Since I started taking photographs in 1976, I have always worked in the mode of street photography. I realized a long time project on Mexico City, in black and white, for about 25 years, until 2003 that I began taking color photographs both in Mexico and in other cities abroad. My photographic work deals with the relationship between representation and the real world, and how nature, time, space, and cultural artifacts, create a new way of experiencing reality. The main themes in my work are cities, streets, popular culture, travel and memory.
“The series of images of death in black and white, or the more recent ones in color, that I have taken in wax museums or in Mexico City streets, do not deal with murder o violent death as real events. They are metaphors to try to understand what life and death mean in my own experience as well as in my own culture.
The two photographs in this exhibition are an expression of my concern with the violent times we are living in Mexico. The Blue Dress is an image I took in a pleasant, middle class neighborhood in Mexico City, and I always wonder how it ended lying on the grass of a small park. It might have been thrown away after the family moved to another place, or when they decided to clean the closet, but for me it is a symbol of so much violence and crime against women in Mexico. The photograph Ex-Votos and Roses shows the milagritos that people place in church altars to ask for a favor of the Catholic saints or as a symbol of gratitude for a miracle granted. In Mexican recent history, many of these offerings are petitions for their daughters, sons, and other family members to come back home unharmed after they have disappeared because of violence of all sorts. The portraits of their loved ones, together with the traditional milagritos, represent the hopelessness and despair of Mexicans that have to confront death every day.”