PHOTOGRAPHY IS NOT MEANT TO HANG ON WALLS
By David Bacon
Jacobin, 4/16/15
Workers' Parade, Tina Modotti, Mexico City, 1926
A hundred years ago, one revolution had been upending the
social order just south of the U.S. border and another revolution was about to
begin halfway around the world. These revolutions did more than expropriate the
property of the wealthy. They discarded old ideas and created a field in which
new ones took their place. This was especially true with photography.
Mexico before its Revolution was a country dominated
economically by the U.S., and on its cultural periphery. Through the turn of
the 20th century, the main aesthetic framework for Mexican photographers was
defined by a Pictorialist tradition that asserted the medium's status as
"art."The Pictorialist and Photo-Secession movement, led by Alfred
Steiglitz and popularized through Camera Work, established New York City as the
center of the photographic world in North America.
The Mexican Revolution, a decade-long conflict in which
one of every seven Mexicans died, officially ended in 1920 with the termination
of its civil war and the destruction of its old social order.New ideas about
art and culture flourished in Mexico City's post-revolutionary ferment,
particularly in photography. Suddenly the unipolar photographic world of north
America, dominated by Pictorialism and Photo-Secession, became a multipolar
one, with a very different approach emerging in Mexico.Photographic ideas
developed outside New York City, both about how photographs should be
constructed, and about the role of photographers themselves.Artists who saw
themselves as agents of social change rejected the old vision and sought a new
one.
This period began an exchange of ideas between the U.S.
and Mexico about photographic technique, aesthetics, and the stance of the
photographer. These ideas did not develop in a vacuum. Instead, the dialogue
took place within a context of social movements that grew and waned. The shift
was part of a larger debate about the role of photographers, writers,
journalists, and painters in relation to those movements -- the
post-Revolutionary leftist movements among workers and peasants in Mexico, and
later, the rising labor movement in the U.S. in the 1930s.
"What was the center and what was the periphery
changed," says John Mraz, a historian of Mexican photography.Mraz is
Research Professor at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades,
Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (México).He curated the national exhibit for the
Centennial of the Mexican Revolution, Testimonios de una guerra, and has
written a number of books on Mexican photographers and photojournalism.He
suggests that the social cataclysm in Mexico created a new climate of ideas,
including aesthetic ones. (1) By the mid-1920s, for instance, painters like
Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros had rejected their pictorialist
training and replaced it with a muralist tradition, promoting in a dramatic new
graphic style the social movements unleashed by the Revolution. The muralists
viewed artists as participants in those movements, even organizing a union of
painters and sculptors (later depicted in a photograph by Tina Modotti) to
express the new social stance they believed artists should take.(2)
Mraz calls this a cultural effervescence, in which new
social ideas mix with new aesthetic ones in an environment of rapid social,
political, and aesthetic change. (3) This effervescence was not confined to
Mexico. The Soviet Revolution started in 1917, and its civil war ended in 1924.
Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Mexico City all became places where this new
climate of ideas flourished.
Into this maelstrom came Edward Weston and Tina Modotti,
arriving in Mexico City from California in 1923-24. Weston, not at all
political himself, was nevertheless determined not to create stock-in-trade
pictorial depictions of colonial churches and exotic (or noble)
"savages."
"Weston introduced modernist photography into
Mexico," Mraz says. "But he didn't bring it from the U.S. because he
didn't do any modernist photography there. He only discovered it and started
doing it here in Mexico. The modernist way of photographing is connected to the
anti-exotic. Exoticism comes from Pictorialism, like a nineteenth century painting.
No ragged edges, no sharp angles. Everything's perfect, the way it ought to be.
A very European idea." (4) Weston found himself in the middle of an
incredible aesthetic revolutionary ferment in Mexico, which transformed his
photography. After a few years, he returned to the U.S., but continued with the
same straight, direct approach he had honed in Mexico.
Modotti, originally Weston's student, stayed behind to
become one of the most influential photographers, not just in Mexico, but also
in U.S. and European photography. She took Weston's approach to form, and gave
it a social content. At first she took still lifes in the Weston formalist
style that included platinum prints of roses, and abstract experiment
compositions beginning in 1924. (5) But as she became more involved in the
political ferment of the city, she made one of her first efforts to give social
meaning to this modernist form, in the photograph, /Workers Parade/, taken in
1926.
