VI. Things turned this way: Mexico The recurring subjects in Mexican photography fluctuated between pretended representations of the identity, similar to other countries in Latin America: the social struggle, nature’ s excesses, the exotic look to original cultures, the post-modern contradictions of our societies 5. This tone has made a gradual turn almost a century after the beginning of the Revolution.
Although not a peaceful country, as its history clearly testifies, the process of violence that affects Mexican population today is a new subject, at least since the solidification of the PRI( Partido Revolucionario Institucional), monolithic power party that continuously ruled the country from 1929 to 2000, the year when PAN( Partido Acción Nacional) rose to power with Vicente Fox, when problems began to unleash 6.
One could say that the depiction of armed violence during this lapse of time – save sporadic but strong events on a media level such as the student’ s movement in’ 68, or the EZLN( Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional)– is something new for photojournalism and Mexican contemporary art. Fernando Brito( Culiacán, 1975) is a paradigmatic case in the national photography circles, having obtained achievements in the last 2 years that no fellow countryman had before, in such different events as Centro de la Imagen’ s Biennale 7( 2010), Photo- España 8( 2011) and Word Press Photo 9( 2011). The reasons: the fragile division the author touches with his work, between photojournalism and contemporary photography, in addition to the state of violence brought up by the confrontation between the drug cartels and the State’ s armed forces.
Brito works in a newspaper in Culiacán, Sinaloa, city close to Badiraguato, land that from the 19th Century has poppy plantations and where the most powerful drug lords of the last decades originated. In this context where images can be assumed as a red note, they acquire through Brito a peaceful but not less impressive character. The author establishes a lonesome and meticulous relationship with the bodies of the executed and the landscape that contains them through formal strategies of contemporary
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