The Urban Three: Photo exhibit captures the Centro Histórico's modern history

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
April 9, 2010

To visitors passing through the shoulder-to-shoulder throngs in Mexico City’s historical center, it might seem impossible to find a singular moment amid the flurry of bodies, sounds and sights. But among the bustling rush down narrow streets and past colonial monuments, three capital city photographers have done precisely that.

A street sweeper moving his twig broom across the concrete. Sandal-clad tourists lugging backpacks and guidebooks. White-haired ladies ambling down an alley. All everyday and unremarkable visions that otherwise go unnoticed, the artists contend.

Benjamín Alcántara, Víctor Mendiola and Mark Powell have captured the people and peculiarities of the Centro Histórico in a collective exhibition titled “Tres Urbana” (“The Urban Three”) at the Archive Museum of Photography in the heart of the Federal District. The display, which opened March 6, will wrap up in one month on May 16.

Alcántara said the project began when the museum extended the photographers an invitation to display their works. Rather than put up previous images, however, the artists began clicking away in the streets surrounding the museum, which stands behind the Aztec empire’s Templo Mayor and the grandiose Metropolitan Cathedral.

“All the images that are hung by the windows have the same textures as the buildings seen through the glass,” he told The News. “It’s like an on-site exhibit; with all the sounds we can hear from the outside, it’s as if we were on the streets seeing the same scene. We wanted to create a dialogue with the museum and the images themselves.”

The artist said his third-floor “Entre Bárbaros” (“Among Barbarians”) display explores the city’s dynamic between international tourists and Mexican residents. His collection’s title is a play on the Greek word “barbaros,” or foreigner, and the modern interpretation of barbarians as invasive and uncivilized.

“I wanted to highlight the stereotypes that both groups have of one another, and also take an ironic look at this daily interaction between the two that does exist, but that we don’t always see,” he said.

In one image, a sour-faced Mexican woman in a black velvet “goth” getup poses with a silver-haired couple in town for an extended trip. Although the trio on the outside appears an uncomfortable match, Alcántara said the visitors had befriended the darkly dressed woman during their stay. A second photo shows a shaggy-haired tourist grinning amusingly between four Mexican men donning rubber masks of U.S. President Barack Obama.

While Alcántara’s collection shows the Centro Histórico’s more ephemeral inhabitants, Mendiola’s display, entitled “Somnolencias,” focuses on the city’s permanent and invisible residents. The photographer creates a portrait of the historical center during its quietest moments, when the first signs of life begin to appear as dawn bleeds into day.

Each image is paired with a short biography, such as the portrait of a street sweeper wearing electric orange pants and a reflective vest. The caption explains that the young man buses in from the State of Mexico every morning and works eight hours a day from Monday to Sunday to earn 900 pesos a week. The following photo shows a middle-aged woman holding a chicken in a dingy coop; on days that she doesn’t earn enough to eat, she’ll snap a chicken’s neck and subsist on the meat, the caption reads.

Mark Powell’s first-floor “Shelf Life” exhibit is a metaphor, extolling the idea that photographers are like cans of food that conserve memories, and that the photographs boast long expiration dates. In the image “Total Recall,” two frosty-haired ladies in matching patent leather pumps admire a bronze-gilded bust. Their stance at first glance gives the appearance of Siamese twins.

Unlike Alcántara and Mendiola’s works, however, several of Powell’s photos venture outside the museum’s parameters and travel east to the Iztapalapa borough, where Powell teaches digital photography workshops at the El Faro Oriente arts college. A second-floor exhibit at the museum features photos by workshop participants Fermín Guzmán and Alfredo Moreno, plus Irving and Jair Cabrera Torres.

Alcántara explained that aside from the unifying city themes in “Tres Urbana,” the three headlining photographers also belong to the same “sandwich” generation.

Mendiola and Alcántara were born in Mexico City in 1969 and are both members of the Via 69 photography collective. Powell, born in 1968 in Detroit, Mich., has lived and worked in Mexico City for more than five years. All three men have lived the transition from analog photography to digital technology, and the trio is surrounded by consecrated tradition on one end and innovative multimedia art on the other.

“In our generation, there are many photographers who are completely focused on conceptual photography, and others who are strictly photojournalists,” he said. “I think we (three) are contemporary documentary photographers who mix both strategies with traditional documentation.”

Alcántara noted that the photography museum has become an important hub in Mexico City in terms of its relevant exhibitions and an archive of more than a million negatives documenting the expansive metropolis.