The book opens with a photograph of a crashed glider sticking vertically out of a field, with about fifty people looking agape behind the two long wings that hold the plane in this dramatic position. It continues with an incessant parade of twisted metal, upside down vehicles, lifeless bodies and open flames, a collection of extraordinary and everyday accidents across Mexico City from the 1950s to the 2000s.
The city reveals itself through these tragedies: its unending stream of vehicles that only lets up for accidents, its human congestion of dense crowds of onlookers, its fiery temper that results in crimes of passion, impulsive murders and suicides, its unwavering piety, its tabloids, its constant action. Action: an intense series of events, real or fictional, that fascinates Enrique Metinides since childhood, when he would sit endlessly in front of movies. An insatiable collector of these tense scenes, he dedicated his life to collecting them, ready day and night to embark with his camera in an ambulance en route to one of the tragedies of everyday life; saving and listing newspaper clippings daily; recording every television programs; directing the turbulent reality around him.
His sense of visual storytelling relieves his photographs of any morbid or voyeuristic intention. Metinides respectfully avoids close-ups of the victims, integrating the corpses into a cinematic composition containing clues, actors and viewers. These fragments of a disaster in color and black-and-white remind us of the importance of the story before the sensational and allow us to reflect on how journalism has evolved. Today, bloodbaths cover the pages of newspapers. This is not Metinides’ style. He continues to tell the stories that fascinate him, although he does so by mixing reality and fiction, memory and imagination, going through his vast archives organized by type of event, selecting certain scenes which he then re-photographs, placing them next to one of the many toys from his collection of miniature ambulances and firemen.
Laurence Cornet
Exhibition
« 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides”
Until Paril 20th, 2013
Aperture Foundation
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
New York, N.Y. 10001
Tel: 212 505 5555
Book
« 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides”
Photographs by Enrique Metinides
Edited and with an introduction by Trisha Ziff
Aperture’s House Edition
184 pages, 50 $
