s texts and Ismael Casasola’s images, during February before the caravan arrived in Mexico City; see Hoy 730 (17 February 1951) and Hoy 731 (24 February 1951). The texts are reproduced in the book on Ismael Casasola, along with a number of his photos. 123. Mañana 394 (17 March 1951): 8-F. 124. Cited in Daniel Molina, La Caravana del Hambre (Mexico City: Ediciones “El Caballito,” 1982), 68. 125. Hoy 75 (30 July 1938): 31–32. 126. “Los soldados del Ejército Nacional son también cumplidos trabajadores,” Hoy 78 (20 August 1938): 23–24. 127. Hoy 77 (13 August 1938). 128. Hoy 76 (6 August 1938): cover, 28–33. 129. Mañana 422 (29 September 1951): 14. 130. There were also regular sections dedicated to movies, literature, books, art, history, archaeology, science, music, and the radio, although these were smaller than the feature articles and tended to appear toward the back of the magazines. The essays on history essentially turned figures from the past into celebrities by focusing on the trivia of their lives, which were recounted in picturesque anecdotes. 131. Monsiváis, “Sociedad y cultura,” 274. 132. Carlos Monsivaís, “Los Hermanos Mayo: . . . y en una reconquista feliz de otra inocencia,” La cultura en México, supplement of Siempre! (12 August 1981): iv. 133. Salvador Novo, La vida en México en el periodo presidencial de Manuel Ávila Camacho (Mexico City: CNCA-INAH, 1994), 136. 134. “Para pachucos no hay servicio porque me caen gordos. This is the first film for which Cantinflas wrote the script, something he would not do again until Su excelencia (1966). His attitude here is no doubt conditioned by the popularity of the pachuco character developed by Tin Tan, above all in his films of the late 1940s, Calabacitas tiernas (1948) and El rey del barrio (1949). 135. Hoy 75 (30 June 1938): 24. 136. On “shock photos,” see Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 31. 137. In this case it was Andrei Vishinsky, USSR representative to the United Nations (Mañana 480 [8 November 1952]: 16). 138. Mañana 346 (15 April 1950); Mañana 381 (16 December 1950). 139. Hoy 694 (10 June 1950). 140. Mañana 366 (2 September 1950): 84; Mañana 385 (13 January 1951): 27. 141. Hoy 1 (27 February 1937): 5. 142. See Mañana, issues 5 through 10, (October–November 1943). 143. Hoy 218 (26 April 1941): 38.

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144. See Brian Horton, The Associated Press Photo-Journalism Stylebook (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1990). 145. See Mañana 362 (5 August 1950) and Mañana 381 (16 December 1951); Mañana 315 (10 September 1949). 146. Mañana 376 (11 November 1950). 147. Mañana 492 (31 January 1953): 18. 148. Felipe Morales, “Centinela del periodismo: Enrique Díaz, fotógrafo y hombre ejemplar,” Mañana 314 (3 September 1949): 28–36. 149. Hoy 959 (9 July 1955): 38; Mañana 718 (1 June 1957): 8. 150. Rodríguez published six photoessays on Mezquital, the tone of which can be seen in titles such as “The Hell of Which Dante Couldn’t Even Conceive,” “Rapes, Injustice, Plunder,” and “Thirst, Hunger, and Typhoid.” These appeared in issues 419 to 424 of Mañana (8 August 1951–13 October 1951). 151. Among the very few exceptions to the rule is the above-mentioned photoreportage by José Revueltas and Ismael Casasola on the “Caravan of Hunger.” 152. Mañana 454 (10 May 1952): 4-A, 10-A. 153. Mañana 402 (12 May 1951): 8. 154. Mañana 454 (10 May 1952). 155. I have taken this concept from Robin Anderson’s “Images of War: Photojournalism, Ideology, and Central America,” Latin American Perspectives 16, no. 2 (1989): 110. 156. The photo of the mother and son was originally published in a photoessay, “13 instantáneas,” Mañana 627 (3 September 1955): 105. There, those images that had been selected as the thirteen best Mayo photos were arranged year by year, from 1943 to 1955, as if they had been taken in the year to which they were assigned. The magazine’s disregard for journalistic truth can be seen in the fact that some of the photos, particularly this one of the mother and her son, were not taken in the year listed; further, the date of the first photo (1943) is, coincidentally, the year of Mañana’s founding rather than 1939, the year of the Mayos’ arrival in Mexico. David Alfaro Siqueiros later incorporated the photo of the grieving mother and dead son into a mural in the Jorge Negrete Theater, which he was commissioned to paint by the National Union of Actors in 1959. However, the mural provoked such controversy among the union members that he was never able to finish it; it was covered by a wall and destroyed. See Antonio Rodríguez, A History of Mexican Mural Paintings (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 407–8, where photographs of the mural are reproduced in plates 221, 222, and 223. 157. I questioned Julio Mayo about the use made of this image. Although he is usually passionate and outspoken, he just shrugged and indicated that this was so common as to make commentary unnecessary. In the same interview, however, he did indicate to me that he did not feel restricted in his work for Mañana, although he did underline that he understood perfectly that the interests involved would not permit criticism. For example, he once wanted to do a reportage on Coca-Cola, but the magazine would not allow it because of the fear of losing advertising revenue. Interview with Julio Mayo, 20 January 1999.

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158. Hoy 844 (25 April 1953): 5. 159. José Pagés Llergo, “Así nació Siempre!,” Siempre! 1 (27 June 1953): 54. 160. Ibid., 57. It is said that Adolfo Ruiz Cortines provided funds for the creation of this magazine, perhaps as a way of distancing himself from his predecessor, who had distanced himself from his predecessor. 161. Essays of opinion remain the strength of Mexican journalism. The only publication known for investigative reporting is Proceso. 162. Pagés Llergo, “Así nació Siempre!,” 54. 163. Pagés Llergo remarked explicitly that the Mexican press preferred freedom to “the slavery of chains of gold” in Siempre!’s first editorial, Siempre! 1 (26 June 1953): 8. Nonetheless, Pagés was above all discreet: when the image from Paris was published again on the first anniversary of Siempre!, the photo was cropped so as to eliminate the figure of Beatriz Alemán, and reversed to veil the manipulation (Siempre! 53 [26 July 1954]: 33). 164. Images of scantily clad women seem to be a standard fare of the illustrated magazines in general. See the first cover of Picture Post (1938), with its leggy women leaping in the air. Life was a firm practitioner of this tradition. According to John Florea, a Life photographer from 1943 to 1949, “Eighty percent of the covers on Life magazine in those days were women,” and managing editor Edward Thompson confirmed Florea’s intuition: “A cover must be just one of two things—attractive or startling. To millions a pretty girl is both” (John Loengard, LIFE Photographers: What They Saw [Boston: Little, Brown, 1998], 172). A cursory glance at the magazine revealed that more than half of Life covers in 1950 pictured pretty women. 165. Siempre! 262 (3 July 1958): cover. The incident was evidently much commented on in the press throughout the Americas; see Rodríguez Castañeda, Prensa vendida, 18. 166. The Mexican Association of Press Photographers participated in the 1946 exhibit. 167. Conversation with Antonio Rodríguez, 1991. 168. Rodríguez describes this exchange with “a high functionary of the Secretariat of Public Education,” in “Ases de la cámara. Fotógrafo admirable, compañero ejemplar, hombre excepcional. XIX. Enrique Díaz,” Mañana 165 (26 October 1946): 31. 169. See Antonio Rodríguez, Homenaje a los fotógrafos de prensa (México visto por los fotógrafos de prensa) (Mexico City: Asociación Mexicana de Fotógrafos de Prensa-Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1947). The exhibit, México visto por los fotógrafos de prensa, is referred to with other names, including Palpitaciones de la vida nacional and Primera exposición nacional de la fotografía de prensa. 170. The first group of article-interviews begins in Mañana 147 (22 June 1946) and runs until Mañana 165 (26 October 1946), and the second batch starts off in Mañana 425 (20 October 1951) and continues until Mañana 457 (31 May 1952). No author is indicated for the first lot, though they were probably the work of Antonio Rodríguez. In the second series, Rodríguez is identified as the author of the first eight essays, and Antoniorrobles is credited with the last twelve. There is a good deal of overlap between the two series, and many of the same photojournalists appear in both, for example, Ismael Casasola, Faustino Mayo, and Alfonso Carrillo.

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171. “Ases de la cámara. ‘Primero hago mi foto, después lo salvo!’ I. Manuel Montes de Oca,” Mañana 147 (22 June 1946): 38. 172. There are, in fact, relatively few articles in Hoy o Mañana that reflect on journalism. Moreover, the majority of those that do are either self-praise for the freedom of press in Mexico or complaints against the influence of foreign magazines. There are many more in Siempre!, and they are a good deal more serious. 173. Antonio Rodríguez, “Nacho López. El esteta de la fotografía periodística,” Mañana 431 (8 December 1951). López’s reputation for aesthetic expression was also noted in an overview of Mexican photojournalism, “Nacho López belongs to that reduced group of press photographers who are also real artists” (Marcos G. Larrain, “Historia de la fotografía de prensa,” Mañana 525 [19 September 1953]: 66). 174. Antonio Rodríguez, “Fotógrafo y vagabundo por vocación (Héctor García),” Mañana 429 (17 November 1951): 38. 175. “Ases de la cámara. Con una Leica en los frentes de peligro. IX. Faustino Mayo,” Mañana 156 (24 August 1946): 42. 176. Antonio Rodríguez, “Casasola, maestro de la fotografía satírica,” Mañana 425 (20 October 1951). 177. “Ases de la cámara. Ojo de Leica con las vibraciones de México. V. Francisco Mayo,” Mañana 152 (27 August 1946): 42. 178. “Ases de la cámara. Hijo, sobrino, hermano, padre y tío de fotógrafos. XI. Agustín Casasola Jr.,” Mañana 157 (31 August 1946): 21; “Ases de la cámara. ¡Aquí están las fotos!, dijo, y se entregó a la policía. II. Ismael Casasola,” Mañana 148 (29 June 1946): 38. 179. “Ases de la cámara. Un fotógrafo que está donde las balas silban. IV. Luis Zendejas,” Mañana 150 (13 July 1946): 32; “Ases de la cámara. Un fotógrafo que ha andado siempre entre balazos. III. Aurelio Montes de Oca,” Mañana 149 (6 July 1946): 71. 180. Antoniorrobles, “¡Afición al peligro! (Manuel Montes de Oca),” Mañana 452 (26 March 1952); Antonio Rodríguez, “La vida por una foto. (Tomás Montero),” Mañana 431 (1 December 1951). 181. The chaotic street fighting that destroyed much of Bogotá, Colombia, during the 1948 protests over the killing of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán is known as the Bogotazo. 182. Antoniorrobles, “Una película de aventuras (Felipe Martínez),” Mañana 445 (8 March 1952) and “Cazador de noticias (Armando Zaragoza),” Mañana 447 (22 March 1952). 183. Antoniorrobles, “¡Afición al peligro!” 39. 184. “Ases de la cámara. Fotógrafo admirable, compañero ejemplar, hombre excepcional. XIX. Enrique Díaz,” 28. 185. Antoniorrobles, “Fotos habladas (Enrique Díaz),” Mañana 444 (1 March 1952): 52. 186. Humberto Musacchio maintains that only with the arrival of the Hermanos Mayo in 1939 does “the press photographer, until then anonymous, begin to receive the credit his work deserves” (“Apuntes para un árbol genealógico,” in Fotografía de prensa en México: 40 reporteros gráficos [Mexico City: Procuraduría General de la República, 1992], 94). Nevertheless, that is not the case in Hoy, where the photojournalists generally received credit in the 1930s, especially the “stars.”

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187. Díaz was “chief of graphic information.” Giving Díaz this position was no doubt a way of honoring him for his long service and warm comradeship, as it was his last year before retiring.

