A photo essay by Keith Dannemiller on Paloma, a fifteen year-old girl growing up in an orphanage Ciudad Juárez due to her mother’s potential to be abusive and who celebrates her Quinceañera – a Mexican rite of passage for girls – sponsored by the city government. With an introduction by TIME magazine photo editor Mark Rykoff.
Between Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas, USA
This series of images accompanied by text is part of a larger installation called “Je suis la frontière” (I am the border) which encompasses a growing archive of audio and visual documents that explore the complexity of living in the US – Mexico borderland. The whole archive constitutes a personal cartography of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, two cities that are at the same contiguous but divided by four international bridges. In her work, Vera seeks to challenge the limited and biased information that the media gives us about certain places in the world. She believes in approaching those places by listening to individuals, following their steps, and walking on the streets. She thus hopes to create a personal cartography of a place and to give presence to the voices and life stories behind the sometimes overwhelming statistics.
A Place Where You Can’t Say No
Acapulco is a place where you can’t say no. Elvis Presley said it this way in a song dating back to 1963 that had become popular a year earlier after the release of the movie Fun in Acapulco. In this installation project, the Mexican artist Pablo López Luz not only sheds light upon the topographic vision of different architectural structures and urban landscape but also to the classical imagery of a place full of glamour that has been vividly immortalized by the cinema and advertising industries.
Ironic Allusions To Our Relationship With The Desert
“In my photographs from the last few years, I have intervened upon the landscape, creating scenes or sets with a wide range of natural and manmade elements. In this way, amidst the sometimes oppressive vastness, I construct and photograph intimate spaces: some of them are metaphors for the painful desertification of the planet caused by man, while others work as ironic allusions to our relationship with the desert. The action I perform deals with reintegration: it’s a reflection on what the desert has lost, but also a way of restoring its ravaged memory through a personal intervention.”
Ciudad Juarez Is At The Epicenter Of The Violence
Mexican drugs cartels are now fighting two fronts. The first involves the authorities, the second is against other cartels and is about controlling the smuggling routes. This is an extreme brutal struggle in which twentytwo thousand people have died so far. Torture, beheadings, mass killings, public executions and drive-by shootings have become normal. Cartels are competing each other in sadism and fierceness and the glorification of extreme violence is penetrating popular culture. Ciudad Juarez is at the epicenter of the violence. With 2600 people killed in 2009, seven victims daily, this city of 1,2 million people has become the most dangerous city in the world.
A Particular Beauty, Fragile And Vulnerable
Juan Antonio Molina Cuesta on Andrés Carretero: “The photographic act could be a means of building an ideal context in which the portrayed individuals do not seem marginal. Finally, an air of abstraction seems to give them a paradoxical normality and a sort of comfortable dignity. Furthermore – and this is no less significant – they reveal a particular beauty, fragile and subtly vulnerable.”
The Space In Which I Make My Camera Click
Mauricio Alejo, who was born in Mexico City and lives and works in New York, records everyday objects that he sets up in absurd arrangements, or more dramatically modifies by cutting, staining or painting them, or submitting them to laws of physics. The actual constructions cannot be experienced directly, but only in the beautifully composed photographs and videos that they gracefully inhabit.
A Metaphor Of Idleness, Ambiguity And Disruption
The work presented here is a series of photographs of abandoned houses in Anahuac, on the north of Mexico. I have lit up the houses at night, as if they were monuments, marking its sculpture characteristics making a theatrical view of the human drama lived there. I analyze through photography their aesthetic categories and their qualities as documents and ruins. In this work I was interested in portraying a disappearing way of life through these images, and how that impacted the use of land. One of the houses was of the sister of my grandfather. The people had to flew to other areas after a drought of several years, that made impossible to keep working the fields
It has been four years since I have started to photograph this group of nudist men that meet several times each year at Cuernavaca City, located at the south of Mexico City. As an escape from the stress of living in Mexico City these men have made of the house, mostly in the garden area, a temporary weekend oasis destined to contemplation, recreation and purification of their bodies.