Here, a crowd of marchers is shot from above, creating a
scene of men in white sombreros, headed for a destination outside the image.
Art historian Leonard Folgarait argues that Modotti does more than document the
event as a photojournalist. "Modotti has engaged in the documentary aspect
of photography . . . but she has balanced that sense of a visual record by
manipulating its information in such a way that it has become an interpretation
of the event, with that interpretation becoming a historical occurrence as
well." (6) She selected the scene for political purposes, discarding
"neutrality," and creating an image whose purpose is to show the
strength of workers in their collective numbers, and also their nationality and
culture as shown in the sombreros. In today's culture, where each person is
inundated by thousands of images, it's easy to forget that this is one of the
first efforts to document mass working-class protest, and that it's done, not
just to record the event, but to inspire similar activity. In his book,
Folgarait quotes journalist Carleton Beals, who knew Modotti:She "no
longer contents herself with perfect platinum prints for wealthy collectors but
has become desirous of a wider audience." (7) That audience (workers and
farmers) was defined by the politics of the Mexican Communist Party, which she
joined the following year.
In a modernist departure from recording events, Modotti
created another series of images, in which she sought to graft together Mexican
nationalist sentiment, strong in the Revolution's wake, with Communist
ideology. First she created a striking and stark photograph of a hammer and
sickle, the Communist emblem, which bore clear evidence of heavy toil. Then in
another image she placed these objects on a sombrero, giving these international
left symbols a specifically Mexican context. Finally she mixed symbols even
further: a sickle and a bandolier of bullets with a guitar, or an ear of corn.
And finally she discards both hammer and sickle, depicting the corn, bandolier
and guitar without them.
Mexican sombrero
with hammer and sickle, Tina Modotti, Mexico City, 1927
Bandolier, corn, guitar, Tina Modotti, Mexico City, 1927
In the Communist movement of the late 1920s, which prized
political orthodoxy, reinterpreting its most important visual symbol must have
caused some controversy.But Modotti's images were widely circulated at the
time. They were published in the radical leftwing periodicals that flourished
in Germany and the U.S. /Mexican sombrero with hammer and sickle/ was the cover
image for the October 1928 issue of /New Masses/, a socialist cultural magazine
published in New York City. (8)Her ideas dovetailed with those popularized in
the Soviet photographic ferment that followed its revolution, not just her modernism
in style, but also her stance as a committed political actor.
She and other photographers of the left in this period
were influenced by Soviet photography, which rejected "photography as
art" and insisted on its use in connection with social change. Alexander
Rodchenko wrote, "art has no place in modern life," and that "we
must take photographs from every angle but the navel." (9) Rodchenko, and
his fellow photographers in Moscow, pioneered the use of extreme angles, along
with diagonal composition and close-ups, as a means to shake the viewer's
perspective and liberate them from complacency. This strategy was similar to
that put forward by the earliest works of Communist playwright Berthold Brecht,
written during the same period. Brecht felt that drama should stimulate people
to question social reality in a critical way, and should not just tell stories.
(10) "Rodchenko believed that it was necessary to educate people to /see/
rather than simply to /look/, and proposed that ordinary familiar things be photographed
in new ways, from new angles and perspectives, effectively
'defamiliarized,'" according to Robert Deane, honorary researcher in
photography at the National Gallery of Australia. Additionally, Soviet
publications, especially Ogonyok (which began publishing in 1923)
"established many of the techniques of the illustrated magazine, such as
the use of large visually striking cover images, now considered
commonplace." (11)
Modotti did not invent the idea of the photographer as a
committed participant in social change. In his book, /Photographing the Mexican
Revolution/, Mraz documents the fact that many Mexican photographers became
supporters of different factions in the civil war, one of the world's most
photographed political upheavals of the time. The style they used came from
their prior training and the way they made a living, primarily as studio
photographers or working for magazines. "Although the subjects that appear
in the images were radically 'other,' it seems that the ways of photographing them
were established prior to the rebellion," Mraz speculates. (12) He links
specific photographers to particular groups active in the revolutionary
struggle: Manuel Ramos with the overthrown dictator Porfirio Diaz, but also
Heliodoro Gutierrez and Geronimo Hernandez with Francisco Madero, who overthrew
him. Amando Salmeron was Emiliano Zapata's photographer, while Antonio and Juan
Cacho were part of Pancho Villa's army. Other photographers similarly took
sides, and often those sides warred with each other. (13) Agustin Victor
Casasola became the best known, and the Casasola archive is today the
repository of a great deal of both his work and that of other photographers
working at the time.