3. Photoessays by Nacho López 1. “Noche de muertos,” photos and text by Nacho López, Mañana 377 (18 November 1950): 35–41. “Noche de muertos” is the night part of the Day of the Dead, or All Souls’ Day, which is celebrated on 2 November. I have reproduced, in translation, the credits for the photoessays as they were published in the magazines. Unless otherwise indicated, the phrases cited come from the photo captions or text of the essay that I am analyzing; although I have attempted to respect the meanings generated, I have combined phrases to make them more legible. 2. See, for example, “La fiesta de los muertos,” text: Ignacio Mendoza Rivera, photos: Julio Mayo, Mañana 586 (20 November 1954); “Vísperas de muertes,” Luis Suárez, photos: Faustino Mayo, Mañana 637 (12 November 1955); “¿Fiesta o drama en Mixquic?” Text: Luis Suárez, photos: Julio Mayo, Mañana 742 (16 November 1957). 3. See García’s photo in Héctor García: Camera Oscura (Veracruz: Gobierno de Veracruz, 1992), 37; and the images of Reuter in Walter Reuter: 60 años de fotografía y cine, 1930–1990 (Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, 1992), 111–15. The photoessay in which Casasola participated was “Pátzcuaro: noche de muertos,” Raúl de la Cruz, photos: Casasola, Hoy 1028 (3 November 1956). The photographers for Hoy in those years were Ismael Casasola and Ismael Casasola Jr.; it is unclear which of the two is here involved. 4. “Ases de la cámara. ¡Aquí están las fotos!, dijo, y se entregó a la policía,” Mañana 148 (29 June 1946): 38; Antonio Rodríguez, “30 años de aventuras al servicio del periodismo!” Hoy 696 (24 June 1950): 30. 5. See images of Duby Blom, Fabila, and de la Fuente in Jaime Vélez Storey et al., El ojo de vidrio. Cien años de fotografía del México indio (Mexico City: Bancomext, 1993). 6. “To the Mexican there are only two possibilities in life: either he inflicts the actions implied by chingar others, or else he suffers them himself at the hands of others” (Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico, trans. Lysander Kemp [New York: Grove Press, 1961], 78). 7. See Alan Knight, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–1940,” in The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940, ed. Richard Graham (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). 8. See the observations of James C. Faris, “Photography, Power and the Southern Nuba” and “A Political Primer on Anthropology/Photography,” in Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), as well as his pathbreaking book, Navajo and Photography: A Critical History of the Representation of an American People (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996). 9. Alan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” Massachusetts Review 19, no. 4 (winter 1978): 865. 10. Interview with Rodrigo Moya, 1999.

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11. According to Nacho López, men are excluded by tradition from participating in this ceremony on Janitzio. Undated comments on 1956 exhibit. ADFLB. 12. Undated comments on 1956 exhibit. ADLFB. 13. The same might be observed of the reigning photojournalist in the world today, Sebastião Salgado, who began his career reproducing the picturesque paradigm, and eventually rejected it. 14. Nacho López, “El indio en la fotografía,” México indígena (“Número especial de aniversario: INI 30 años después, revisión crítica”) (December 1978): 330. 15. See Vélez Storey et al., El ojo de vidrio, 123, 131. 16. Observation to the author of Ignacio Gutiérrez Ruvalcaba, May 1994. 17. “Ante el umbral del silencio,” texts and photos by Nacho López, Mañana 452 (26 May 1952): 28–35. 18. Undated comments on 1956 exhibit. ADFLB. 19. López, “El indio en la fotografía,” 330–31. 20. See Los rumbos del tiempo. Nacho López (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1997). 21. “Prisión de sueños,” reportage by Carlos Argüelles, photos: Nacho López, Mañana 378 (25 November 1950): 30–39. There are some insignificant exceptions, for example, the three-part series “Ésta es Itzamkanac, tumba de Cuauhtémoc,” which appeared in Mañana 416, 417, and 418, during August and September of 1951. Nonetheless, López’s images in this series are simple illustrations without any interest. 22. Mariana Yampolsky stated that what was most novel about López’s photography was his work on Mexico City (conversation, September 1994). 23. See Agustín Víctor Casasola: Fotografía y prisión, 1900–1935 (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1991). 24. John Mraz, “Close-up: An Interview with the Hermanos Mayo [May Day Brothers], Spanish-American Photojournalists (1930s–present),” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 11 (1992): 207–8. 25. “Donde el infierno quedo atrás,” Jaime Morales, photos: Faustino Mayo, Mañana 588 (4 December 1954). Ismael Casasola did several photoessays on women and children in prison, published in Hoy during May and June of 1938, but they are uninteresting. 26. See Emilio García Riera, Historia documental del cine mexicano (Mexico City: Era, 1972), 4:75. 27. Ibid., 392. 28. Although one important theme in López’s archive is “The sacred and the profane.” 29. Undated comments on 1956 exhibit. ADFLB. 30. Yo, el ciudadano: Nacho López (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1984), 24. 31. Nigel Warburton, “Authentic Photographs,” British Journal of Aesthetics 37, no. 2 (April 1997): 130, 134. 32. “The Black Palace,” Life (3 March 1950); Life (3 October 1960): 47. 33. “Virgen india,” by Ángel Fernando Solana, photos: Nacho López, Mañana 381 (16 December 1950): 30–37.

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34. Eisenstaedt’s photo may have been published in Life, as it is listed as the copyright holder (1944) in Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989), 468. 35. References to “the profane” throughout the photoessay, typical of López’s language, make me think that he must have written the cutlines. 36. The image of the man drinking pulque offers one instance of the way in which the magazine changed the meaning of López’s photos on republishing them. The cutline here says, “Fragrant neutle, Indian physiognomy, absolute unconcern. After the material pleasures will come the spiritual discipline that balances and comforts.” In 1957 and 1958, this photo was used in Mañana to illustrate two articles on the problems of alcoholism: Mañana 725 (20 July 1957): 47 and Mañana 764 (19 April 1958): 60. Pulque is a fermented drink made from cactus, and is about as strong as beer; gorditas are a fried food. 37. “México místico,” texts and photos by Nacho López, Hoy 838 (14 March 1953): 28–35. 38. When I discussed Nacho López’s position on religion and the Catholic church with Lucero Binnqüist, she made the following encapsulation. It appears that he was very interested in religions, read about them in some depth, and was very respectful of believers, though he had no relation with the Catholic church. He had been married outside the church to his first wife and, when he was to marry Lucero, her parents insisted that they get married in the church. Although he did not wish to marry in a church, he accepted. However, as Nacho had never taken his first communion, it was necessary for him to study with a priest in order to become a member of the church so that he could then marry. 39. “La calle lee,” a graphic reportage by Nacho López, Mañana 382 (23 December 1950): 30–37; “Yo también he sido niño bueno,” a reportage by Nacho López, Mañana 383 (30 December 1950): 20–26. 40. Rodrigo Mayo said that López exuded confidence in dealing with the editors of the illustrated magazines, with whom he got along famously (interview with Moya, 1999). See the letter of 17 March 1952 by Daniel Morales, director of Mañana, who wrote to his friend G. Beckman, the head of the telephone company, asking that they install a line for “our exclusive photographer.” ADFLB. 41. See the section titled Nacho López’s Mexico in chapter 4. The boy is apparently posing for López, because several different negatives of the scene exist. 42. Artes de México 58/59 (1964). López’s essay included parts of cutlines and texts from his photoessays in the illustrated magazines. That the leading publication of the art world would devote a double issue to his photography and prose is a testimony to his work. This essay was later used as the preface to the book Yo, el ciudadano. 43. It would be a formidable if not impossible task to document the multiple uses to which this image has been put. 44. On the photo and the prize, see Pepe Grillo, “Vivir para ver,” Más 17 (25 December 1947). Anne Rubenstein noted the adult literacy campaigns in Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 15.

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45. See this photo in Mraz, “Close-up,” 207. 46. Roger Bartra, La jaula de la melancolía. Identidad y metamorfosis del mexicano (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1987), 110; my translation. 47. The photographs were taken in different places over a period of three years, having been shot in Venezuela and Panama during 1948, as well as in Mexico during 1949 and 1950. To judge from López’s notes on the 1956 exhibition, several of the images were taken on dates far outside the Christmas season. 48. “Ángeles con caras sucias,” Mañana 374 (28 October 1950); Alberto del Razo, “Los otros niños,” Mañana 400 (28 April 1951). 49. “Una Navidad mejor,” Mañana 591 (25 December 1954). 50. Luis Suárez, “Semblante del dolor y la alegría,” Mañana 640 (3 December 1955): 32. 51. Antonio Rodríguez, “Nacho López: el esteta de la fotografía periodística,” Mañana 431 (8 December 1951): 43. 52. In Mexico of the 1950s, the Night of the Magi (the Wise Men/Kings) was the occasion for giving and receiving presents much more frequently than Christmas. 53. “Noche de Reyes,” texts by Carlos Argüelles, photos by Nacho López, Mañana 385 (13 January 1951): 12–15. 54. “Reparto de juguetes en el estadio,” Hoy 254 (3 January 1942): 18; “Un regalo de reyes,” Mañana 542 (16 January 1954). See the child who is delighted with the new shoes brought him by the First Lady, Hoy 986 (14 January 1956): 11. See also the photo from the Casasola Archive of the First Lady giving gifts to campesino children around 1920 in Los niños. Exposición fotográfica (Mexico City: Fototeca del INAH, 1984), 15. 55. “Juguetes a los niños pobres,” Así 60 (3 January 1942): 9. 56. “Una vez fuimos humanos,” texts: Carlos Argüelles, photos: Nacho López, Mañana 393 (10 March 1951): 44–51. 57. See, for example, “¡En pleno infierno!” Enrique Navarro Zimbron, photos: Faustino Mayo, Más 3 (18 September 1947); “¡Barrio maldito!” Antonio Ibarra, photos: Faustino Mayo, Mañana 436 (5 January 1952); “La barranca de ‘los millonarios,’” Antonio Ibarra, photos: G. Y. Massart, Mañana 675 (4 August 1956); “La feria de los diablitos,” texts: Divinia Muñoz, photos: Julio Mayo, Mañana 705 (2 March 1957); “La Periquera, viviendas de 10 pesos mensuales de renta,” texts: Antonio Ibarra, photos: Julio Mayo, Mañana 799 (20 December 1958). 58. James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 308. 59. Robert Stam, “Hybridity and the Aesthetics of Garbage: The Case of Brazilian Cinema,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 9, no. 1 (theme issue on the topic “Visual Culture in Latin America,” Tel Aviv, 1998). 60. J. H. Matthews cites Ado Kyrou, who argues that the “dramatic architecture” of Las Hurdes is based on the structure of “yes, but” (J. H. Matthews, Surrealism and Film [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971], 111). 61. Luis Buñuel, Mi último suspiro, trans. Ana María de la Fuente (Mexico City: Plaza & Janes, 1982), 194.

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62. José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent, Luis Buñuel: prohibido asomarse al interior (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1986), 60. 63. Buñuel, Mi último suspiro, 196; de la Colina and Pérez Turrent, Luis Buñuel, 62. Article 33 is the constitutional law that permits the expulsion of foreigners who meddle in Mexican politics. Perhaps its most famous victim was Tina Modotti, expelled in 1930. Gachupin is a denigratory term applied to Spaniards, particularly of the shopkeeper variety. Julio and Faustino Mayo talk about what it meant to be called Gachupines, and how they insisted on being referred to as “refugees” (refugiados), in John Mraz and Jaime Vélez Storey, Uprooted: Braceros in the Hermanos Mayo Lens (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996), 21, and Mraz, “Close-up,” 208–9. 64. Buñuel, Mi último suspiro, 195. 65. An interesting case is outlined in chapter 4: that of the poor farmer who participated in Arthur Rothstein’s famous image “Fleeing a Dust Storm.” James Curtis has shown how the presence of the Farm Security Administration agent at the scene no doubt encouraged the farmer to cooperate in hopes of receiving loans. See James Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 87–88. 66. “Filósofos de la noticia,” texts: Luis Gutiérrez y González, photos: Nacho López, Mañana 396 (31 March 1951): 34–41. 67. I have found no other illustrated article on this theme. However, it is worth mentioning that, among the few critical images in the Casasola Archive are some interesting ones of newspaperboys sleeping on the sidewalk outside the press; see Los niños, 28, 48–52. 68. The officialism of the Casa del Voceador can be seen in the fact that Ruiz Cortines headed up the celebration of its third anniversary. See Rafael Rodríguez Castañeda, Prensa vendida: Los periodistas y los presidentes: 40 años de relaciones (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1993), 36. 69. “Fiesta en Nicaragua,” photos by Nacho López, Mañana 383 (30 December 1951): 51–54; “Rafael Ávila Camacho,” photos: Nacho López, Mañana 389 (10 February 1951): 41–52; “6 millones por hora,” by Carlos Roman Celis, Mañana 388 (3 February 1951): 14–17. 70. Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism,” 865. 71. “Somoza: Deportista de América,” Mañana 381 (16 December 1950); Mañana 420 (15 September 1951). 72. Mañana 734 (21 September 1957). 73. Hoy 729 (10 February 1951). 74. José Emilio Pacheco, Las batallas en el desierto (Mexico City: Era, 1981), 10. 75. See John Mraz, “The New Photojournalism of Mexico, 1976–1998,” History of Photography 22, no. 4 (winter 1998): 344; and the 1984 photos of PRI politicians taken by Andrés Garay, a Nachito (a “little Nacho,” as López’s students are known), in El poder de la imagen y la imagen del poder. Fotografías de prensa del porfiriato a la época actual (Chapingo: Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, 1985), 171. 76. Mraz, “The New Photojournalism,” 336–37. It appears that Ismael Casasola took a “very sarcastic” photo of a PAN candidate in Nuevo León, Antonio L. Rodríguez, which was “the final blow to his political career”; see Antonio Rodríguez, “Casasola, maestro de la

