About a century ago, artists joined the politicos and rebels in rethinking Mexico’s identity.
Muralist Diego Rivera and painter Frida Kahlo were the best-known artist-revolutionaries. But photographers played a big role, too.
A new exhibition at the Chrysler Museum of Art, “Constructing Mexico: Photography and National Identity,” opening Thursday shows how photography at that time — and in other eras — helped shape the ever-evolving nation.
More than 55 images are on display in the Frank Photography Gallery, most of them from the museum’s expansive photography collection.
A shift occurred during the 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution, when the country ousted its dictator and installed a constitutional republic.
Representing that era and its aftermath are a top roster of photographers, including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, his former wife Lola Alvarez Bravo, Tina Modotti and her partner, Edward Weston.
But outsiders ran Mexico for centuries. Some of the earliest photos on display show the bad outcome for a foreign ruler who is dropped in with no connection to the place.
Napoleon III, emperor of France, invaded the country in 1862. Two years later, he invited Maximilian I, Archduke of Austria, to run the latest addition to France’s empire.
Maximilian knew the power of images and hired a photographer to shoot an impressive picture of him and his wife. That 1864 portrait shows the posh duo set to become Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlota.
“In Mexico, whatever he was selling did not capture the attention or belief of the Mexican people,” said Mark Castro, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs and exhibition organizer.
The new emperor hired a court photographer, Francois Aubert, to document his reign. In 1867, Napoleon withdrew his troops and the emperor was captured and killed. Aubert was tasked with photographing his boss in a coffin, to show the world what had happened.
Why so brutal? The prior Mexican president, Benito Juárez, had returned and wanted to deter any future foreign intervention, Castro said. The nation’s search for identity heightened in the ensuing years.
“There’s such a strong history of Mexico trying to define what it means to be Mexican. And what that means is always changing.”
The government had long minimized the existence of its many Indigenous people, wrote Olivier Debroise in his book, “Mexican Suite: A History of Photography in Mexico.” By the 1920s, they were being celebrated.
Photographers had varying approaches. The Italian Modotti championed the worker. Her 1927 photo of a worker’s hands resting atop a shovel is handsome and dignified.
Weston photographed beautifully lit, sensual abstract forms. His 1923 photo “Pyramid of the Sun” focuses on a portion of a massive ancient temple. Though he had no agenda, that image became famous and helped spread enthusiasm for Mexico’s ruins.
One of the museum’s recent acquisitions for the show is a dreamlike image of a Mayan palace nearly swallowed by dense foliage on a hillside plateau. “Palenque in Fog,” shot circa 1950 by Armando Salas Portugal, shows his fascination with ancient structures buried in the jungle, Debroise wrote, “and in growing danger of disappearing."
Castro said, “They have this incredibly rich living history around them,” and the Mexican landscape is part of its identity, too.
The latest work was taken in 2020 by Alexandra German, who is Mexican-English and photographs the sky. The images are her way of uniting globally scattered Mexicans.
Such people see the same sky. It’s another way of looking at identity, Castro said, for the growing diaspora.
“Constructing Mexico” is on display from August 7 through November 30. Visit chrysler.org for more information. Admission is free.
