The 13,000 photographs that tell the modern history of Mexico and Latin America

A group of guerrillas marches through the streets of San Cristóbal de las Casas, the beautiful colonial city of Chiapas, in the south of Mexican territory. It is 1994 and the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), whose uprising has shaken Mexico, triumphantly enters that tourist gem and one of the soldiers stares at photographer Antonio Turok's lens and points his gun at him. He has dark circles under his eyes, a tired look, without the adrenaline of a conquest reflected in it. Behind him are dozens of guerrillas, equally exhausted, many of them indigenous, people who raised suspicions and hopes in similar doses. Black and white photography is part of the collection preserved by the Image Center, in Mexico City, an institution that celebrates 30 years of disseminating photography. It is one of the most important organizations of its kind on the continent – ​​the center claims that its archive is “unique in the world” – and will celebrate its anniversary with a huge exhibition that will show some 400 images that tell the modern history of Mexico and Latin America.

The Zapatista movement may have left resentments and disappointments, but the images of those ragged men and women who triumphantly entered an important Mexican city have remained engraved in the collective memory of Mexico, but also in Latin America, this vast region that has seen triumph, become corrupted and fall so many revolutionary projects. It is the memory that is alive in the archives of the Image Center, which protects it with such care that very few people can enter its vaults to avoid the deterioration of their jewelry, because the archive is made up of printed photographs, there are no negatives. . “It is a public collection specialized in contemporary photography,” says Johan Trujillo Argüelles, director of the institution. “His collection is a national heritage. This is an initiative of the photographic community itself, which integrates this collection with a mainly Latin American link, it is an international collection,” explains the official.

Trujillo refers to the donation made by the Mexican Council of Photography (CMF) of its photographic collection - which in 2016 was recognized by UNESCO's Latin American and Caribbean Memory Program - so that this institution could preserve it. The Council is the predecessor of the IM and had been created by Pedro Meyer, one of the pioneers of contemporary photography in Latin America. Meyer, born in Spain but emigrated to Mexico during the Spanish Republican exile, founded the CMF in 1976, together with fellow photographer Lázaro Blanco and the Argentine cultural promoter Raquel Tibol. “It was an effort to recognize photography as part of the Fine Arts,” explains Trujillo. “The idea was to consolidate an infrastructure for its dissemination and study, but above all as a bridge to link with Latin America, thus expanding what was known about photography outside of Mexico. It was possible to establish communication with photographers from other countries and from that effort, for example, the Photography Biennial emerged,” says the director. The Council also organized colloquiums that allowed authors from Argentina, Chile or Brazil to arrive in Mexico. This group also managed to get museums to open their doors to photography. “It is an important effort for its recognition as an artistic practice,” says Trujillo.

The budgetary problems came at the end of the eighties, when the Council stopped receiving – “due to administrative processing issues,” according to Trujillo – public financing to maintain itself. The institution lost its facilities in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City and everything pointed to his death, and with it the dissemination of the image in the country. Then a portentous event occurred, because at that time the Mexican photographer, writer and editor Pablo Ortiz Monasterio organized the celebration of the 150 years of photography in Mexico, with which he was able to convince many galleries in the city to join and exhibit. images. The importance of that event and the pressure generated by photographers allowed the newly created National Council for Culture to agree to provide financing to create a public space for the image. It helped that the first director of that organization, Víctor Flores Olea, was also a photographer.

The current headquarters of the Image Center is a beautiful 18th century building built in the old heart of Mexico City, a plant that was first a tobacco factory, but was later used as a military barracks, mainly to store weapons. The rehabilitation and remodeling work on the property began in the early nineties, because the construction was almost abandoned, in poor condition - “everything creaked” - says Trujillo. The building has a huge esplanade that extends to a charming park where every Sunday dozens of retirees gather to dance boleros. It also has fresh internal patios full of bougainvilleas, trees and plants and a large room for exhibitions, because it has also become an important museum for dissemination. The Image Center was inaugurated by the Culture authorities on May 4, 1994 and that is why this year it will celebrate its 30th anniversary with a large exhibition that will show the public more than 400 images from its collection.

The archive has photographs from the first decades of the last century, such as one by Enrique Díaz, which shows a certain Commander Pimentel next to the fire department mascot, on top of a newly released fire extinguishing machine, in an image from 1945. Or that of Lola Álvarez Bravo from the same year, in which a traveling photographer is seen photographing a family in a parched landscape full of cacti. There is a photo by David Meneses, from the late nineties, that shows a woman in the throes of divine ecstasy as a member of the

, the controversial Mexican sect; and that of Federico Gama, with a smiling young man riding a bicycle, which is part of that urban culture known as the

. Latin American history also has a place, between beauty and infamy, like the photo of Alejandro Cherep from September 20, 1984, when the results of an investigation that gave an account of the horrors of the military dictatorship were delivered to President Raúl Alfonsín. Argentina: almost 9,000 missing people that could be confirmed.

“They are more than names or just events,” says director Trujillo. It is history itself portrayed for posterity. There are photos of divided Germany, before the fall of the wall; life in the cities of the continent under military dictatorships, from Guatemala to Brazil; the guerrilla movements of Central America. “It has been the great events in the region that have allowed us to have this unique collection,” says Trujillo. “The idea of ​​the exhibition that we are going to put together is to give an account of this documentary wealth,” she adds. The exhibition will open its doors on May 4 and will be divided into three parts, dedicated to photography that portrays current events, to photojournalistic essays; another that shows events that occurred in 1994, the year when everything happened in Mexico, such as the Zapatista uprising; and the last is a look at contemporary, more artistic photography, with images by authors from Latin America. An exhibition that tells the turbulent history of an always turbulent region and that supports the popular saying that a picture is worth a thousand words.