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fotografía satírica,” Mañana 425 (20 October 1951): 21. PAN is the Partido de Acción Nacional. It was the first real opposition party, and continues today as the right-wing alternative to the PRI. Given Ismael Casasola’s social consciousness, at least that which can be seen in his photos of the 1951 Miners’ Hunger March, it is understandable that he would make a critical photo of a PAN politician; the officialism of the media ensured that it got published. 77. Nacho López took other photos of Puebla at the same time, above all on the textile industry, for the article “Puebla: metrópoli de la industria textil,” by Antonio Ibarra, which was published in the same issue of Mañana (389) as the reportage on Rafael Ávila Camacho; the photographs were not credited. There are no critical images in this file of the archive. 78. Mraz, “The New Photojournalism,” 341. 79. “Profesionales de lo insólito,” by Guido Reni, photos: Nacho López, Mañana 392 (3 March 1951): 36–43. 80. “El mexicano,” Mañana 420 (15 September 1951): 83–232. 81. “Pregón del tianguis,” a reportage by Nacho López, Mañana 424 (13 October 1951): 30–37. 82. The photographer placed this negative in the series “The sacred and the magical,” as he noted on the envelope containing it. 83. Guillermo Bonfil, México profundo (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1987). 84. “Pasos en el cielo,” photos: Faustino Mayo, Nacho López, texts: Carlos Argüelles, Mañana 426 (27 October 1951): 32–43. 85. The discussion of whether the photo of the Republican soldier is staged or not is a long one, which I deal with in the last chapter as part of a discussion of quasi-journalistic photography. 86. Gerda Taro was crushed by a tank in 1937 during the Spanish civil war; David Seymour (Chim) was killed by machine-gun fire in 1956 at the end of the Suez Canal War; and Werner Bischof died on the same day as Capa, when his car plunged off a cliff in Peru. W. Eugene Smith was seriously wounded in 1945, during the war in the Pacific. 87. See the discussion of these forty article-interviews in chapter 2. 88. Discussions of the differences between these photographers, as well as some illustrative images, can be found in Guimond, American Photography; Naomi Rosenblum and Walter Rosenblum, “Camera Images of Labor—Past and Present,” in The Other America: Art and the Labour Movement in the United States, ed. Philip S. Foner and Reinhard Schultz (London: Journeyman Press, 1985); Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1986). 89. The influence of López’s photography (or of Modernism itself ) can be seen in the incorporation of a shot up into the skyscraper’s frame in a film made three years later, Dos mundos y un amor (Alfredo Crevenna, 1954), a melodrama about an architect who was determined to design the tallest building in Mexico. 90. The Mayo photo appeared on the cover of the exhibit’s catalog, Asamblea de ciudades (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes, 1992).

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91. Another possibility is that the coverage by Mañana of the battle between the official union thugs and independent workers during May Day of 1952 had affected Nacho López. This incident is discussed in chapter 2. 92. “Cuando el pueblo compra en la carpa una ilusión,” photos and texts by Nacho López, Hoy 814 (27 September 1952): 30–35. 93. Jeffrey Pilcher provides an introduction to carpa theater in Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2001), 23–28. 94. Eisenstaedt’s image of the Parisian children is reprinted in Richard Lacayo and George Russell, Eyewitness: 150 Years of Photojournalism (New York: Oxmoor House, 1990), 153. 95. See André Kertész (Cologne: Könemann and Aperture, 1997), 69. 96. “Cuando una mujer guapa parte plaza por Madero,” Siempre! 1 (27 June 1953): 22–24. The photoessays in Siempre! often placed the photographer’s name in the text, rather than in a byline. 97. On the moralina of Ruiz Cortines and Uruchurtu, which led to a generalized repression of cultural life, including book burnings, see Armando Bartra, “Papeles ardientes: ublicaciones galantes y censura en el medio siglo,” Luna Córnea 11 (1997). 98. See the discussion in chapter 2 of López’s 1956 exhibit at the Organization of American States. One of the articles attacking López, by an Abogado Patalarga (Lawyer Longlegs), appeared in Novedades (11 November 1956), and refers to Matty Huitrón (also spelled Maty and Mati) as a bataclana. A bataclán is a house of prostitution, though usually of the type with parties and dancing. ADFLB. According to Emilio García Riera, Huitrón appeared in a total of three films during 1952 and 1953; as she is not listed in any casts before or after those years, her cinema career must have been short (Historia documental del cine mexicano [Mexico City: Era, 1973], vol. 5). More recently, Matty Huitrón reappeared when the news agency, Notimex, used this photo as the poster celebrating the agency’s twenty-fifth anniversary. According to Notimex, she has been an actress on stage and in television soap operas (telenovelas). See “A su paso, por la calle,” El hilo de Notimex 5 (June 1994). I am grateful to Francisco Mata Rosas for providing me with the Notimex publication. Huitrón is currently attempting to claim the rights to the images of her made by Nacho López, and has filed a suit making these photos unavailable to the public. 99. A piropo is a flirtatious remark by men directed toward women, usually made in the street. 100. A short discussion of this photo’s history, and a reproduction, can be found in Ruth Orkin, A Photo Journal (New York: Viking Press, 1981), 90. On Orkin, see Naomi Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1994). See also Shaun Considine, “Candid or Contrived? The Making of a Classic,” New York Times, 30 April 1995, section 2, 38. The photo can be seen at www.orkinphoto.com/ amergirl.html. 101. Considine, “Candid or Contrived?” 38. 102. Orkin, A Photo Journal, 90. 103. Interview with Daniel Mendoza, Xalapa, Veracruz, 1991.

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104. Rosenblum, Women Photographers, 226. 105. Considine, “Candid or Contrived?” 106. The negatives indicate that López was shooting from a considerable distance, hence the men’s reponse is to the woman, not to the photographer. 107. “Sólo hubo una persona honrada,” Siempre! 2 (4 July 1953): 22–25. 108. “Pero es que hay tanta gente en México que no tiene que hacer?” Siempre! 4 (18 June 1953): 16–19. 109. “La venus se fue de juerga por los barrios bajos,” Siempre! 5 (25 July 1953): 16–19. 110. La Jornada, 16 December 1998, 19, and La Jornada, 13 April 1995, 22. 111. Mike Weaver and Anne Hammond, “William Eggleston: Treating Things Existentially,” History of Photography 17, no. 1 (spring 1993): 56. 112. Mark Haworth-Booth, “William Eggleston: An Interview,” History of Photography 17, no. 1 (spring 1993): 49. 113. Robert Frank, The Americans (New York: SCALO Publishers, 1993), 11, 37. This book was originally published in Paris (1958) and New York (1959). 114. López’s strategy of “previsualization” is discussed in chapter 4. 115. “México acostumbra echarse una copa a las dos de la tarde,” Siempre! 4 (18 July 1953): 24–25. 116. The beer may well have been paid for by López, as there are three negatives of this man drinking, a clear indication that he was collaborating with the photographer. 117. Nacho had quite the reputation for spending long periods with friends in the Tunnel (El túnel), a cantina whose name is also a metaphor for being on a lengthy binge. Eleazar López Zamora has wondered if all Nacho’s best ideas were not the product of conversations in the Tunnel. 118. Stephen Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 15. 119. “Sólo los humildes van al infierno,” text and photos by Nacho López, Siempre! 52 (19 June 1954): 20–25. This photoessay has been reproduced in John Mraz, “Today, Tomorrow and Always: The Golden Age of Illustrated Magazines in Mexico, 1937–1960,” in Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940, ed. Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 143–48. Mexico City is divided into political-judicial areas called delegaciones. When someone is arrested, jurisdiction over them is assigned to the delegación in which they committed their crime; if people want to report a crime, they go to the delegación in which it occurred. The delegaciones are police stations, with holding cells, as well as political entities. 120. Quoted in Marianne Fulton, “Bearing Witness: The 1930s to the 1950s,” in Eyes of Time: Photojournalism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 136. 121. Marianne Fulton, “Changing Focus: the 1950s to the 1980s,” in Eyes of Time, 181. 122. Quoted in William S. Johnson, “Public Statements/Private Views: Shifting the Ground in the 1950s,” in Observations: Essays on Documentary Photography, ed. David Featherstone (Carmel, Calif.: Friends of Photography, 1984), 90. 123. Seth Fein, “Transcultural Anticommunism: Cold War Hollywood in Postwar

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Mexico,” in Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video, ed. Chon Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 98. 124. Más 6, 7, and 15 (9 October 1947; 16 October 1947; 11 December 1947); “La policía, cáncer de México,” Hoy 665 (19 November 1949): 7; “La policía, el cáncer de México,” Siempre! 40 (27 March 1954): 8. 125. Julián Sorel, “Noches con huella. Danza de los 7 pecados capitales,” Hoy 884 (30 January 1954). 126. Luc Boltansky, “La retórica de la figura,” in La fotografía: un arte intermedio, ed. Pierre Bourdieu, trans. Tununa Mercado (Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1979), 195. 127. The negative for this photo appears together with those from the 1950 photoessay “Prisión de sueños,” and it is possible that he utilized an earlier image in “Sólo los humildes.” This suspicion is heightened by the fact that a note appears on one of the envelopes of an unused negative shot for “Sólo los humildes”—“P/ sustituir de las Rejas” (To be substituted for the one of the bars)—which would seem to indicate that he was thinking of replacing the woman behind the bars with another negative that had been taken in the delegaciones. 128. Carlos Monsivaís, “Tin Tán: es el pachuco un sujeto singular,” Intermedios 4 (October 1992): 9. The term was evidently an insult in itself, at least for Cantinflas. When the comic wanted to insult a ruffian in Puerta . . . jóven (Manuel Delgado, 1949), he said, staring at the man, “I don’t know what I’ve got in my eye, because I can’t see anything but pachucos.” 129. This final sentence is one of the most explicit references in the essay’s cutlines to class differences, and to the fact that the rich do not have to appear in the delegaciones. Given this emphasis, it is worthy of note that the woman on the far left has bare feet, an immediate indicator of class difference, which have been almost completely cropped in the magazine’s reproduction. 130. This woman appears in Photo 40, where she is described as a mother whose child has been beaten, and in another image, where it states that it is she who was beaten. 131. The ratio for “Noches de muertos” is 3 to 1, and that of “Una vez fuimos humanos” is 4 to 1. 132. Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism,” 875. 133. “El drama de los niños desválidos,” by Luis Suárez, photos: Nacho López, Mañana 645 (7 January 1956): 19–23; “El lastre humano de las mujeres abandonadas,” by Luis Suárez, photos: Nacho López, Mañana 646 (14 January 1956): 38–42; “¡Asalto a la corte de los milagros!” by Luis Suárez, photos: Nacho López, Mañana 647 (21 January 1956): 29–35. 134. “La vida privada de un mendigo de tantos,” Siempre! 6 (1 July 1953): 20–23. 135. “Las mil caras de la ciudad,” Mañana (1958–60?): 29–43. It has so far proved impossible to identify the exact date of the latter essay as a result of fact that issues of Mañana are missing from the three major hemerotecas consulted: the Hemeroteca Nacional, the Hemeroteca de Hacienda, and the Hemeroteca of the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Comparing some of the published photos makes it clear that it is post-1956. The undated copy I have is from the Fototeca del INAH.

