** Post updated, July 7, 2011. See below.
Enrique Metinides, the genius Mexican photojournalist, is finally getting his due. His pictures of the daily drama of gore, true crime, human tragedy, and monumental accidents in the biggest megalopolis of the Americas have recently been shown in major galleries all over the world, including earlier this year at Blum & Poe in L.A. I met and interviewed Metinides in October at his apartment in Mexico City. The man doesn't consider himself an artist so much as a journalist. Looking at his four decades of spectacular daily images, you might say he's the best news photographer we've ever known, in any language. He started shooting for the "nota roja" pulp press at the age of 12. Throughout his career, he frequently escaped death and injury himself; the photographer was also known to drop his camera and join rescue efforts when a hand was needed.
** UPDATE: For my L.A. Times profile of Metinides, published in Jan. 2011, go here.
The New York culture media is focused this week on the man they call “The Weegee of Mexico.” Metinides’ current show at Anton Kern in Chelsea was in The New Yorker, and this week, in The New York Times. Here's that review. It discusses what I believe to be the most completely perfect photograph of “urban mayhem” ever shot: The pretty blond woman who is killed in a car accident, and as The New Yorker noted, “doesn’t seem to know she’s dead.” It’s beautiful. And from a news photo standpoint, golden. Metinides, who at all hours had one ear to the dispatch frequencies, got to the scene just as she was being covered. Metinides said she was a writer who had just gotten her hair and nails done and was walking to a reading.
* Here is Kathryn Garcia's review of the Blum & Poe show at Artnet.
** UPDATE: For more posts in Intersections and at La Plaza on Metinides, see here, here, and here.