Peasant Zapatistas, members of a Mexican insurgent group,
are fed breakfast at the famous restaurant Sanborns, Agustin Casasola, Mexico
City, 1914.
The revolution had an enormous impact on the left in the
U.S.Its precursor battle, the uprising in Cananea in 1907, was planned by
Mexican anarcho-syndicalists in Los Angles and St. Louis. Many of their
political associates went to Mexico to join the fighting. Radical journalist
John Reed covered the battles of Pancho Villa, and his dispatches became the
basis for his first revolutionary book, /Insurgent Mexico/. (14) Reed then went
on to St. Petersburg, where he wrote the story of the insurrection that
ultimately brought the Soviets to power in /Ten Days That Shook the World/.
(15)
Reed had no desire to be an impartial observer. He took
part in labor struggles in the U.S. (notably the Paterson N.J. silk workers
strike), and then traveled through the new Soviet Union in its first years,
promoting the Revolution. He died there and is buried in the Kremlin wall. His
stance, as a journalist and writer covering a movement in which he
participated, was a common choice for many artists in the U.S. until
McCarthyism deprived most leftwing cultural workers of the ability to earn a
living.
Modotti too chose politics over art. The Mexican
government, as it moved to the right, cynically accused her of involvement in
the assassination of her lover, Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella. It
deported her to Europe. There she gave up photography, and went to work for the
Communist International, eventually shepherding refugees out of Spain after the
victory of the fascists in the Spanish Civil War.Even before she left Mexico,
she wrote Weston, explaining, "Since the element of life is stronger in me
than the element of art I should just resign to it + make the best of
it..." (16)
That political stance is as much Modotti's legacy to
photography in Mexico (and in the U.S.) as the social content and formalism of
her photographs, but it was not taken up by everyone. The U.S. documentary
tradition of the 1930s that followed included photographers with a wide
diversity of political perspectives.Some saw their role as showing the
devastating impact of the Depression, but hesitated at linking their
photography to the radical social movements actively trying to change existing
economic and political conditions. For example, at the Farm Security
Administration, Roy Stryker would not hire photographers he viewed as too left,
fearing the backlash from right-wingers in Congress who targeted his funding.
(17)
But there were other photographers working at the time
who participated in leftwing social movements. John Gutmann left Germany in
1933, where he had already been influenced by the radical photographers of the
Weimar Republic, and of the Soviets before them.Some of his photographs were
direct warnings of fascism on the horizon, such as /The News Photographer, San
Francisco City Hall/, 1935. In this image, a huge U.S. flag is draped beside
the Nazi swastika and the flag of fascist Italy, just as the city fathers greet
officials from those two countries, while a newsman takes the picture.
The News Photographer, San Francisco City Hall, John
Gutmann, 1935
Alexander Alland also came to the U.S. from Europe when
fascism rose to power. Here, he connected the rise of the right to domestic
racism, and took photographs of anti-racist demonstrations, as well as the
Hooverville settlements of the unemployed and homeless. (18)
The two most committed "movement photographers"
of the period were Otto Hagel and Hansel Mieth. Both left Germany at 15, and
went to work as laborers and farm workers on their arrival in the U.S. They
photographed the huge farm worker strikes of the 1930s, and were close to the
dockworkers union when the San Francisco general strike in 1934 radicalized
U.S. labor.(19)
Outstretched Hands, Hansel Mieth, San Francisco,
California, 1934
Their photograph, /Outstretched Hands/, 1934, became an
icon of the union, showing the desperation and humiliation of longshore workers
trying to get hired in the despised daily shapeup, an abusive system that the
union eventually abolished. Mieth also took photographs in the Heart Mountain
concentration camp for Japanese "internees" during World War II,
where photography was virtually forbidden.
