Mexico: a Photographic History

Thirty years after the founding of Mexico’s Fototeca Nacional, this big, bold first catalogue of the archive’s holdings offers a panoramic history of the art of photography in Mexico–a look into one of the most important image collections in Latin America and testimony to over 130 years of social, political, cultural, artistic, scientific and economic happenings. Its concise descriptions and rich samplings from 40 of the Fototeca’s most important collections include views of Mexico’s past and its indigenous heritage; the work of nineteenth-century pioneers Desire Charnay, William H. Jackson, Alfred Briquet and Francois Aubert; photographs of Mexican colonial architecture by Guillermo Kahlo, Frida’s father; and the collections of Tina Modotti. The great figures of modern Mexican history stand alongside documentation of the country’s varied social classes and ethnic groups, spaces both public and private, historical events and scenes of daily life, ancient pre-Hispanic cities and the modern metropolis. Linenbound with powerful gold stamping, this remarkable evocation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican life and history is both modern and classic at once. It is necessarily selective in its variety of photographers, subject matter, techniques and materials, but the resulting vision is all-embracing. It is at once a family album of the Mexican nation, a social and cultural history, a sourcebook and a delight for photo lovers. Spans from 1847 to the 1970s.