What Fernando Brito (a photojournalist from Mexico) seeks with his images, is that the next time someone sees a photo of a human being who has perished, they would cease looking at violent deaths as a normal, everyday occurance.
This year Brito has won three major awards in Mexico: Visual Arts Biennale, Northwest Biennale Exhibition of Plastic Arts of the UAS, and the Biennale Nacional del Centro de la Imagen.
Brito’s images have the strength of pure photojournalism, the morbidity of the Red Note, and the subtlety of an austere poem.
Fernando Brito, photo editor of the newspaper El Debate de Culiacán, in the northwestern state of Sinaloa in Mexico, faces the call of Death every day in the context of the absurd war against drug trafficking in Mexico, a war that has left more than 33,000 dead in 4 years. Brito comes across death, execution, abduction and torture daily. Death is in front of his camera clothed in a different outfit each time.
In a country like Mexico, where publications do not have rules for printing violent photos of death, everything depends on the sensitivity of the editors. Therefore, Brito’s photos give dignity back to the bodies of those who lost their lives in terrifying conditions.
His pictures are based on the concept of a landscape, where the body of a corpse seems to be a detail or an accident in the image. In the sea of photographs that publish death in daily newspapers, Brito’s work stands out thanks to the silent space for reflection, a pause in the middle of the nightmare, that he brings to each of them.
Here are some pictures to let you see the same judge as purgatory, and especially Fernando looks like a sensible and intelligent photojournalist who has managed to frame death without being paralyzed by fear.
Ulises Castellanos