After the war, however, the U.S. lost its socially committed
documentary tradition to McCarthyism. Alland was blacklisted in the late 1940s,
as the cold war began. After they were called before the House Un-American
Activities Committee, Mieth lost her job as a staff photographer for /Life/
magazine, and Hagel's freelance career ground to a halt. He photographed a
pioneering work on longshoremen, however, /Men and Machines/; the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union was one of the few organizations that would still
give him work. (20) Nevertheless, the whole idea of photographers connected to
radical social movements ended because they couldn't work, while leftwing
social movements themselves were on the run.
In Mexico, successive administrations moved to the right
during the cold war as well, and pressured media outlets to use photography for
their political glorification.Nevertheless, the tradition of documentary
photography, carried on by politically committed photographers, lived on. The
Mayo brothers, who fled Spain at the end of the Civil War, became the most
productive photojournalists in Mexico City. While most of their work wasn't
overtly political, they had close ties with the Mexican left. (21)
Manuel Alvarez Bravo became a photographer during the
cultural and political ferment in which Modotti was active. But Alvarez Bravo
was not a political militant or an activist photographer, despite images such
as "Death of a Striker," purportedly showing the violence of the
social turmoil of the time. In a long career he combined documentary work,
surrealism, nude photography, and other visual genres. His first wife, Lola
Alvarez Bravo, became a pioneer documentarian of the country's indigenous
cultural roots, using a realist style to combat the exoticism of the
Pictorialist tradition.
Nevertheless, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the Mexican
photographer best known to U.S. audiences, was the mentor of others who did
document social reality. Their work was published, despite the fact that the
publications in which their work appeared needed to stay on the good side of
the government. The work of Nacho Lopez, Hector Garcia, and their colleagues,
rebelled against depicting either false cheer or the exploitation of indigenous
pre-Hispanic cultures as exotic fare for Europeans and tourists. Lopez' most
dramatic images were taken in the police stations (delegaciones) of Mexico
City, showing clearly peoples' poverty and powerlessness. But he treated his
subjects as human beings, with dignity, rather than representing them as
helpless victims.(22) Lopez famously remarked that, "Photography was not
meant as art to adorn walls, but rather to make obvious the ancestral cruelty
of man against man." (23)
Woman Standing Before Book in Delegacion, Nacho Lopez,
1954
Hector Garcia, who died in 2012 at the age of 89, also
tried to use photography as a way to help dissident social movements break
through the wall of official silence. He grew up on the streets and went to
work on the railroad in the U.S. as a bracero contract worker in the 1940s.
After Alvarez Bravo took him under his wing, he began work as a
photojournalist. At the same time, he took photographs of social protests in
which he also participated, even starting a newspaper that carried his images
of student marches.Both Garcia and the Mayo brothers documented the high point
of rebellion in the 1950s-the 1958 railroad strike-which led to the
imprisonment of its leaders Demetrio Vallejo and Valentin Campa.
One striking Garcia image shows two steel workers, their
dark glasses, and cloth wrapped around their noses and mouths as their only
protection from fumes and sparks. When muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros was
imprisoned in 1960 during Mexico's anti-Communist purge, Garcia took a famous
image showing him with his hand raised, behind the bars of the Lucumberri
Prison. The image brings to mind Mieth and Hagel's famous photograph of
imprisoned labor activist Tom Mooney-a stylized portrait of his face behind the
bars of California's San Quentin prison-taken around 1936.Both are direct
frontal portraits. In the Hagel and Mieth portrait Mooney face is framed by the
bars, while Siqueiros holds up his hand, palm forward, in a gesture undoubtedly
meant to say "Stop!" Both portraits clearly convey the idea that
these are not passive prisoners, but ones who are resisting an unjust imprisonment.They
are profoundly political images."What I've done practically all my
life," Garcia explained, "is to be a witness and to make graphic
testimonies of the movements and struggles of the social classes in Mexico.
This continues to be the most important motive I have to do photography."