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The “Corte de los milagros” is an ironic term applied to a gathering of beggars who have been organized into a sort of mafia. 136. See his letter of 21 January 1957 to José Gómez Sicre and his letter of 8 February 1965 to the Mexican Association of Press Photographers. Both letters indicate that he stopped collaborating in the illustrated magazines at the beginning of 1957. ADFLB. 137. The exhibits and book were realized throughout the rest of López’s life, and in different forms. The earliest major result was the double issue of Artes de México dedicated to López’s photography (“Yo, el ciudadano,” Artes de México 58/59 [1964]). 138. “Nacho López presenta México, D.F.,” Siempre! 280 (5 November 1958): 44–47. A previous article had appeared on the San Carlos dance in Hoy 979 (12 November 1955). 139. “Un día cualquiera en la vida de la ciudad,” Siempre! 262 (3 July 1958): 72–79. 140. See Henning Hansen, Myth and Vision: On the Walk to Paradise Garden and the Photography of W. Eugene Smith (Lund: ARIS, University of Lund, 1987), 5. Smith’s photo was published in Hoy 563 (5 September 1953): 22; it was evidently so well known that it did not require being credited to Smith! 141. Lucero Binnqüist stated that Nacho López had lost his fascination for Mexico City in the late 1950s, as it became dangerous to go out with cameras in the night. 142. On the Henriquista movement and the repression of 7 July 1952, see Carlos Martínez Assad, El henriquismo, una piedra en el camino (Mexico City: Martin Casillas Editores, 1982), and Elisa Servín, “La matanza de la Alameda: Recuento de un olvido,” La Jornada Semanal 162 (19 July 1992). 143. Yo, el ciudadano, 38. In this book the photo is identified as belonging to the 1958 strikes, but this is an error because the two negatives of this man being grabbed by the police both are located in the section of López’s photo archive belonging to the repression of the Henriquistas, instead of being filed with the 126 photos of the 1958–59 strikes. 144. This photo may well have been staged in collaboration with a woman friend. 145. Cri-Cri (Gavilondo Soler) was for many years the most famous author and singer of children’s music in Mexico. 146. That López used women to represent the rich, and men to embody the poor, was probably a result of the fact that, if you are going to photograph the wealthy, the women are less dangerous than the men. Of course, the “wealthy women” may well be posing (in both this photo and that of the woman with the fur stole), just as the poor men could have been convinced to collaborate by the case of beer that they share. 147. Shifra M. Goldman, Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 173. 148. “Mientras México duerme el vicio anda suelto,” Siempre! 330 (21 October 1959): 72–77. 149. See José Agustín, Tragicomedia mexicana 1: La vida en México de 1940 a 1970 (Mexico City: Planeta, 1991), 105; and the interview with Margo Su by José Ramón Enríquez, “Margo Su no quiere morir,” La Jornada Semanal 213 (11 July 1993): 5. 150. Roberto Blanco Moheno, Memorias de un reportero (Mexico City: Libro-Mex Editores, 1965), 157.

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151. Roberto Blanco Moheno, La noticia detrás de la noticia (Mexico City: author’s edition, 1966), 322. 152. See “Nacho López. Curriculum Vitae.” ADFLB. 153. Interview with Alfonso Muñoz, 1999.

4. Thinking about Documentary 1. See, among others, Tim Gidal, Modern Photojournalism: Origin and Evolution, 1910–1933 (New York: Macmillan, 1973); Arthur Rothstein, Documentary Photography (Boston: Focal Press, 1986); and Paul Almasy, La photo à la une. Qu’est-ce que le photojournalisme? (Paris: Éditions de CFPJ, 1980). The texts of Alfred Eisenstaedt were collected in Eisenstaedt on Eisenstaedt (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985). Photo editors have also produced some useful work; see Wilson Hicks, Words and Pictures: An Introduction to Photojournalism (New York: Harper, 1952), and John G. Morris, Get the Picture: A Personal History of Photojournalism (New York: Random House, 1998). 2. Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself: The Autobiography of Margaret BourkeWhite (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985); Robert Capa, Slightly Out of Focus (New York: Henry Holt, 1947); Kent Cooper, Kent Cooper and the Associated Press (New York: Random House, 1959); David Douglas Duncan, Yankee Nomad (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966); Arnold Genthe, As I Remember (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1936); John C. Hemment, Cannon and Camera (New York: Appleton, 1898); Dmitri Kessel, On Assignment: Dmitri Kessel, Life Photographer (New York: Abrams, 1985); Felix H. Man, Man with Camera (New York: Schocken Books, 1984); Don McCullin, Unreasonable Behaviour: An Autobiography (London: Vintage Books, 1990); Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel, Simple Life: Photographs from America, 1929–1971 (Stuttgart: Schmetterling Verlag, 1991); Carl Mydans, More Than Meets the Eye (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959); John Phillips, Free Spirit in a Troubled World (Zurich: Scalo, 1996); P. H. F. “Bill” Tovey, Action with a Click (London, Herbert Jenkins, 1940). 3. Cándido Mayo, Yo soy la opinión pública (Mexico City: Ediciones Prisma, 1982). Francisco Mata Rosas is the most articulate of the New Photojournalists; see “El ensayo documental en el contexto de las nuevas tecnologías, tendencias y usos de la fotografía,” in Crónicas fotográficas, ed. Alberto Tovalín (Xalapa: Gobierno del Estado de Veracruz, 1995), and “Documentary Photography,” a lecture given in 1995, and available at www.zonezero.com. 4. Nacho López, “22 lecciones sobre la fotografía.” ADLFB. 5. I have discussed the development of an independent press in Mexico in “The New Photojournalism of Mexico, 1976–1998,” History of Photography 22, no. 4 (winter 1998). 6. Eleazar López Zamora has described Georg Lukács as the main influence on Nacho López. 7. Untitled manuscript that begins with the phrase “Desearía saber cuántos de los presentes son fotógrafos,” 5. ADLFB. 8. “Laberintos fotográficos.” ADLFB. 9. “‘La fotografía más valedera como arte-documento surge ahora del periodismo’,

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afirma Nacho López,” Excelsior, 28 October 1975, 8-B; Macario Matus, “Ignacio López: La fotografía encierra el intento de encontrar la conciencia del hombre,” El Día, 28 October 1975. Nacho is “fudging” a bit here, because he was never really a reporter, and Álvarez Bravo did do “features” on one or another occasion for the illustrated magazines. 10. Mention of the “critical artist” can be found in “Análisis y perspectiva del Primer Coloquio Latinoamericano de Fotografía,” evidently given as a talk at the Museum of Modern Art (27 June 1978). On “combative art,” see the untitled manuscript that begins with the phrase “Desearía saber cuántos de los presentes son fotógrafos,” 5. The passage “I avoid the word ‘artistic’” (“evito la palabra ‘artístico’”) can be found in Nacho López, “Introspectiva,” 1. ADLFB. On “graphic vitality” (grafismo vital), see López’s article “De la fotografía como grafismo vital,” Unomásuno, 12 March 1979, 19. ADFLB. 11. “Fotografía y sociedad,” 3. ADFLB. 12. “Enfoque,” in Los trabajadores del campo y la ciudad (Mexico City: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, Económicos y Sociales, 1982), 7. 13. As late as 1980, López decried: “No hay costumbre por comprar fotografía,” “La Bienal Fotográfica y los caballos de hipódromo,” 1. ADFLB. 14. Shifra M. Goldman, Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 170–71. 15. Untitled manuscript that begins with the phrase “¿Qué lugar ocupa la fotografía en el arte?” 4. ADFLB. 16. “La Bienal Fotográfica y los caballos de hipódromo,” 2. ADFLB. 17. See “Los errores previsibles de la Primera Bienal Fotográfica Mexicana,” 6, and “Lo que pienso sobre ello” (“Conferencia, 3 de marzo de 1976, Museo de Arte Moderno”), Foto Zoom 137 (February 1987): 37. ADFLB. 18. Nacho López, “De obreros, sólo el 3 por ciento de las imágenes, en las muestras,” Unomásuno, September 1978; “Introspectiva,” 1. ADFLB. 19. “Fotografía y sociedad,” 3. ADFLB. 20. López said of those he considered the ten best photographers: “dominan su oficio impecablemente como expresión personal y para ganarse el sustento diario,” “10 grandes fotógrafos del mundo de hoy,” Foto Zoom 137 (February 1987): 36; “Arte fotográfico de Nacho López: Mi punto de partida,” 24 (place and date of publication unknown). INAH Fototeca. 21. Interview with Nacho López by Raquel Tibol (1981); reprinted in Raquel Tibol, Episodios fotográficos (Mexico City: Proceso, 1989), 174. 22. “10 grandes fotógrafos del mundo de hoy,” 36. 23. “‘La fotografía más valedera como arte-documento surge ahora del periodismo’, afirma Nacho López”; Dorothea Hahn, “La periodística, la mejor fotografía: Ignacio López,” Unomásuno, 17 October 1984, 19; Adriana Malvido, “En la fotografía el contenido está por encima de los elementos estéticos, en opinión de Nacho López,” Unomásuno, 8 April 1981. 24. “Conciencia óptica,” 5. ADFLB. 25. Emilio Fuego, “Dos propuestas de Nacho López,” Excelsior, 19 October 1984; “Condicionamientos actuales,” 4. ADFLB.

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26. “Duplicidad en los Premios Nacionales de Periodismo,” 5. ADFLB. 27. “Nacho López,” Angel Olmos, Heraldo Cultural (place and date of publication unknown). INAH Fototeca. On photography as a “second-class art,” see “Condicionamientos actuales,” 2. ADFLB. 28. Manuel Berman, “Nacho López: Fotógrafo desde los nueve años,” Punto y aparte (place and date of publication unknown). ADFLB. 29. Letter to Manuel Berman, 1 August 1980. ADFLB. López did not really return to working as a photojournalist. He did write in the newspaper Unomásuno, but the photography he did was basically for the government. 30. See “La Bienal Fotográfica y los caballos de hipódromo,” 1–2, “Conciencia óptica,” 4, and “Laberintos fotográficos,” 3. This latter manuscript appears to be related to the MS “Tienen ojos y no ven.” ADFLB. 31. “Condicionamiento actuales,” 3. ADFLB. 32. “El peso de la óptica,” 3. ADFLB. 33. “Conciencia óptica,” 3. ADFLB. 34. “10 grandes fotógrafos del mundo de hoy,” MS, 9. ADFLB. 35. Untitled manuscript that begins with the phrase “¿Qué lugar ocupa la fotografía en al arte?” 3. ADFLB. 36. “Conciencia óptica,” 5. ADFLB. 37. “Fotografía y sociedad,” 3. ADFLB. 38. “Conciencia óptica,” 5. ADFLB. 39. “Condicionamientos actuales,” 3. ADFLB. 40. “Análisis y perspectiva del Primero Coloquio Latinoamericano de Fotografía,” 2. ADFLB. 41. “El peso de la óptica,” 5, and “10 grandes fotógrafos del mundo de hoy,” MS, 2. ADFLB. 42. “Conciencia óptica,” 2. ADFLB. 43. He believed in the obligation of photojournalists to capture history on film, asserting that history is currently written in the images of photojournalists such as Agustín Víctor Casasola and los Hermanos Mayo (“La Bienal Fotográfica y los caballos de hipódromo,” 4). ADFLB. Hahn, “La periodística”; Juan Gonzalo Rose, “La fotografía artística en México: Nacho López,” Diorama de la Cultura (Excelsior), date unknown, and “Mi punto de partido,” 25. INAH Fototeca. 44. “Conciencia óptica,” 5. ADFLB. 45. “La fotografía ¿arte o testimonio?” Unomásuno, 24 March 1979. 46. Untitled manuscript that begins with the phrase “¿Qué lugar ocupa la fotografía en el arte?” 2, and “10 grandes fotógrafos del mundo de hoy,” MS, 2. ADFLB. 47. This statement is a combination of phrases taken from “Conciencia óptica,” 2, and “El peso de la óptica,” 2. ADFLB. 48. Interviews during the period 1992–98. 49. Interview with Lucero Binnqüist, Xalapa, February 1995. 50. Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 19.

