Photographer Enrique Metinides, in Mexico City, on April 22, 2016. Saúl Ruíz
It was said of him that he saw too much.
That ambulances appeared to him in dreams, that he cried before going to bed.
Also, that when he hung up the camera, so many years of fear and terror came over him that no one like him photographed.
The man who, despite the chaos, looked serenely at death and portrayed the beauty of the last moment of hundreds of people, has died this Tuesday at the age of 88.
Enrique Metinides (Mexico City, 1934), catapulted a battered genre into the category of art, although fame came after he retired.
As an inheritance to a country that did not make it easy for him, he has left his work.
The legend of him.
Metinides told this newspaper in an interview that his destiny was to be born in the United States.
His parents, Teoharis and María, Greek immigrants, were going there when their ship stopped in Veracruz and, after being robbed, they had to stay in Mexico and try their luck.
In the capital, in the populous neighborhood of Santa María la Ribera, his father opened a restaurant.
And when little Jarambalos Enrique — his full name — turned nine, he gave him a dream.
A Junior Brownie, made in Germany.
Twelve black and white photos.
box cannon.
His father knew him well.
When he photographed his first death he was 11 years old.
The young Metinides, who was already photographing crashed cars and collapsed hoods, was following some policemen he had met in his father's restaurant.
His first cover in a newspaper was made at 12. And since then he hasn't stopped.
The images of death that captured his eye, always alert to him, were published in all the Mexican media.
After all, she was born in Mexico in the 1930s, not in the United States.
And you had to eat.
La Prensa, Crime, War on Crime, Zócalo, Alarma
… In black and white.
In color.
His compositions began to distinguish him quickly.
Mexican journalist Adela Legarreta, run over in 1979. Enrique Metinides
His serene gaze into horror showed the sweeter side of death.
Like his iconic photograph of the car accident that took the life of the famous journalist Adela Legarreta Rivas, on April 2, 1979. An unreal, almost pictorial portrait: her body is broken, defenseless, but the sun illuminates her face. she.
Her eyes, large and calm, are still open.
Her makeup is impeccable.
From the eyebrows to the nails.
“She is beautiful because she is awake.
There is no death”, commented the author.
Like a statue in the midst of chaos, Metinides stood patiently, with an innate sensitivity to detail as the world crumbled around him.
The photos that he took in his more than 50-year career are an example of how pain, tragedy, always have a human part, the only one capable of stirring something in the viewer's guts.
A lesson from Metinides for generations of Mexican photographers who for years have come across increasingly macabre, more horrible scenes.
Well, as it was for him, death continues to be their daily bread.
Mexico never made it easy for him.
The work to which he had dedicated his life never gave him as much as he deserved: miserable salaries, impossible days attached to police frequencies, two dismissals.
While working, he had 19 serious accidents, broke seven ribs, was run over twice and suffered a heart attack.
But he continued.
He seemed to have death on his payroll.
Children, pregnant women, babies.
He didn't care.
He was there first.
And then, when it was all over, too.
Everything was still in his head.
He did not forget.
Not that night, not the next day, not the next.
A woman cries next to the body of her boyfriend who was stabbed by thieves in Chapultepec Park, in Mexico City, 1995. Enrique Metinides
In 1997, after more than 50 hectic years of work, he retired.
It was then that glory began to surround him.
What he had been despised now gained value.
Collections and catalogs were published;
documentaries were filmed.
And Mexico discovered in Metinides one of his great portraitists.
He exhibited in New York, Berlin, Madrid, Zurich, San Francisco, Arles, Helsinki, Paris… his images became art.
“I always avoided the macabre, the gruesome.
I had respect for the victims”, said the author in the interview for this newspaper.
In these days when the country wakes up with a slaughter harder than the previous one -sometimes broadcast almost live-, the powerful legacy of the photographer who died this Tuesday is essential to review the sensitivity in the tragedy, the embrace of pain and mourning always absent and silent, but as necessary as his work.
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