(24)
David Alfaro Siqueiros, Hector Garcia, 1960
Tom Mooney, San Quentin Prison, Otto Hagel, 1936/1938
At twenty years old, Mariana Yampolsky left her native
U.S. in 1945. She became the first woman in the Taller de Grafica Popular (the
People's Graphic Workshop), an anti-fascist project started in the late 1930s
by Leopoldo Méndez, Pablo O'Higgins, and Luis Arena. Yampolsky was a socialist,
close to the Mexican Communist Party. She worked for many years with the
Secretariat of Public Education during the period, when the office was staffed
by progressive educators dedicated to bringing schools and literacy to rural
areas, especially in indigenous communities. She published art and children's'
books, including textbooks for schools, and documented indigenous community
life in a realist style. One of her best-known photographs, /Martel/, shows a
disused railway station -- half a railroad car -- as empty tracks lead to
nothing in the distance. The composition's strong graphic elements show her
skill as a printmaker, paring reality down to a few essential elements. The
image dates from the years when passenger rail service still existed in Mexico,
although it's now long since gone. In its atmosphere of abandonment, the
photograph is evocative of the migration issues of today. Yampolsky said,
"If I have to define my photography, I'd say my studio is the
street." (25)
Martel, Mariana Yampolsky, Mexico, 1968
Yampolsky was friends with the U.S. photographer, Milton
Rogovin, one of the few U.S. photographers who maintained a commitment to
social documentary photography during the cold war. Rogovin, who photographed
in Mexico in the early 1950s, knew Yampolsky when she worked at the Taller
Grafica. He was called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in
1958, and his optometry practice was virtually destroyed, something, he later
said, that forced him to make a greater commitment to photography.(26) In the
following decades, Rogovin took several series of photographs documenting
working people, especially African Americans, in Buffalo, New York, and in
Appalachia. "I just use the camera as a way of expressing my thoughts
about society," he said. "It is the political awareness of what's happening
to people that drives me into the direction of my photography." He cited
Brecht's question: "Who built the Seven Gates of Thebes?Was it kings who
hauled the craggy blocks of stones?" and responded, "I wanted to show
who did the toughest work in industry. I wanted to show them because nobody
does."(27)
In 1988, Yampolsky took Rogovin to Pachuca, Mexico, where
he took photographs of coal miners. His extensive body of work on miners
eventually included workers in ten countries, including Cuba, China, and
Czechoslovakia. The images were straightforward and direct, showing the
subjects' lives both at work and at home. (28)
Family of Miners, Mexico, Milton Rogovin, 1988
Trabajadores, Hector Garcia, 1950s
By the 1960s, the pressure for social change had built to
crisis point in Mexico, the U.S., and much of the rest of the world. In the
U.S., the civil rights and anti-war movements gave social protest new life, and
with the rebirth of radical social movements came the rebirth of movement
photography. In Mexico, battling repression was more difficult. Hundreds of
students were shot down in the Tlatelolco plaza in 1968, and others were killed
in Mexico City streets in 1973. The government launched a "dirty
war," murdering leftists it viewed as political enemies.
Yet in Mexico too, the social movements that grew
nonetheless gave new life to social documentary photography. The New
Photojournalism movement produced photographers like Pedro Valtierra, and today
Antonio Turok, Victor Mendiola and Yuriria Pantoja. (29) Periodicals like /Uno
Mas Uno/ and /Proceso/, and later /La Jornada/, were willing to publish their
work. A new generation of indigenous Mexican photographers, including Leopoldo
Peña, Antonio Nava, Miguel Bravo, and others now work on both sides of the border,
as do U.S. photographers like David Maung, Francisco Dominguez, myself, and
others.
"I think we have had an influence on photography in
the U.S., not just in this digital age, but going back into our history,"
concludes Valtierra. "Mexican photographers kept alive certain ideas. They
were close to social movements. They documented migration all the way back to
the 1940s, and the original cultures of indigenous people, which have both
become major themes for modern photography."(30)
According to Folgarait, "Mexican photographers
influenced U.S. and world photography because of their political engagement:
human action with social relevance." (31) "I think there is a way of
seeing that is Mexican," adds Valtierra. "Whether it is its heart or
its look, I can tell it from others." (32)The use of the camera has a
point to make, a critique. As Lopez says, it was not meant to adorn walls.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] <#_ftnref1>John Mraz, interview with author, Mexico
City, January 31, 2014.
[2] <#_ftnref2> /Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo with
members of the artists' union on the May Day march, Tina Modotti, Mexico City,
1929/
[3] <#_ftnref3> John Mraz, interview with author,
Mexico City, [Add month and day here], 2014
[4] <#_ftnref4> Ibid.