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51. Patricia D. Leighten, “Critical Attitudes toward Overtly Manipulated Photography in the 20th Century,” Art Journal 37, no. 2 (1977–78): 138. 52. See the Introduction of Harold Evans, Pictures on a Page: Photojournalism, Graphics and Picture Editing (London: Pimlico, 1997). 53. See the interviews with Peter Stackpole and Martha Holmes in John Loengard, LIFE Photographers: What They Saw (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 64, 211. Life also published examples of the tabloids’ use of staged imagery as an obvious counterpoint to its own restraint; see “COMPOSOGRAPHS: Faked News Pictures in the New York ‘Graphic’ Brought U.S. Journalism to a Half-Century Low,” Life (2 January 1950): 95. 54. Interview with David Scherman in Loengard, LIFE Photographers, 115. In implying that artists would not be willing to stage scenes, but journalists would have no problem with that, Scherman may be intentionally ironic. 55. See Mraz, “The New Photojournalism of Mexico,” 355–56. 56. See A. D. Coleman, “The Directorial Mode: Notes Toward a Definition,” in Light Readings: A Photography Critic’s Writings, 1968–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 250. 57. Nigel Warburton, “Varieties of Photographic Representation: Documentary, Pictorial and Quasi-Documentary,” History of Photography 15, no. 3 (autumn 1991): 209. 58. Arthur Rothstein, “Direction in the Picture Story,” in The Complete Photographer, ed. Willard Morgan (New York: Education Alliance, 1943), 4:1356–63. This mail-order encyclopedia was published in small installments. 59. See Dona Schwartz, “To Tell the Truth: Codes of Objectivity in Photojournalism,” Communication 13 (1992): 95–109. 60. Leighten, “Critical Attitudes,” 133. 61. See ibid., as well as Constructed Realities: The Art of Staged Photographs, ed. Michael Kohler (Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1995), and Anne H. Hoy, Fabrications: Staged, Altered, and Appropriated Photographs (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987). 62. See Nic Nicosia’s image Like Photojournalism, in Kohler, Constructed Realities, 66. 63. Meyer refers to being “cornered by reality” in his essay “Los desafíos de la tecnología a la creación fotográfica latinoamericana contemporánea,” La Jornada Semanal 267 (24 July 1994): 25. 64. See Kohler, Constructed Realities, and Hoy, Fabrications. 65. Martha A. Sandweiss, Rick Stewart, and Ben W. Huseman, Eyewitness to War: Prints and Daguerreotypes of the Mexican War, 1846–1848 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 64. 66. This image can be seen in Imagen histórico de la fotografía en México (Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Historia, 1978), 39. The story is recounted in Rosa Casanova and Olivier Debroise, Sobre la superficie bruñida de un espejo: fotógrafos del siglo XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989), 33. 67. Photographs could not really be published in periodicals until the invention of the halftone process in 1880, and it is only in the 1890s that they become a regular feature. Prior to the 1890s, photographs served essentially as models for wood engravings and lithographs

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that appeared in national illustrated weeklies such as Illustrated News, Leslie’s Illustrated, and Harper’s Weekly. See Marianne Fulton, Eyes of Time: Photojournalism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 15. Martha Sandweiss notes that “no extant newspaper illustrations based on Mexican War daguerreotypes have been located.” And she asserts that, despite their importance as the very first photographs of war in the world, the surviving daguerreotypes of the Mexican War “do not mark the birth of modern photojournalism or the end of the lithograph’s importance as a conveyor of news and information” (Sandweiss, Stewart, and Huseman, Eyewitness to War, 64). 68. See an example of these photos in Peter Bacon Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839–1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 211. 69. See the photo, Heat Spell (23 May 1941), in Miles Barth, Weegee’s World (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997), 46. The description provided by Weegee’s assistant, Louis Liotta, of how the photographer went about staging this image can be found in Madeline Rogers, “The Picture Snatchers,” American Heritage 45, no. 6 (October 1994): 66. 70. Martha Rosler, “Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations: Some Considerations,” in Photography after Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age, ed. Hubertus v. Amelunxen, Stefan Iglhaut, and Florian Rötzer (Munich: G+B Arts, 1995), 38. For information about Life’s doubts, and the extraordinary reproductions this image has generated, see Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991), 143–44. See the photograph made of the first flag raising by Sergeant Louis Lowery of Leatherneck Magazine, in Evans, Pictures on a Page, 146. 71. See Peter Hamilton, Robert Doisneau: A Photographer’s Life (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995), 180, 354. 72. Some might feel that the FSA image makers would be better classified as “documentary photographers” than as “photojournalists.” Certainly, Roy Stryker would have argued this position: “Newspictures are the noun and the verb; our kind of photography is the adjective and the adverb” (interview with Stryker made in 1972 by Nancy Wood: Roy Emerson Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America 1935–1943 as Seen in the FSA Photographs [NewYork: Galahad Books, 1973], 8). Nonetheless, many of the FSA images were distributed in the mass media; see Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 108–9. 73. Interview with Stryker by Wood, in Stryker and Wood, In This Proud Land, 19. 74. James Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 47–67. Examples of some of the multiple uses to which this image has been put can be found in Goldberg, The Power of Photography, 140–41. 75. See the description in Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth, 71–89. 76. Rothstein, “Direction in the Picture Story,” 1360. It is worth noting that there is no evidence that this scene occurred during a dust storm, which would have made it almost impossible to photograph. Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth, provides an image of a real dust storm (80), as well as another Rothstein photo in which a man seems to be walking against the wind (86).

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77. Arthur Rothstein, “Setting the Record Straight,” Camera 35 22, no. 3 (April 1978): 51. 78. The first person to really begin to question the veracity of this image in print appears to have been Phillip Knightly, The First Casualty. From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 209–12. 79. See Jerry W. Knudson, “The Ultimate Weapon: Propaganda and the Spanish Civil War,” Journalism History 15, no. 4 (winter 1988): 102–11. 80. Tovey, Action with a Click, 248. 81. In a study carried out on all the Barcelona newspapers for the years 1936–37, it was determined that at least half of the photos published “were not really spontaneous, but had been prepared or mounted in some way.” See Josep Lluís Gómez Mompart, “L’Origen de la comunicació visual de masses (1936–1939),” Anàlisi 13 (1990): 135. I have discovered many instances of directed imagery in my research in the anarcho-syndicalist newspaper published in Barcelona before and during the civil war, Solidaridad obrera. On Centelles, see Agustí Centelles (1909–1985) Fotoperiodista (Barcelona: Fundació Caixa de Catalunya, 1988); the photographs reproduced on pages 89, 93, 125, and 137 offer examples of setups. In English, see the introduction to Centelles by J. R. Green, “Agustí Centelles: Spanish Civil War Photographer,” History of Photography 12, no. 2 (1988): 147–59; posed photographs are reproduced on pages 151 and 155. Capa and Gerda Taro apparently participated in photographing a mock attack on the village of La Granjuela in June of 1936; see Richard Whelan, Robert Capa: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 119. 82. This page from Vu is reproduced in Whelan, Robert Capa, 98. Caroline Brothers asserts, “To this author it appears highly likely that the Death of a Republican Soldier was in fact staged at least twice, by different soldiers, before a camera mounted on a tripod or held by a stationary photographer” (War and Photography: A Cultural History [London: Routledge, 1997], 183). 83. See Richard Whelan, Capa: cara a cara. Fotografías de Robert Capa sobre la Guerra Civil Española (Madrid: Ministerio de Educación y Cultura/Aperture, 1999), 29–33. 84. These images appear in ibid., 33. I should also mention that I am suspicious of Mario Brotons, an amateur historian who was evidently one of Borrell’s “best friends,” according to Marie-Monique Robin, “Muerte de un republicano español,” El País Semanal (19 April 1998): 65. The fact that Spanish researchers of communications and photography for whom I have great respect, such as Josep Lluís Gómez Mompart and Margarita Ledo, express in conversations what I believe to be an unnecessary need to defend the photo’s authenticity makes me even more skeptical of Brotons. 85. Hersey’s account appears in Knightly (The First Casualty, 211), and was also published as “The Man Who Invented Himself,” “47”: The Magazine of the Year (September 1947). Gallagher was evidently the first to question the image, some forty years after the fact, and his interviews with Knightly and Lewinski are vital to their arguments. He is, however, not an unimpeachable witness. Whelan believes that Gallagher has confused Capa with another photojournalist, and Whelan is no doubt correct in saying that it is inconceivable that Capa would have cooperated with Franco’s troops to make the image, as Gallagher asserted in the interview with Lewinski. See Jorge Lewinski, The Camera at War: A History

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of War Photography from 1848 to the Present Day (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 88. The fact that Knightly quotes Gallagher (212) as saying that they were Republican soldiers either resolves the problem by demonstrating Gallagher’s confusion (and lack of credibility) or complicates it by countering Whelan’s observation. 86. Knightly, The First Casualty, 212; Lewinski, The Camera at War, 88. It should also be noted here that, in the only interview given and written down within a year after the photo was made, Capa stated: “No tricks are necessary to take pictures in Spain. You don’t have to pose. . . . The pictures are there, and you just take them. The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda” (Whelan, Robert Capa, 97). 87. See the photograph titled A hand grenade attack, Spain, 1936, by Seymour, which is almost certainly a training exercise; Inge Bondi, Chim: The Photographs of David Seymour (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 49. See as well the photographs of a man ostensibly throwing a grenade in Hans Namuth and Georg Reisner, Spanisches Tagebuch 1936 (Berlin: Nishen, 1986), 48–49. 88. On Smith’s importance in the 1950s, see W. Eugene Smith: Photographs 1934–1975, ed. Gilles Mora and John T. Hill (New York: Harry Abrams Publishers, 1998). His contributions to the photoessay form are discussed in Glenn G. Willumson, W. Eugene Smith and the Photographic Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 89. I have taken the liberty of combining two quotes from interviews with Smith. The first sentence comes from “W. Eugene Smith,” in Photography within the Humanities, ed. Eugenia Parry Janis and Wendy MacNeil (Danbury, N.H.: Addison House Publishers, 1977), 102. The second sentence is from “W. Eugene Smith: A Great Photographer at Work: An Interview by Arthur Goldsmith,” in Photography: Essays and Images, ed. Beaumont Newhall (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 295. 90. W. Eugene Smith, “Photographic Journalism,” Photo Notes (June 1948): 4. 91. John Szarkowski called it “pivotal,” and argued, “With this example the photo essay moved away from narrative, toward interpretive comment” (cited in Willumson, W. Eugene Smith and the Photographic Essay, 48). Jim Hughes believes that this photoessay “was the harbinger of a new age in photojournalism” (Jim Hughes, W. Eugene Smith: Shadow and Substance [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989], 222). 92. Hughes, W. Eugene Smith, 216–17. 93. See the negative strip in Willumson, W. Eugene Smith and the Photographic Essay, 246. 94. This photo can be seen in ibid., 93. The record of the rental is described in Hughes, W. Eugene Smith, 244. 95. Smith letter, cited in Hughes, W. Eugene Smith, 250. 96. See the negative strips, with twenty-eight shots, in Willumson, W. Eugene Smith and the Photographic Essay, 119. 97. Interview with Castle by Jim Hughes, 1982; cited in Hughes, W. Eugene Smith, 253. 98. Editorial, Journal of the Photographic Society of London (21 September 1855): 221; cited in Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 103. 99. In a letter written the day after his excursion to this site, he described how a couple of near misses forced him to change location: “It was plain that the line of fire was upon the

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very spot I had chosen, so very reluctantly I put up with another view of the valley 100 yards short of the best point.” He stated that he stayed there photographing for an hour and a half, “getting two good pictures.” During the course of that time, one cannon ball bounced until it stopped at his feet; he picked it up to take home to his wife as a souvenir: “After this no more came near, though plenty passed on each side” (Fenton letter of 24 April 1855, reprinted in Helmut Gernsheim and Alison Gernsheim, Roger Fenton: Photographer of the Crimean War [London: Secker & Warburg, 1954], 69). 100. Michael Punt, “‘Well, Who You Gonna Believe, Me or Your Own Eyes?’: A Problem of Digital Photography,” Velvet Light Trap 36 (1995): 4. Punt cites a forthcoming CD-ROM by Kieron Lyons for this insight into Fenton’s photography. 101. Gordon Baldwin, Roger Fenton: Pasha and Bayadère (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 1999), 6–9. 102. Gernsheim and Gernsheim, Roger Fenton, 20. Fenton makes no explicit reference in his letters to moving the balls. 103. This was first commented on by Frederic Ray, “The Case of the Rearranged Corpse,” Civil War Times 3, no. 6 (October 1961): 19, and has been analyzed in detail by William A. Frassanito, Gettysburg: A Journey in Time (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 186–92. Frassanito also documents cases where living individuals were posed as if dead in photographs of the Civil War. 104. Gardner committed a number of prevarications in the text of this photograph. Though he was clearly aware that the dead man was a Confederate, Gardner affirmed that the man had settled himself in “a permanent position from which to annoy the enemy.” Throughout his book, Gardner only employs the word enemy in reference to the rebel combatants, so he is here insinuating that this was a Federal soldier. Further, it is likely that he was an ordinary infantryman rather than a sharpshooter, to judge from where he originally fell as well as from the rifle, which is not that of a sniper. See the text facing Plate 40 in Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (New York: Dover 1959); this is a a republication of Gardner’s 1866 book. 105. In an unsuccessful stereo version, the corpse was photographed on top of the blanket that must have been used to drag him there. See Frassanito, Gettysburg, 190. 106. Fulton, Eyes of Time, 28. 107. Frassinito, Gettysburg, 192. 108. Gardner, Photographic Sketch Book, Plate 41. 109. Arthur Rothstein, “The Picture That Became a Campaign Issue,” Popular Photography 49 (September 1961): 43. 110. Rothstein, “Setting the Record Straight,” 51. 111. Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth, 76. 112. William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 269. 113. Alan Trachtenberg, “Walker Evans’ America: A Documentary Invention,” in Observations: Essays on Documentary Photography, ed. David Featherstone (Carmel, Calif.: Friends of Photography, 1984), 56–57.

