If you’ve traveled in Mexico, you know the sensational crime papers with scenes of grisly accidents and murders splattered across the front page. 73-year-old Enrique Metinides is one of Mexico’s top crime photographers whose work falls in this category, but his images, although they force us to be voyeurs, do so in a way that makes us think about fate, chance and why certain things happen the way they do.
I came across an interview with Metinides in the photography issue of Vice Magazine. I’m sometimes dubious about Vice with its trendy, snarky tone, but they often have pearls in there.
Metinides picked up a camera at age 11 and soon signed on as the youngest photographer for La Prensa, working as an assistant to the crime editor. Over the years, he became a skilled technician in the art of tracking and documenting tragedy. Wired in to the police radio, Metinides was often the first to arrive on the scene. He’s been compared to Weegee, but his style doesn’t have the naked shock produced by Weegee’s flashbulbs. Metinides in some ways shares more with Cindy Sherman and her staged, filmic images. In the photo above dated 1979, the actress, Adela Legeratta Rivas was walking along Avenue Chapultepec when she was struck and killed by a car. This is moments after the tragedy and it doesn’t seem possible that this beautiful women so carefully made up, lying with the tiniest trickle of blood across her face, is dead. We are so used to our cinematic images of death that the real thing just doesn’t feel real.
Metinides zooms in on catastrophe and makes us stop in our tracks when confronted with the lurid details, but as we stand there and gawk he forces us to realize that tragedy can happen quickly, to anybody—and that might be worth thinking about. He has also been written up in The Guardian and The New York Times.
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