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| Enrique Metinides: photographing the dead for Mexico's 'bloody news' | Enrique Metinides: photographing the dead for Mexico's 'bloody news' |
| (about 20 hours later) | |
| When he was 10, Enrique Metinides was given a Brownie "box" camera by his father. He was soon using it to photograph car accidents on the streets of San Cosme in Mexico city, where he lived. By 12, he had published his first photograph in a local newspaper and been christened "El Niño" (the Boy) by the older press photographers. Soon, though, his eye was drawn away from the smashed-up vehicles to the human wreckage. So began a long career photographing death, carnage and human suffering, often close up and in colour – a style that earned him a new sobriquet: "the Mexican Weegee". | When he was 10, Enrique Metinides was given a Brownie "box" camera by his father. He was soon using it to photograph car accidents on the streets of San Cosme in Mexico city, where he lived. By 12, he had published his first photograph in a local newspaper and been christened "El Niño" (the Boy) by the older press photographers. Soon, though, his eye was drawn away from the smashed-up vehicles to the human wreckage. So began a long career photographing death, carnage and human suffering, often close up and in colour – a style that earned him a new sobriquet: "the Mexican Weegee". |
| You can see some early black-and-white photographs of crashed cars in the new book 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides, published by Aperture, which presents Metinides's personal selection of his favourite images. It's a troubling book, of course – not least because his photographs become more disturbing as he becomes a better photographer. Many of his early images fit into the genre of Mexican tabloid photojournalism known as the nota roja ("bloody news"), which thrives on the Mexican public's seemingly insatiable appetite for the macabre. Violent deaths by fire, bullet, explosion and car crash all feature regularly, and in often graphic detail, on the front pages. In a baroquely Catholic country, death is not so much a fascination as a collective obsession. Metinides grasped this early on. | |
| Unlike Weegee, Metinides did not tune in nightly to police radio but enrolled as a Red Cross volunteer, arriving at the scene of accidents with the emergency medical crews. Like Weegee, he was relentless in his pursuit of the grisly and the visceral. Once, he was travelling in an ambulance that was summoned to a plane crash at Mexico city airport. "After I had shot the three rolls of film I had," he later recalled, "I went into the plane to help rescue the people." Metinides had the sensibility and sense of priority of a reportage photographer, but it was focused obsessively in one direction – towards the aftermath. He was an ambulance chaser and a great photographer, but could he have been one without the other? | Unlike Weegee, Metinides did not tune in nightly to police radio but enrolled as a Red Cross volunteer, arriving at the scene of accidents with the emergency medical crews. Like Weegee, he was relentless in his pursuit of the grisly and the visceral. Once, he was travelling in an ambulance that was summoned to a plane crash at Mexico city airport. "After I had shot the three rolls of film I had," he later recalled, "I went into the plane to help rescue the people." Metinides had the sensibility and sense of priority of a reportage photographer, but it was focused obsessively in one direction – towards the aftermath. He was an ambulance chaser and a great photographer, but could he have been one without the other? |
| Of late, Metinides's images have moved from one context – the tabloid culture that produced them – to another: the gallery wall. More problematically, the later photographs have the sheen of staged contemporary art photography. In one, a young woman in a bright summer dress weeps beside the sprawled body of her dead boyfriend, killed in a botched robbery. In another, a woman weeps into her hands by the roadside while her brother lies dead nearby, having been thrown through the windscreen of his car. | Of late, Metinides's images have moved from one context – the tabloid culture that produced them – to another: the gallery wall. More problematically, the later photographs have the sheen of staged contemporary art photography. In one, a young woman in a bright summer dress weeps beside the sprawled body of her dead boyfriend, killed in a botched robbery. In another, a woman weeps into her hands by the roadside while her brother lies dead nearby, having been thrown through the windscreen of his car. |
| One of the most disturbing images is also one of the most artfully composed. It is a picture of a striking blonde woman, freshly dead after being hit by a car while crossing a busy road, her eyes still open as she lies wedged between two metal poles. A Red Cross worker is about to cover her body with a sheet, and just visible below his hand is something bloody and mangled, perhaps a severed leg. The caption tells us that she is Adela Legarreta Rivas, a journalist who was on her way from a beauty parlour where she'd had her hair and nails done to a press conference about her latest book, when she was hit by a white Datsun. It's a shocking photograph and a shockingly cold one, its formal beauty making it all the more so. | One of the most disturbing images is also one of the most artfully composed. It is a picture of a striking blonde woman, freshly dead after being hit by a car while crossing a busy road, her eyes still open as she lies wedged between two metal poles. A Red Cross worker is about to cover her body with a sheet, and just visible below his hand is something bloody and mangled, perhaps a severed leg. The caption tells us that she is Adela Legarreta Rivas, a journalist who was on her way from a beauty parlour where she'd had her hair and nails done to a press conference about her latest book, when she was hit by a white Datsun. It's a shocking photograph and a shockingly cold one, its formal beauty making it all the more so. |
| Amid the car wrecks, the burning buildings, the electrocutions, the buses hanging precariously over flyovers or submerged in rivers, this image has always stuck in my mind as emblematic of how brilliant, and ruthless, a photographer Metinides is. His art, if we can call it that, is a catalogue of death and suffering in all its random, often absurd everydayness. But it is more than that. It is a catalogue of intrusion. It makes voyeurs of us all, particularly when shown in a gallery context. In her introduction to The 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides, curator Trisha Ziff writes: "Metinides's photographs are crafted with cinematic precision and style, yet his compassion for the victims is never far away. He feels a deep moral responsibility toward those left behind." She cites his "straightforward commentaries" and his obsessive remembering of "names, characters and narratives", but these seem like afterthoughts compared with the voyeuristic tendencies of his photographs. Their real power lies in the fact that we look at them even as we want to look away, and in doing so we too are implicated in his dark, ruthless vision. | Amid the car wrecks, the burning buildings, the electrocutions, the buses hanging precariously over flyovers or submerged in rivers, this image has always stuck in my mind as emblematic of how brilliant, and ruthless, a photographer Metinides is. His art, if we can call it that, is a catalogue of death and suffering in all its random, often absurd everydayness. But it is more than that. It is a catalogue of intrusion. It makes voyeurs of us all, particularly when shown in a gallery context. In her introduction to The 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides, curator Trisha Ziff writes: "Metinides's photographs are crafted with cinematic precision and style, yet his compassion for the victims is never far away. He feels a deep moral responsibility toward those left behind." She cites his "straightforward commentaries" and his obsessive remembering of "names, characters and narratives", but these seem like afterthoughts compared with the voyeuristic tendencies of his photographs. Their real power lies in the fact that we look at them even as we want to look away, and in doing so we too are implicated in his dark, ruthless vision. |
| Now see this | Now see this |
| At the National Media Museum in Bradford, still life photography is examined in Art of Arrangement: Photography and the Still Life Tradition, which draws on images from the museum's extensive permanent collection. | At the National Media Museum in Bradford, still life photography is examined in Art of Arrangement: Photography and the Still Life Tradition, which draws on images from the museum's extensive permanent collection. |
| Brancolini Grimaldi in London is showing new work by Domingo Milella, featuring 30 images made over the last decade of historically important sites in the Mediterranean where civilisation and nature overlap. | Brancolini Grimaldi in London is showing new work by Domingo Milella, featuring 30 images made over the last decade of historically important sites in the Mediterranean where civilisation and nature overlap. |
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