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114. Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth, 23–44. 115. James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (New York: Ballantine Books, 1960 [1941]), 211. 116. The image and the story are in Barth, Weegee’s World, 26–28. 117. These images are discussed in chapter 3. Although these are two of the best-known examples of setups designed to provoke a response, the strategy may not be all that uncommon. For example, during the Korean War Life had a reporter pretend to be a hoarder in order to see what sort of reactions he could produce: “Nobody Loves a Hoarder,” Life (21 August 1950): 26–27. 118. See the interview with Rouch in G. Roy Levin, Documentary Explorations: 15 Interviews with Film-Makers (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1971), 137; and the discussion in Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of Non-Fiction Film (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 254–55. 119. I am here quoting from Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 44. I find the concepts Nichols employs, “The Observational Mode” and “The Interactive Mode,” more useful in distinguishing between the forms than what Barnouw calls direct cinema and cinéma vérité. 120. Undated comments on 1956 exhibit. ADFLB. 121. Gretchen Garner, “Disappearing Witness: Change in the Practice of Photography,” Photo Review 19, no. 4 (winter 1996): 7. In quoting Weston and White later in this paragraph, I am citing from Garner’s article. 122. Ed Reinke, quoted in Brian Horton, The Associated Press: Photojournalism Stylebook: The News Photographer’s Bible (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1990), 51. 123. The complexity of photojournalism can be appreciated in the variety of categories that its pictures cover: “spot news, general news, features, sports action, sports feature, portrait/personality (close-ups), environmental portraits, pictorial, food illustration, fashion illustration, and editorial illustration” (Schwartz, “To Tell the Truth,” 99). Schwartz also offers an overview of current photojournalism textbooks that candidly discuss the need “to pose, direct, or otherwise enlist the cooperation of subjects” (103). 124. Several recent controversies demonstrate the repudiation of staging news. Two involve the newspaper USA Today, which apparently set up scenes of a schoolgirl snorting drugs, and of gang members brandishing guns; see the Wall Street Journal, 22 August 1996, section B, 1, and the St. Petersburg Times, 16 April 1993, 1A. Another was related to a story that appeared in Time magazine about ostensible “child prostitutes” in Moscow (New York Times, 5 October 1993, section B, 11). NBC News was also involved in a scandal over a muchdiscussed episode of an “exploding truck,” which was ignited by toy rockets (St. Petersburg Times, 16 April 1993, 1A). The media’s interest in defending its credibility can be seen in the resignations of an NBC president and a producer over the truck incident, and the demotion of the USA Today editor, who also had his salary cut by fifteen thousand dollars. 125. Among other places, Jameson has said, “History is what hurts,” in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 102. The relationship between what is “out there” and how we perceive it is as complex

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a discussion as what “reality” is. Immanuel Kant considered the way in which a priori categories determine our perception in Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), 68–69. Frank Tomasulo encapsulates the issue well by arguing, “It is one thing to say that the material world (reality) may exist subject to infinite perceptual mediation and conceptual interpretation; it is quite another, however, to deny that ‘reality’ or ‘facts’ exist at all” (“‘I’ll See It When I Believe It’: Rodney King and the Prison-house of Video,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack [New York: Routledge, 1996], 73). 126. Julio Mayo had this quote from himself pinned up on the wall of the Hermanos Mayo studio. 127. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 80. As Geoffrey Batchen has argued, “What makes photographs distinctive is that they depend on this original presence, a referent in the material world that at some time really did exist to imprint itself on a sheet of light-sensitive paper. Reality may have been transcribed, manipulated, or enhanced, but photography doesn’t cast doubt on reality’s actual existence” (“Ectoplasm: Photography in the Digital Age,” in Overexposed: Essays on Contemporary Photography, ed. Carol Squiers [New York: New Press, 1999], 18). 128. For an article that convincingly revindicates Cartier-Bresson as a photojournalist, see Claude Cookman, “Compelled to Witness: The Social Realism of Henri CartierBresson,” Journalism History 24, no. 1 (spring 1998): 3–15. Cookman notes the tendency to minimize or deny Cartier-Bresson’s career as a photojournalist, and asserts that “He produced the great majority of these images while engaged in magazine or book photojournalism” (3). 129. On “the decisive moment,” see Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers (New York: Aperture, 1999), 42. 130. Ibid., 22. The degree to which the hunting metaphor is dominant in classical photography can be appreciated in Vilém Flusser’s assertion that “Viewing the motion of a man with his camera (or a camera with its man), we are looking at the movements of hunting. . . . In sum: The gesture of photographing is one of hunting” (Towards a Philosophy of Photography [Göttingen: European Photography, 1984], 23, 27). 131. Henri Cartier-Bresson, “Lo imaginario, a partir de la naturaleza,” El País Semanal (5–6 January 1991): 48. This short essay appears at the end of the interview “Henri CartierBresson: la fotografía es un beso muy cálido,” conducted by Alberto Anaut, who states that it is previously unpublished. Cartier-Bresson is also critical of cropping or any other darkroom alteration: “We must neither try to manipulate reality while we are shooting, nor must we manipulate the results in a darkroom” (Cookman, “Compelled to Witness,” 9). I have not seen an image by this photographer that I would identify as directed. 132. Cookman (“Compelled to Witness,” 9) cites Cartier-Bresson on the distinction between “taking” and “making” photographs, as well as his opinion as to the wealth of reality. The reference to “things-as-they-are” can be found in Cartier-Bresson, The Mind’s Eye, 24. 133. Cookman, “Compelled to Witness,” 7. See also Anaut, “Henri Cartier-Bresson,” 46, and the interview “Henri Cartier-Bresson” in Paul Hill and Thomas Cooper, Dialogue with Photography (Manchester: Cornerhouse Publications, 1992), 67.

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134. See the photograph Fountain (1917) made by Alfred Stieglitz, in Amy Conger, “Edward Weston’s Toilet,” Perspectives on Photography, ed. Peter Walch and Thomas F. Barrow (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986), 179. 135. A well-known strategy of Surrealists, dépaysement means literally to be taken out of one’s native land, hence the ordinary, torn out of a familiar context and placed in a foreign situation, which enables it to be seen in a new way. 136. Cartier-Bresson mentions the importance of intuition in the interview by Hill and Cooper in Dialogue with Photography, 67: “The only aspect of the phenomenon of [Surrealist] photography that fascinates me, and will always interest me, is the intuitive capture through the camera of what is seen. This is exactly how Breton defined objective (le hasard objectif ) in his Entretiens.” Susan Sontag discusses the relationship of Surrealism and photography in On Photography (New York: Dell Publishing, 1979), 51–59, 74, 130. Noting that “Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise,” she states, “It was photography that first put into the circulation the idea of an art that is produced not by pregnancy and childbirth but by a blind date (Duchamp’s theory of ‘rendez-vous)’” (52, 130). See also Peter Galassi, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987). 137. Michel Frizot has commented on the relationship between the photographer as hunter and Duchamp’s ready-mades in A New History of Photography, ed. Michel Frizot (Cologne: Köneman, 1998), 397. 138. “Sebastião Salgado: A Lecture,” ed. Stephen Perloff, Photo Review 16, no. 4 (fall 1993): 10. It should be noted that Cartier-Bresson has also recognized that the genre of the picture story may require “hours or days,” and that, in photographing people, “the photographer should try always to substantiate the first impression by ‘living’ with the person concerned” (Cartier-Bresson, The Mind’s Eye, 24, 31). 139. “Sebastião Salgado: One Second Split into 250 Images,” an interview by Brian J. Mallet, Art Nexus 29 (August–October 1998): 77. 140. Cited in the interview by John Bloom, Photo Metro 84 (November 1990): 8. In this interview, Salgado provides a sketched diagram contrasting what he labels “CartierBresson’s ‘Decisive Moment’” with “Salgado’s ‘Photographic Phenomenon.’” 141. See my article “Sebastião Salgado: Ways of Seeing Latin America,” Third Text 58, vol. 16, no. 1 (March 2002): 15–30. Among the better essays on this pivotal photographer, see Julian Stallabrass, “Sebastião Salgado and Fine Art Photojournalism,” New Left Review 223 (1997), and Ingrid Sischy, “Photography: Good Intentions,” New Yorker (September 1991), reprinted in Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present, ed. Liz Heron and Vall Williams (London: J. B. Tauris, 1996). 142. Sebastião Salgado, Workers: An Archeology of the Industrial Age (New York: Aperture, 1993). 143. Sebastião Salgado, Migrations: Humanity in Transition (New York: Aperture, 2000). 144. “Sebastião Salgado,” an interview by Ken Lassiter, Photographer’s Forum (September 1994): 29. Salgado has also made this argument in Perloff, “Sebastião Salgado: A Lecture,” 10; in Jonathon Cott, “Sebastião Salgado: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone 619–20 (12–26 December 1991): 3; and in the interview by John Bloom in Photo Metro (8).

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145. Jones Griffiths is quoted in Russell Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History (New York: Grove Press, 1997), 220. 146. See, for example, Lawrence W. Levine, “The Historian and the Icon,” in Documenting America, 1935–1943, ed. Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W. Brannan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 26, and James Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth, 49. 147. The ease and rapidity with which a digital image is ready to use, and the facility in transmiting it—combined with the increasing scarcity of silver—make it clear that chemical-process photography will soon be limited to those who like working in antiquated techniques, such as individuals who make contemporary ambrotypes. See Mark Glaser, “Why Pros Go Digital,” New York Times, 18 October 2001, and the Web site “The Digital Journalist,” edited by Dirck Halstead since 1997, www.digitaljournalist.org. 148. Cited in Christopher R. Harris, “Digitalization and Manipulation of News Photographs,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 6, no. 3 (1991): 171. Harris also cites the position taken by the Norwegian Institute of Journalism in 1989, calling for manipulated photographs to be marked as “montage.” 149. See Shiela Reaves, “The Vulnerable Image: Categories of Photos as Predictor of Digital Manipulation,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 72, no. 3 (autumn 1995): 706–15. 150. These and other cases are discussed widely in, for example, works such as William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); Fred Ritchen, In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography (New York: Aperture, 1999); “Little Photoshop of Horrors: The Ethics of Manipulating Journalistic Imagery,” Print (November–December 1995); J. D. Lasica, “Photographs That Lie: The Ethical Dilemma of Digital Retouching,” Washington Journalism Review 11, no. 5 (1989); Dona Schwartz, “Objective Representation: Photographs as Facts,” in Picturing the Past: Media, History and Photography, ed. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 151. Pedro Meyer, Verdades y ficciones. Un viaje de la fotografía documental a la digital (Mexico City: Casa de las Imágenes, 1995), 111. 152. Compare the published picture in Willumson, W. Eugene Smith and the Photographic Essay, 181, with the original negative (212). 153. Perhaps inspired by Rosenthal’s image from Iwo Jima, Khaldei’s photo was also directed: he had his tailor sew the banner from red cloth used to cover tables during conferences, and recruited Soviet soldiers to go up and raise the flag for the image that later became famous. Khaldei says he shot an entire roll of film to get the image he wanted. See Michael Griffin, “The Great War Photos,” in Schwartz, Picturing the Past ; the documentary Evguini Khaldei: Photographe sous Staline, directed by Marc-Henri Wajnberg (1997); Tatyana Tolstaya, “Missing Persons,” New York Review of Books (15 January 1998); and the information at the Web site http://atlasgeo.span.ch/fotw/flags/svctry.htm. 154. See, for example, Dino A. Brugioni, Photo Fakery: The History and Techniques of Photographic Deception and Manipulation (Dulles, Va.: Brassey’s, 1999), and Alain Jaubert, Making People Disappear: An Amazing Chronicle of Photographic Deception (Washington, D.C.: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1989).

