Mexico and the Photobook

Mexico’s relationship to photobooks is nearly as old as the country itself. Agustín Víctor Casasola’s never-completed Álbum histórico gráfico (Historical graphic album) sought to capture Mexico’s revolution in the early twentieth century. Since then, photobooks have continued to evolve alongside Mexico’s diverse and multicultural society. Perhaps the best embodiment of this spirit is Pablo Ortíz Monasterio, a photographer, editor, curator, and prolific collector. Ortíz Monasterio edited Río de Luz (River of light), a government-funded book series featuring monographs by Latin American photographers such as Pedro Meyer and Mariana Yampolsky. In 1994, along with his peers in the photography community, Ortíz Monasterio founded the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, where he has served as chief curator and editor of Luna Córnea, a magazine that promotes critical dialogue around photography.

Horacio Fernández, a photography historian, is a publishing legend in his own right. Fernández curated the lauded Fotografía Pública: Photography in Print 1919–1939 (1999) at Spain’s Museo Reina Sofía and edited The Latin American Photobook (Aperture, 2011). For this issue, Ortíz Monasterio and Fernández met in June following the opening of the show Fotos en libros, libros en fotos (Photos in books, books in photos), a collection of photobooks and photographs from the Centro de la Imagen’s collection, gathered over the last forty years by the Consejo Mexicano de Fotografía. At Ortíz Monasterio’s home in Coyoacán, they spoke about the long legacy of photobooks in Mexico, from Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s early work and Lourdes Grobet’s portrayal of lucha libre to Alejandro Cartagena’s inventive self-publishing.

Pablo Ortíz Monasterio: In Mexico, there have been books that (Historical graphic album, 1921) by Agustín Víctor Casasola, a masterpiece that was meant to become an encyclopedia with many volumes, of which only one was published.