When you see an iconic photograph hanging on a gallery wall, it's tempting to assume this was the creation of a lone visionary. If so, a new exhibition at The Getty Center, in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, will set you straight.
Instante / revelación: Moments in Mexican Photography gathers work from thirteen practitioners across nine decades.
It makes the case that Mexico's rich photographic tradition was built not by isolated geniuses, but by a vibrant network of friends, teachers, students and even couples who kept shooting the same streets, the same faces and sometimes the same bathtub.
I'm not being flippant with that last bit, by the way. One of the show's threads follows Graciela Iturbide's series shot inside artist Frida Kahlo's bathroom at Casa Azul, decades after the latter's death, where crutches, orthopaedic braces and a Stalin poster sit oddly together in the tub.
Strange, but true.
Masterclass in framing
Another thing I like is that rather than presenting all this work chronologically, curator Julieta Pestarino has organized it into 5 themes, each named after a line from Octavio Paz's poem Cara al tiempo, written to accompany Manuel Álvarez Bravo's images in the 1982 book that gives the show its title.
One of these sections, La sensación y la percepción ("Sensation and perception"), provides a masterclass in framing.
Back in the late 1920s, Álvarez Bravo figured out that if you crop tight enough or shoot from an interesting enough angle, an ordinary scene stops looking ordinary. You can see the same trick in later work by Iturbide, Pedro Meyer and Cecilia Salcedo Méndez.
The latter shoots a cluster of seed pods against black until they look more like sculpture than plant matter. Meyer does it with a nautilus shell, shooting so close that scale disappears and all that's left is light and curve. "Ahead of their time" doesn't really cut it.
An uneasy truce
Another section, El ojo piensa, el pensamiento ve ("The Eye Thinks, Thought Sees") section, examines the relationships between photographers and Mexican artists including Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, Octavio Paz and Juan Rulfo.
This means we get, for example, a dramatic Rodrigo Moya portrait of Rivera and Siqueiros standing shoulder to shoulder in front of a mural: two rival titans of the art world sharing an uneasy truce for the camera.
The final section, El tiempo no cesa de fluir ("Time never stops flowing") grounds all this experimentation in history.
This spans everything from the economic boom of the mid-20th century, aka the "Mexican Miracle", through to a haunting image by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio – a wind-bent cactus with graffiti scrawled beneath it, demanding the return of the 43 students who disappeared in Ayotzinapa in 2014.
Instante / revelación: Moments in Mexican Photography runs at the Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, from September 01 2026 until January 03 2027. Admission is free, but timed entry tickets need to be booked.
