Enrique Metinides holds a special place among the world’s professional photographers of Greek descent. Metinides spent his entire career taking photographs of the accidents and disasters in and immediately around Mexico City.
Born on February 12, 1934, in Mexico City, of Greek immigrant parents Jaralambos Enrique Metinides Tsironides is today an internationally recognized photographer. Given his place of birth this Greek-Mexican’s name, within Mexico, follows Spanish naming customs where the first or paternal family name is Metinides and the second or maternal family name is Tsironides.
While on their honeymoon in Mexico Metinides’ parents found themselves more or less stateless citizens when the Second World War broke out. What was only meant as a romantic holiday transformed into a new life in the ksenitia.
Enrique Metinides: Schauspiel des Tatsächlichen from Kunst+Film on Vimeo.
Metinides began working with photography as a child when his father gave him a Brownie box camera. Soon he was using it to photograph car accidents on the streets of Sa Cosme in Mexico City near his father’s restaurant, where he lived.
It is said that he began taking such photos imitating popular action movies. The young lad published his first photo in a newspaper when he was eleven. By the age of thirteen, Metinides became an unpaid assistant at La Prensa, the largest newspaper in Mexico City. No sooner did his photographs begin appearing than the older photographers christened him ‘El Nino’ (the Boy).
Metinides soon became a leading news photographer not only in Mexico City but throughout the country.
Unlike, say, Weegee (Arthur Fellig, 1899-1968), the noted American photographer and photojournalist who listened to the police radio traffic young Metinides enrolled as a Red Cross volunteer, arriving at the scene of accidents with the emergency medical crews.
Metinides, an incredibly productive photographer, finally retired in 1997, seeing his work published regularly for over fifty years.
Upon his retirement, Metinides has seen his work gain worldwide recognition with one-man show exhibitions in galleries and other venues in Mexico, the United States, and across Europe. With all that being said, you do not have to leave the comfort of your own home to see and learn about this singular photographer’s career.
The 2016 documentary film The Man Who Saw Too Much: Enrique Metinides by Trisha Ziff is readily available on DVD (themanwhosawtoomuch.com). While the film’s dialogue is in Spanish subtitles in English appear throughout. James Young’s review in Variety had this to say about the initial media screening of this documentary: “Trisha Ziff’s The Man Who Saw Too Much is self-narrated homage to the dauntless Mexican photojournalist who somehow turned tragedy into art with zero exploitation, and for many decades, whose work has become an international art sensation in its own right.
Now 81, the photographer Metinides’ specialty was tragedy – car crashes, earthquakes, gas explosions, wrecks, murder, derailments and heartbreak, and he has seen more than a thousand lifetimes of it without flinching. Ziff’s documentary delves into his well-documented history, centering on personal interviews with the maestro as well as a number of known voices in the photography community in Mexico (October 26, 2015).”
As I see it, there is one reoccurring error in the public press concerning Metinides’ overall work. Metinides’ photographs are often referred to as ‘crime’ photographs and this is most certainly not the case. To be sure over a fifty-year career, Metinides did take photographs related to crime but that was never the center of his visual work.
All manner of human accidents, fires and natural disasters were captured by Metinides’ camera. This makes the vast majority of his images a complex chronicle of the widest possibilities for disaster and the utterly unexpected conceivable in man’s fate.
Still, I may be alone in this point of view. This is due to the fact that Metinides sold his images of “murders, car crashes, and catastrophes (to) the nota rojas, Mexico’s infamous crime magazines. He has won numerous prizes and received recognition from the Presidency of the Republic, journalists’ associations, rescue and judicial corps, and Kodak of Mexico.
In 1997 he received Mexico’s Espejo de Luz Prize (Mirror of Light), awarded to the country’s most outstanding photographer. His work has been shown internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art and Anton Kern Gallery, New York; and Photographers’ Gallery, London (aperture.org).”
One of the figures interviewed in the Metinides documentary is Dan Gilroy the movie director. Gilroy was undoubtedly chosen because of his film Nightcrawlers (2014), which deals with freelance news photographers in Los Angeles. At one point Gilroy speaks to the whole notion of graphic images in Metinides’ work: “I think in many ways you can also tell a country by its news. And their approach to news. And I think what you can see is that Mexican news is historically more graphic and lurid than even anything the yellow journalism in the United States and New York City in the 1940s really trackled.
Some of the stringers slash ‘nightcrawlers’ who I worked with in my film, who shoot in Los Angeles, the most graphic violent pictures they can’t sell to the American market they sell to the Mexican market.
I think in the United States has always tried to live by an ideal. I’m going to say a faux ideal. In the sense that we do not want to look at anything negative that reflects negatively on our society or our culture. And where you specifically see it is when America gets into a war. We hide our dead.”
Aside from that documentary film, Ziff is also responsible for a touring exhibition of select images drawn from Metinides’ wider body of work. A book, 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides (Aperture 2014), which Ziff also edited accompanied this tour. The violence seen in Metinides’ images is one thing in a Mexican newspaper and another thing on an art gallery wall. In her introduction to The 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides, Ziff writes:
“‘Metinides’ photographs are crafted with cinematic precision and style, yet his compassion for the victims is never far away. He feels a deep moral responsibility toward those left behind.’ She cites his ‘straightforward commentaries and his obsessive remembering of “names, characters and narratives,’ but these seem like afterthoughts compared with the voyeuristic tendencies of his photographs. Their real power lies in the fact that we look at them even as we want to look away, and in doing so we too are implicated in his dark, ruthless vision (Guardian, November 21, 2012).”
This specific edition of Metinides’ images is also unique given that “since all of Metinides’ previous books are out of print, or strictly for art audiences, this will be the only book in print about his life and work. It is also the only Metinides book comprised of images chosen by the photographer himself, and which offers his own account of his life’s work (enriquemetinides.com).” Again, both the documentary and book are readily available.
As unique as Enrique Metinides’ work may be, he is far from the only internationally recognized photographer of Greek descent. A very short list of such artists would have to include, but is certainly not limited to Effy Alexakis, Chloe Kritharas Devienne, Constantine Manos, William ‘PoPsie’ Randolph, Polixeni Papapetrou, Daimon Xanthopoulos and many, many others. We must extend our vision of modern Hellenism well past our individual home communities and come to recognize the enduring contributions persons of Greek descent continue to make on a daily basis on nothing less than the world stage.
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