[5] <#_ftnref5> /Roses, and Experiment in Related
Form (Glasses), Tina Modotti, Mexico City, 1925/ reproduced in /Tina Modotti:
Aperture Masters of Photography/ (Koln, Germany: Konemann Verlagsgesellschaft
mbH, 1999), 21, 59
[6] <#_ftnref6> Leonard Folgarait, /Seeing Mexico
Photographed: The Work of Horne, Cassola, Modotti, and Àlvarez Bravo/ (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press,2008), 48.
[7] <#_ftnref7> Ibid., 125.
[8] <#_ftnref8> Patricia Albers, /Shadows, Fire,
Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti/ (Berkeley, University of California Press,
1999) 240-241
[9] <#_ftnref9> Alexandrr Rodchenko, "Trends
in contemporary photography", in Varvara Rodchenko and Alexandr
Lavrentiev, /The Rodchenko family workshop/ (London: The Serpentine Gallery,
1986), 86.
[10] <#_ftnref10> Martin Esslin, /Brecht: The Man
and His Work/ (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1961), 124.
[11] <#_ftnref11> Robert Deane, "The New
Photography 1920s-1940," in /Occasional Papers/ (Canberra,
Australia:National Gallery of Australia, 2012) 6
[12] <#_ftnref12> John Mraz, /Photographing the
Mexican Revolution/: /Commitments, Testimonies, Icons/ (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2012), 17.
[13] <#_ftnref13> Ibid., 2.
[14] <#_ftnref14> John Reed, /Insurgent Mexico/ (NY
and London: D. Appleton and Co.), 1914.
[15] <#_ftnref15> John Reed, /Ten Days That Shook
the World/ (NY: Boni and Liverigh, 1919).
[16] <#_ftnref16> Folgarait, /Seeing Mexico
Photographed/, 126.
[17] <#_ftnref17> Mary Warner Marien, /Photography:
A Cultural History/ (NY: Prentice Hall, 2002), 278.
[18] <#_ftnref18> /University of Chicago Students
Prepare Placards for a Demonstration against Racial Discrimination in the
Medical School, Chicago, /and/Hooverville, Alexander Alland, 1946 and 1938/ , reproduced
in /Reframing America/ (Tucson, Center for Creative Photography, 1995) 21, 29
[19] <#_ftnref19> For more on the work of Mieth and
Hagel, see Janet Zandy, /Unfinished Stories: The Narrative Photography of
Hansel Mieth and Marion Palfi/ (Rochester NY, RIT Press, 2013), and Nancy
Schiesari, /Hansel Mieth: Vagabond Photographer/ (video documentary, shown on
Independent Lens, PBS).
[20] <#_ftnref20> Otto Hagel, /Men and Machines/:
/a photo story of the mechanization and modernization agreement between the
International Longshoremen's & Warehousemen's Union and the Pacific
Maritime Association now in operation in the ports of California, Oregon, and
Washington,/(San Francisco: International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's
Union, 1963).
[21] <#_ftnref21> John Mraz, /Nacho Lopez, Mexican
Photographer/ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press2003), 7-8, 20.
[22] <#_ftnref22> Ibid., 127-150.
[23] <#_ftnref23> Nacho Lopez quoted in Blanca
Ruiz, "/Travesias / Muestran los fetiches de Nacho Lopez"/ (Mexico
City: Reforma, July 16, 1999)
[24] <#_ftnref24> Quoted on the webpage of the
Southwestern and Mexican Photography Collection, the Witleff Collections,
http://www.thewittliffcollections.txstate.edu/collections/southwestern-mexican-photography/artists/garcia.html
[25] <#_ftnref25> Quoted on webpage, Jesse Kitt
Photography, http://photokitt.com/galleries/series/
[26] <#_ftnref26> Milton Rogovin and Cheryl
Brutvan, /The Forgotton Ones/ (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985),
10
[27] <#_ftnref27> Ibid, 13-14.
[28] <#_ftnref28> See Milton Rogovin, Social
Documentary Photographer,
http://www.miltonrogovin.com/photoseries/familyminers.html (accessed March 1,
2014).
[29] <#_ftnref29> Mraz, /Nacho Lopez, Mexican
Photographer/, 169-170.
[30] <#_ftnref30> Pedro Valtierra, interview with
the author, Mexico City, January 5, 2014.
[31] <#_ftnref31> Leonard Folgarait, telephone
interview with the author, January 3, 2014.
[32] <#_ftnref32> Pedro Valtierra, interview with
the author.
