In the series entitled Republic, the Rencontres is presenting six contemporary Mexican photographers: Enrique Metinides, Maya Goded, Dulce Pinzon, Daniela Russell, Inaki Bonillas and Fernando Montiel Klint.

As Trisha Ziff explains, curator of the exhibition “101 Tragedies”, the photographer Enrique Metinides is sometimes known as the “Weegee of Mexico” in an analogy with the American photographer. As his homologue, he became a specialist of traffic accidents, fires, murders and suicides. A passion, if we can call it that, that he begain to satisfy at the age of 12 when his father offered him his first camera. However, contrary to Weegee, he was not looking for the large angle shot but rather distance in order to mix the scene with the inevitable onlookers.
Today, at 77 years old, he did not want to cross the Atlantic out of fear of… an accident. Cloistered in his apartment, he produces shoots by putting his prints in a situation. He disposes against his inspiration toys, trucks, fire trucks, ambulances, characters, police cars in front of prints of accidents, of fires or of dramas and rephotographs them with a digital camera. No need to try and find complicated metaphysical interpretations. It is quite simply his passion from his early days that he works on now in a new way.
In a way, “101 Tragedies” is a sort of retrospective, an ensemble of the photographs accompanied by narrations by the photographer who remembers everything. The work of an entire life. Unique and to be discovered as that of Weegee.
We can find Enrique Metinides on Arte on July 17th at 5:45pm.

With Maya Goded, we are looking at a photographer much younger (she was born in Mexico in 1970), but whose universe could flirt with certain sulfurous aspects of that of Enrique Metinides. The titles of the two series seem to speak to each other: “Welcome to Lipstick” and “Land of Witches”;
The first shows, via a projection, a sort of no-man’s land, close to the border of Mexico and the USA, that hides the prostitutes. A world of violence not often frequented, a red zone in which the daily preoccupation is survival.
The world of witches began with the introduction to the catholic religion, imported with the Spanish conquest who had condemned not only indigenous women but also Spanish women thought to practice witchcraft. The exhibition shows these witches in very catholic villages, in which the inhabitants look to this with fear and fascination. With a consequence of a life that becomes a sort of exile, as “they are too different from the other women of the village.”

 If Inaki Bonillas attempts with “Clair Obscur” via images extracted from vast archives of his grandfather to reconcile elements normally unsympathetic, Dulce Pinzon tries to tell us the “True story of super heroes.” That of those after 9/11 become present in the collective imagination. Here it is the Mexican workers that live in the US who are the super heroes. Through 20 color prints of Latin American immigrants represented in their work area wearing work clothes/super heroes with legends indicating “his name, his birthplace, the number of years that he worked in New York and the amount of money that he sends to his family or to his community each week.

Fernando Montiel Klint, born in 1978 in Mexico, tries to show us through “Acts of faith” how our society “atomises and isolates the individual.”
He is interested in the deconnected faith with religion. “I recreated my mental liberation thanks to the scenes played out and actions that are captured by the camera, in which I invent artificial realities made by absurd atmospheres, in search of introspection…”
 
And in regards to Daniela Rossell, born in Mexico City in 1973, she illustrates via the series “Ricas y famosas” (1994-2004) an ensemble of photographs taken in the high spheres of society and politics of Mexico. Their publication created a scandal in 2002.
 
 
Bernard Perrine  
Bernard.Perrine1@orange.fr

Rencontres d’Arles 2011
July 4th – September 18th

Enrique Metinides, Maya Goded
Daniela Rossell, Dulce Pinzon
Atelier de Forges

Inaki Bonillas
Couvent Ste Césaire 1e étage

Fernando Montiel Klint
Cloître Saint-Trophime Rdc.