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155. Here the reference is to Gregory Bateson’s idea, expressed in “Form, Substance, and Difference,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 453. 156. Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and Jay Kinney, “Digital Retouching: The End of Photography as Evidence of Anything,” Whole Earth Review 47 (July 1985): 42. 157. The degree to which digitalization reduces photojournalists’ control over what their images say is debatable. William J. Mitchell fears that they will “be reduced to little more than fleshy bipods—mobile supports for image-capture devices that send streams of pictures back to an editor’s desk, where the crucial selection and framing decisions are made” (The Reconfigured Eye, 55). Martha Rosler agrees: “It opens the way for further loss of relative autonomy for the professional photographer, who may become, like the TV newscamera operator, merely a link in the electronic chain of command” (“Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations,” 48). However, Dirck Halstead argues that photojournalists will be able to edit their own takes, returning to them “the creative process control we used to have” (“Digital Photojournalism Turns a Corner,” editorial, Digital Journalist [January 2001], www.digitaljournalist.org). 158. Pedro Meyer, “Traditional Photography vs. Digital Photography,” Editorial, Zonezero (March 2001), http://www.zonezero.com/editorial/marzo01/march.html. 159. Meyer, “Los desafíos de la tecnología a la creación fotográfica latinoamericana contemporánea,” 25. See Barbara E. Savedoff, “Escaping Reality: Digital Imagery and the Resources of Photography,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no. 2 (spring 1997), and Martin Lister, “Introductory Essay,” in The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, ed. Martin Lister (London: Routledge, 1995). 160. “F-8” is a medium aperture for the lens. See Ritchen, In Our Own Image, 101. 161. “Little Photoshop of Horrors,” 34. 162. Meyer, Verdades y ficciones, 19. The photograph of the workers was taken in one location, that of the billboard in another. Some observations should be made in relation to Meyer’s book: (1) He is not pretending to be a photojournalist in his digital imagery, and has clearly labeled his pictures as altered by putting two dates of production. Thus, he is governed by artistic rather than documentary conventions. (2) Only a few of the images he has digitalized “play” with the documentary aura; most are obvious constructions, which would not even require the indication that they have been altered. My decision to use Meyer as an example is based on the fact that he is a Mexican, and an articulate spokesman for digitalization, which offers a nice interface with Nacho López’s situation in directed photography. See Meyer’s Web site, which has been operating since 1995: www.zonezero.com. 163. Meyer’s statements here were actually made in relation to other images, but the argument is equally relevant to the example I have chosen (Verdades y ficciones, 115 and 111; my translation). 164. This image can be seen in Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth, 60. 165. At least two different shots of this scene have been published. See Bill Ganzel, Dust Bowl Descent (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 35; and Hank O’Neal, A Vision Shared (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 164. 166. Pedro Meyer, personal communication, 28 September 2001. I have translated and constructed the following paragraph from this communication.

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167. On the relationship between presentational contexts and the meaning of “manipulation,” see Edwin Martin, “On Photographic Manipulaton,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 6, no. 3 (1991). 168. Pedro Meyer, “Redefining Documentary Photography,” editorial, Zonezero (April 2000), www.zonezero.com. 169. One of the problems with the medium of digital imagery is that it produces no original negative, hence there is no way of verifying whether alteration has occurred. This is related to the “seamlessness” of digital manipulation. Nonetheless, the technology exists to indicate original takes, and presumably could be developed to detect alterations. 170. Meyer, “Redefining Documentary Photography.” 171. Savedoff, “Escaping Reality,” 213. 172. Ritchen, In Our Own Image, xii, 4. The events of 11 September may well shake the United States, and the rest of the developed world, out of its solipcism. As the former picture editor of Time, Arnold Drapkin, wrote in an e-mail shortly after the attacks, “The aftermath of the terrorist strikes has exposed America’s shallow knowledge and understanding of today’s complex world in which we live. The media abdicated its responsibility to inform the public with insightful reportage, in-depth enterprise journalism, and hard news. Instead, they fed us softball lifestyle features that would ‘sell.’ We were entertained instead of educated”(cited in Dirck Halstead, “The Return of Photojournalism,” editorial, Digital Journalist [October 2001], www.digitaljournalist.org). 173. See “Condicionamientos actuales,” 2; “El peso de la óptica,” 2; “Conciencia óptica,” 1. ADFLB. Elsa Medina feels that what she most learned as a student of López was the ability “to see” (unpublished interview with Elsa Medina, 5 September 1991). 174. “México: dolor y sangre, pasión y alma,” Siempre! 100 (25 May 1955): 22–24. This photoessay is made up of López’s archival images, some of which had appeared in other essays, such as the girl watching her mother cook (“Una vez fuimos seres humanos”) and the boy reading in the street (“La calle lee”). In 1951, Mañana dedicated a large section to “El mexicano,” which included a superficial photoessay about Mexicans, “En su identificación con la tierra, crisol de la raza,” by Arno Brehme. In the discussion on the various aspects of mexicanidad, no mention was made of photography (Mañana 420 [15 September 1951]: 83–232). Life explored “The Drama of Mexico” in 1950, and played with some of the same contrasts López had found. “Perhaps the main ingredient of Mexico’s drama lies in the mentality of the Mexican people. Their character is by turns proud and courteous, violent and gay, poetic and cruel, inert and profound. . . . Of all the constrasts in modern Mexico’s seething drama, the most striking is perhaps the contrast between wealth and poverty” (“The Drama of Mexico,” Life [9 January 1950]). Photographed by Leonard McCombe, the imagery is unexceptional. 175. The photograph occupies the upper-right-hand corner of an odd page, identified as the most preferred space in a periodical by Lorenzo Vilches, in Teoría de la imagen periodística (Barcelona: Ediciones Paidós, 1987), 63. 176. “Virgen india,” by Ángel Fernando Solana, photos: Nacho López, Mañana 381 (16 December 1950).

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Agustín, José. Tragicomedia mexicana 1: La vida en México de 1940 a 1970. Mexico City: Planeta, 1991. Ameluxen, Hubertus v., Stefan Iglhaut, and Florian Rötzer, eds. Photography after Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age. Munich: G+B Arts, 1995. Bartra, Roger. The Cage of Melancholy: Identity and Metamorphosis in the Mexican Character. Trans. Christopher J. Hall. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992. ———. La jaula de la melancolía. Identidad y metamorfosis del mexicano. Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1987. Bethell, Leslie, ed. Mexico since Independence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Blanco Moheno, Roberto. Memorias de un reportero. Mexico City: Libro-Mex Editores, 1965. Campa, Valentín. Mi testimonio. Memorias de un comunista mexicano. Mexico City: Ediciones de Cultura Popular, 1978. La caravana del hambre. Ismael Casasola. Texts by José Revueltas and Victoria Novelo. Puebla and Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de Puebla and Fototeca del INAH, 1986. Cockroft, James D. Mexico: Class Formation, Capital Accumulation, and the State. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983. Coleman, A. D. Light Readings: A Photography Critic’s Writings, 1968–1978. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Curtis, James. Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Debroise, Olivier. Mexican Suite: A History of Photography in Mexico. Trans. Stella de Sá Rego. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Evans, Harold. Pictures on a Page: Photojournalism, Graphics and Picture Editing. London: Pimlico, 1997. 239

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Meyer, Pedro. Truths and Fictions: A Journey from Documentary to Digital Photography. New York: Aperture, 1995. ———. Verdades y ficciones. Un viaje de la fotografía documental a la digital. Mexico City: Casa de las Imágenes, 1995. Mitchell, William J. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. Monroy Nasr, Rebeca. “Fotografía de prensa en México. Un acercamiento a la obra de Enrique Díaz, Delgado y García.” Ph.D diss., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2001. Monsiváis, Carlos. “Sociedad y cultura.” In Entre la guerra y la estabilidad política. El México de los 40, edited by Rafael Loyola. 259–80. Mexico City: Grijalbo and Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1990. Mraz, John. “Foto Hermanos Mayo: A Mexican Collective.” History of Photography 17, no. 1 (spring 1993): 81–89. ———. La mirada inquieta: Nuevo fotoperiodismo mexicano, 1976–1996. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional de Cultura y Artes-Centro de la Imagen-Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1996. ———. “The New Photojournalism of Mexico, 1976–1998.” History of Photography 22, no. 4 (winter 1998): 313–65. ———, ed. Mexican Photography. History of Photography 22, no. 3 (autumn 1996). Mraz, John, and Jaime Vélez Storey. Uprooted: Braceros in the Hermanos Mayo Lens. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996. Niblo, Stephen R. Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999. ———. War, Diplomacy, and Development: The United States and Mexico, 1938–1954. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1995. Orme, William, ed. A Culture of Collusion: An Inside Look at the Mexican Press. Miami: University of Miami Press, 1997. Ortiz Garza, José Luis. México en guerra. La historia secreta de los negocios entre empresarios mexicanos de la comunicación, los nazis y E.U.A. Mexico City: Planeta, 1989. Pansters, Wil G. Política y poder en Puebla. Formación y ocaso del cacicazgo avilacamachista, 1937–1987. Mexico City and Puebla: Fondo de Cultura Económica and Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1998. ———, ed. Citizens of the Pyramid: Essays on Mexican Political Culture. Amsterdam: Thela Publishers, 1997. Pellicer de Brody, Olga, and José Luis Reyna. El afianzamiento de la estabilidad política. Vol. 22 of Historia de la Revolución Mexicana. Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1978. Pilcher, Jeffrey. Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2001. ———. ¡Que vivan los tamales!: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.

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Weaver, Mike, and Anne Hammond. “William Eggleston: Treating Things Existentially.” History of Photography 17, no. 1 (spring 1993): 54–61. Whelan, Richard. Robert Capa: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. Willumson, Glenn G. W. Eugene Smith and the Photographic Essay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

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Index

Abbott, Berenice, 112 Advertising: in the illustrated magazines, 36, 47; government (Gacetillas), 47 AIZ (Die Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung), 20 Alemán Valdés, Miguel, 14, 15, 24–28, 35, 36, 41–44, 49, 54–56, 59–62, 70, 77, 104–6, 154, 160 Alemanismo, 14–16, 24–27, 31, 34, 35, 43, 47, 54, 58, 70, 105, 108, 110, 124, 136, 160, 164, 190 Álvarez Bravo, Manuel, 3, 6–10, 164 Anticommunism. See Communism Antoniorrobles, 60, 61 Argüelles, Carlos, 12, 72, 91, 110 Arias Bernal, Antonio, 42, 58 Armendáriz, Pedro, 50 Ávila Camacho, Manuel, 24, 25, 36, 43, 52, 61, 62 Ávila Camacho, Maximinio, 43 Ávila Camacho, Rafael, 15, 103, 104, 160 Bartra, Roger, 6, 29, 88 Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, 1, 39 Blanco Moheno, Roberto, 36, 42, 43, 58 Bordes Mangel, Enrique, 20, 165 Bourke-White, Margaret, 112, 163 Brady, Matthew, 9, 11

Brehme, Hugo, 4, 68 Buñuel, Luis, 94, 97–99, 149 Campesinos, 4, 7, 15, 29, 32, 49, 70, 71, 85–88, 105, 190 Cantinflas, 50, 116 Capa, Robert, 2, 21, 111, 112, 163, 168, 169, 175, 176 “Caravan of Hunger” (Caravana de hambre), 20, 48, 102 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 15, 20, 23–25, 34, 38–43, 51 Cardenismo, 15, 24–30, 34, 43, 161, 164 Carpa theater, 116–17 Carrillo, Rafael, 5, 49, 62 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 2, 166, 183–86, 189 Casasola, Agustín Víctor, 9, 166 Casasola, Ismael, 9, 37, 41, 53, 60–62, 66 Casasola, Miguel, 9, 73 Caso, Alfonso, 37, 42 Castellanos, Rosario, 4 Castrejón, Guillermo, 164, 168, 170 Cedillo, Saturnino, 41, 52 Celebrities, 15, 50, 51, 102–7, 112, 192 Centelles, Agustí, 175 245

