YUAG Offers Snapshot Of Mexican Photographers

It’s a famous picture, of a girl peeking into a window, and seems almost like a happy accident, a case of the photographer being in the right place at the right time. If so, that timing was nearly miraculous, due to the beauty in its formal composition. The circle of the hat echoes the circle of the window, while both offset the relentless diamonds on the wall. It succeeds in feeling like street photography and like an intricately composed image all at once. 

The image, by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, is part of ​“Mexican Photography from the Gallery’s Collection,” a small exhibition with surprising breadth, running now through mid-November on the fourth floor of Yale University Art Gallery on Chapel Street. As the Bravo piece suggests, the works are all from several ​“well-known figures in Mexican photography,” who collectively ​“contributed to the development of photography as a modern artistic practice and a tool for social justice.” 

The exhibition can also be understood as something of an artistic family tree. Bravo is ​“often considered the originator of modern Mexican photography,” as his style diverged from that of his mentor, the German photographer Hugo Brehme. In turn, he mentored a few of the other photographers in the exhibition, suggesting a lineage in the medium, even as each photographer has her or his own distinct way of shooting.

It is perhaps a little too easy to describe a certain flavor of Latin American art as either surreal or magical realist, but in a few cases that label is delightfully hard to avoid. Graciela Iturbide, an assistant to Bravo from 1969 to 1972, creates a huge atmosphere in Nuestra señora de las iguanas — Our Lady of the Iguanas — in its pairing of the incongruous and the banal. Questions abound regarding what is happening in the image. How does one fit so many iguanas on one head? How did they get there, and why are they staying there? Perhaps just as interesting, though, is the woman’s inscrutable expression. Perhaps she’s on the verge of something momentous. Maybe she’s just waiting for a bus.

The accompanying text informs us that ​“Iturbide studied filmmaking at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Cinematográficas, in Mexico City, and her photographs have a narrative and filmic quality.” Iturbide noted that she was influenced by photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ​“concept of the ​‘decisive moment’ — the split second in which a photographer, after carefully watching life unfold, freezes a precise moment with the release of the shutter.” 

Nuestra señora de las iguanas, in the context of the exhibition, is something of an outlier of Iturbide’s work. The accompanying text tells us that she was hired to document the indigenous Seri people in the Sonoran desert in 1978, where she procued one of her most famous images, of a woman crossing the desert in traditional garb with a boom box — the ancient and the modern coexisting side by side.

Marcela Taboada, meanwhile, heads toward a more realist style. ​“In 2001 she began to document daily life in San Miguel Amatitlán,a remote town that has a low ratio of men to women because many men have left for jobs in larger cities or, more commonly, in the United States,” leaving women to maintain the town and keep developing it. Soledad revels in the details of the old woman’s hand, the texture of her skin, but also lends some ambiguity regarding her intentions. She is protecting the child, perhaps, but also half-blinding them. She doesn’t want to let them go, but also knows that, eventually, she can’t stop them. 

Like Graciela Iturbide, Ángeles Torrejón wanted to be a film director but got into photojournalism instead. Her most famous images were those ​“documenting women of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) … just months after the EZLN’s January 1994 uprising in response to the Mexican government’s compliance with the North American Free Trade Agreement. Torrejón returned to the Lacandon Jungle in the state of Chiapas over several years, producing images of the EZLN that sharply contrast those made by her male counterparts in that they highlight the contributions of EZLN women and the fact that they held positions of power within the movement.”

A couple of Torrejón’s images are also notable for the way they capture people in the midst of conflict in moments of relaxation, even levity. The moment feels incongruous — do people during an uprising really have time for a party? But at the same time, it’s obviously right, as natural as a woman with a crown of reptiles.

“Mexican Photography from the Gallery’s Collection” runs at Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., through mid-November. Admission is free. Visit the museum’s website for hours and more information.