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Charros: as picturesque figures, 5, 30; as sold-out labor leaders, 48, 54–56 Chávez, Carlos, 59 Children, 6, 67, 88–93, 99–101, 130, 131, 147, 150–53, 174 Chinas poblanas, 5 Cinema: Hollywood, 4, 51, 52; Mexican, 23, 26–30, 35, 50–54, 67, 73, 129, 192 Cold War, 24–27, 30, 164 Coleman, A. D., 170–71 Colonialism and neocolonialism, 32, 50, 93, 124, 190, 192 Comic books, 34 Communism, 5, 25–27, 42, 48, 51, 55, 164; anticommunism, 25, 27, 30, 51, 55; Mexican Communist Party (Partido Comunista Mexicano), 5, 28 Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM) (Confederation of Mexican Workers), 24–28, 40, 41, 48, 54–56 Corruption, 26, 31, 32, 36, 43, 47, 48, 100, 130, 147, 167 Cuban Revolution, 52, 58, 164 Curtis, James, 11, 174, 179 Díaz, Enrique, 4, 9, 41, 48, 49, 52, 53, 62, 65, 115 Digitalization. See Photography, digitalized Directed photography. See Photojournalism, direction of Doisneau, Robert, 173, 174 Echeverría, Luis, 7, 38 Education, 30, 105; literacy campaigns, 23, 34, 85; socialist education, 23, 24 Eggleston, William, 122 Eisenstaedt, Alfred, 79, 116, 166 Eisenstein, Sergei, 4, 67, 68 Evans, Walker, 9, 11, 166, 179 Existentialism, 73–75, 122–24 Exoticism. See Picturesque Fascism, 25, 38, 43–46, 51, 175, 186 Farm Security Administration (FSA), 174, 178, 179, 187

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Index

Félix, María, 50 Fenton, Roger, 177 Fernández, Emilio, 30, 67–70 Figueroa, Gabriel, 4, 67–70 Frank, Robert, 122, 128 Fuente, Julio de la, 66, 69 Fuentes, Carlos, 37 Garay, Andrés, 164 Garbage, 95, 150 García, Héctor, 7, 8, 19, 20, 37, 60, 62, 66, 165 García Riera, Emilio, 31, 73 Gardner, Alexander, 177 Garduño, Flor, 3, 4, 8 Garner, Gretchen, 181 Gasparini, Paolo, 9 Gidal, Tim, 39 Gironella, Cecilia (“Bambi”), 47 Goldman, Shifra, 157, 165 Griffiths, Phillip Jones, 18, 185 Guimond, James, 11, 92 Gutiérrez y González, Luis, 58, 101 Heartfield, John, 20, 172 Henriquista movement, 20, 154 Hermanos Mayo, 7–9, 13, 17, 20, 42, 43, 50, 53–56, 60–62, 65, 66, 73, 85–88, 91, 110–15, 154, 163, 165, 182 Hernández Llergo, Regino, 38, 43 Hine, Lewis, 11, 122 Hoy, 1, 37, 38, 41–56, 58, 59, 104, 116, 129 “Hunger March.” See “Caravan of Hunger” Identity: Héroe agachado (bent hero), 7, 29, 88, 190, 192; mexicanidad, 1–9, 16, 28–34, 58, 60, 66, 88, 107, 108, 190, 192; México y lo mexicano, 16, 29, 110; national identity, 3, 29, 88, 190, 192 Illustrated magazines, 1, 9–16, 26, 34, 38, 160, 164; in Mexico (see Hoy; Mañana; Más; Presente; Rotofoto; Siempre!; Tricolor); in France (see Vu); in Germany (see AIZ; Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung); in

Index

Great Britain (see Picture Post); in the United States (see Life; Look) Imperialism. See Colonialism and neocolonialism Indigenous, 52, 53, 58, 104, 126; indígenas (Indian women), 3, 4, 15, 49, 54, 58; indigenismo, 6, 10, 67; photography of, 4, 6, 12, 15, 49, 66–72 Industrialization, 24–31, 47, 110–12 Infante, Pedro, 27, 50 Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) (National Indigenist Institute), 10, 68–73 Iturbide, Graciela, 3, 4 Jackson, William Henry, 2 Jameson, Fredric, 9, 182 Journalism, Mexican, 34–37; lacunae in, 36; paper supply, 36, 42; PIPSA (Productora e Importadora de Papel) (Producer and Importer of Paper), 36, 42; Press Freedom Day (Día de la Libertad de la Prensa), 35–38, 53; social pages, 26, 100–104 Kertesz, André, 117, 166 Khaldei, Yevgeni, 186 Knight, Alan, 23, 41 Kolko, Bernice, 4 Labor. See Confederación de Trabajadores de México; Strikes of 1958–59; Work and workers Lange, Dorothea, 9, 11, 174, 187 Life, 1, 19, 33, 37, 44–46, 58, 63, 65, 77, 78, 91, 128, 169, 173–76 Lo Mexicano. See Identity Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 25, 28, 30, 37, 39, 41, 48, 58 Look, 1, 91 López, Nacho: concept of mexicanidad, 16, 189–92; direction of photography, 85, 101, 117–27, 122; exhibit of 1956, 32–34, 76, 160; filmmaking, 10, 150, 160, 166; Indians, 65–72; presidential-

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ism, 15, 16; “Previsalization,” 124, 181; reflections on photojournalism, 163–69; Yo, el ciudadano, 77, 122 López Mateos, Adolfo, 58, 160 López Zamora, Eleazar, 168 Machismo, 107, 108, 124, 126, 159 Mañana, 1, 13, 14, 37–56, 58–62, 65, 72, 77, 83, 88, 91, 102, 104, 108, 115, 116, 129, 147, 149 Márquez, Luis, 5, 67, 68 Martínez de la Vega, Francisco, 34, 43, 58 Más, 20, 42, 43, 129 Mata Rosas, Francisco, 168, 169 McCullin, Don, 163 Medin, Tzvi, 28 Medina, Elsa, 107, 164, 168 Méndez, Leopoldo, 42 Mendoza, Daniel, 119, 169 Mexicanidad. See Identity, mexicanidad Mexican revolution, 2, 9, 23, 24, 29, 61, 100 Mexico City, 14, 85, 91, 108, 147, 149– 60 Meyer, Pedro, 172, 185–88 Middle class, 37, 46, 47, 91, 122, 174 Modernity and modernization, 6, 26, 37, 50 Modotti, Tina, 2, 5, 9, 19, 20 Monsiváis, Carlos, 15, 41, 50 Morales, Daniel, 43, 44, 62 Moreno, Mario. See Cantinflas Moya, Rodrigo, 165, 168 Muralism, 23, 50, 59 Mydans, Carl, 163 Namuth, Hans, 111, 176 National Geographic, 2, 185 Nationalism, 24, 28, 30–34, 43, 49, 70, 82, 99, 100, 107, 108, 126, 165, 190, 192; “Denigrating Mexico,” 33, 34, 60, 61, 99; “National Unity,” 24, 25, 29, 93 Negrete, Jorge, 50 New Photojournalism of Mexico, 8, 10, 105, 169, 170

248

Night of the Magi, 14, 28, 44, 89–91 Novo, Salvador, 30, 37, 50 Obregón, Álvaro, 23, 46 Orkin, Ruth, 118, 119, 180, 181 Orozco, José Clemente, 34, 164 O’Sullivan, Timothy, 178 Pachuco (zoot-suiter), 30, 31, 50, 136 Pagés Llergo, José, 36, 38–43, 56, 57, 63, 118, 119, 129, 159 Partido de la Revolucion Institucionalizada (PRI) (Institutional Revolutionary Party), 7, 8, 15, 23–28, 37, 38, 47, 58, 100, 105, 110, 154, 164, 190 Patriarchalism, 105 Paz, Octavio, 29, 66 Phillips, John, 163 Photoessays (features), 10, 14, 16, 19, 21, 37, 52, 56, 62, 63, 82, 83, 85, 91–93, 101, 102, 110, 122, 124, 128, 150, 182 Photography: digitalized, 172, 185–89; indexicality, 34, 182, 190; industrialist, 15, 42, 48, 112; metaphors, 114; victim photography, 12, 77, 90, 93, 127, 137, 144, 147, 190 Photojournalism, 13, 16, 18; of daily life, 7, 8, 56, 82, 101, 110, 150, 165; dangers of, 110, 112, 167; direction of, 14, 19, 124, 153, 169–81; fine-art, 114, 115; exhibits in Mexico, 59, 82; genres of, 16–21; shock photos, 51, 58 Photoreportage, 19, 21, 37, 52, 56, 58, 62, 63, 82, 83, 150 Picture Post, 1, 18, 37, 44, 46 Picture press. See Illustrated magazines Picturesque (Exoticism), 3–8, 27–29, 32, 51, 61, 67–70, 86, 100, 108, 109, 192; antipicturesque, 5, 6 Police and prisons, 12, 14, 19, 31, 41, 43, 60, 72–78, 127–47, 154, 159 Poniatowska, Elena, 4 Poor (humildes), 6, 12–14, 19, 21, 43, 54, 79, 80, 85, 91–102, 108, 116, 122, 124, 126, 127–47, 150, 154, 156, 190

..

Index

Presente, 37, 41, 42 Presidentialism, 15, 16, 23, 25, 35, 38, 41, 43, 46, 49, 52, 53, 56, 59, 61, 62, 105–7, 190; First Lady, 44, 91; patriarchal, 44, 46 Puebla, 105–7 Ramos, Samuel, 29, 37 Reisner, Georg, 111, 176 Religion, 27, 43, 49, 51–53, 75, 78–82, 150, 192 Reuter, Walter, 20, 62, 66, 111 Revueltas, José, 37, 42 Riis, Jacob, 11, 173 Río, Dolores del, 50 Ritchen, Fred, 2, 186, 189 Rivera, Diego, 34, 50 Rodríguez, Antonio, 4, 12, 32, 54, 58–61, 88 Rodríguez, Ismael, 27, 73 Rosenthal, Joe, 173 Rothstein, Arthur, 11, 171, 174, 175, 178, 179 Rotofoto, 37–42 Ruiz Cortines, Adolfo, 24, 36, 53, 59, 104, 118, 154, 158 Salgado, Sebastião, 2, 7, 9, 184, 186 Salomon, Erich, 39 Scherer García, Julio, 38, 42 Sekula, Alan, 11, 67, 103, 145 Seymour, David (Chim), 111, 112, 176 Siempre!, 1, 37, 38, 56–59, 63, 117, 118, 127, 129, 133, 137, 150, 157, 159 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 50, 99 Smith, W. Eugene, xvii, 9, 11, 19, 21, 112, 145, 152, 153, 166, 168, 176, 177, 180, 185, 186 Spanish civil war, 7, 20, 50, 61, 111, 112, 169, 175 Staged photographs. See Photojournalism, direction of Steichen, Edward, 152 Strand, Paul, 2, 9, 67 Strikes of 1958–59, 20, 154

Index

..

249

Student Movement of 1968, 20, 154, 164, 166 Surrealism, 3, 110, 124, 172, 183, 184

Virgin of Guadalupe, 14, 38, 49, 51, 75, 79, 81, 82, 192 Vu, 1, 37, 175

Taro, Gerda, 111, 112 Time, 59 Tin Tan (Germán Valdés), 30, 31, 50 Tlatelolco Plaza massacre. See Student Movement of 1968 Tovey, P. H. F. (Bill), 163, 175 Tricolor, 20, 42, 43

Warburton, Nigel, 77, 170, 171 Weaver, Mike: and Hammond, Anne, 122 Weegee (Arthur Fellig), 173, 180 Weston, Edward, 2, 5, 182 Women, 3, 4, 44–47, 53, 59, 67, 71, 75, 76, 104, 118–21, 124, 130–35, 137–40, 147, 156, 157, 160 Work and workers, 13, 15, 27–32, 35, 48, 49, 53, 54, 74–76, 87, 88, 100, 107, 108, 124, 167 World War II, 51, 112, 154

United States, 1, 24, 28, 33, 35, 45, 50, 51, 58, 149, 150, 154, 172 Urbanization, 29, 50, 85, 110–13 Uruchurtu, Ernesto, 118, 147, 149, 157–60

Yampolsky, Mariana, 3 Valtierra, Pedro, 168 Vaughan, Mary Kay, 28 Velázquez, Fidel, 48, 54

Zapata, Emiliano, 46, 70, 71 Zea, Leopoldo, 29, 37, 42

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Nacho López (Ignacio López Bocanegra, 1923–1986) was one of Mexico’s preeminent

photojournalists. He studied photography and cinema at the Institute of Film Studies in Mexico City, where the photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo and the film director Alejandro Galindo were among his teachers. During the 1950s he took photographs for Mexico’s leading illustrated magazines, and in the 1960s he participated in collective exhibitions of Los Interioristas, a group of Mexican artists characterized by their rejection of “good taste” and their call for “socially oriented art.” He also worked in documentary cinema and created award-winning commercials and the short film Los hombres cultos. He taught photography at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and at Universidad Veracruzana. John Mraz is research professor at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades,

Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico. As a “visual historian,” he has published widely on the uses of photography, cinema, and video to recount the histories of Mexico and Cuba. He is the author of several books and guest editor of journal issues on film, photography, and visual culture; he has also directed award-winning documentary videos and curated international photography exhibits.