position in the controversy is encapsulated in the
title of the book he edited in Spanish, German, and
English:Picturesque Mexico. Photographers such
as Rafael Carrillo and Luis Ma ́rquez joined
Brehme in believing that their idyllic and bucolic
perspective was the proper way to represent Mex-
ico. Though they usedHelios as a platform to
attack the direct, realist vision of Weston, Modotti,
and Manuel A ́lvarez Bravo as being ‘‘an imitation
of foreign exoticisms,’’ their photography was
nonetheless oriented toward giving readers outside
Mexico what they expected. Thus, when asked if
there was a Mexican School of Photography, Luis
Ma ́rquez responded:
Mexico is an absolutely photogenic country: its arche-
ological ruins, its colonial monuments and its peculiar
landscape are the foundation of the photography that
has developed there. Showing its diversity, the monu-
mental and the typical, has made Mexico known in
foreign lands.The greatest of Mexico’s photographers, Manuel
A ́lvarez Bravo, was no doubt stimulated by the
presence of Weston and Modotti. He, in turn, was
a definitive influence on the most aesthetically
experimental Mexican photojournalists of the per-
iod between 1950 and 1970, Nacho Lo ́pez and
He ́ctor Garcı ́a, and through them on the New
Photojournalism of Mexico. Lola A ́lvarez Bravo
was the first wife of Manuel A ́lvarez Bravo, and
she used his name from the time they were married
in 1925 until her death in 1993. Lola’s best photo-
graphy manifests the sort of understated irony for
which Manuel is famous, a modest esthetic in
which the photographer’s presence is rarely noted.
In one or another image, she expressed with parti-
cular poignancy her situation as a woman: for
example, the powerful photo of a woman who—
covered by a grid of shadows which take on the
form of bars—slumps in her window and gazes into
space,In Her Own Prison(ca. 1950). For many
years, Lola lived in the shadow of Manuel (though
they separated in 1934). In 1965, a major exhibit of
Lola’s work was held in the Palace of Fine Arts,
but it was only with her ‘‘discovery’’ in 1979 by the
French critic Olivier Debroise that her imagery
began really to be seen in exhibitions and books.
This is not unexpected, for Lola worked for many
years as a photojournalist for minor magazines
that were seen by a very limited audience.
Photojournalism has been the cradle of photo-
graphy in Mexico, but visual representations of
politicians were almost uniformly laudatory of
those in power, prior to the founding of a genuinely
critical press in the 1970s. As in much of the world,
illustrated magazines were a paramount form of
visual culture and the primary venue for photo-
graphs, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. In
Mexico, Jose ́Page ́s Llergo was the founder of the
most important pictorial gazettes, and his produc-
tions—Rotofoto (1938), Hoy (1937), Man ̃ana
(1942), andSiempre! (1953)—were the Lifeand
Look of Mexico. The constraints within which
these publications functioned can be appreciated
in his guiding dictum: he asserted that his journal-
ists had no restraints, ‘‘as long as they don’t touch
the President of the Republic or the Virgin of Gua-
dalupe.’’ In fact,HoyandMan ̃anawere far more
restrictive than Page ́s’s relatively pluralistic code in
their reverence for the powerful. However,Roto-
fotooffered images that went against the grain.
Because of that, the magazine lasted only 11 issues,
from 22 May to 31 July, 1938, before it was
destroyed by goons from the official labor union.
Still, though short-lived, it was an agile, provoca-
tive, and fundamentally graphic attempt to vindi-
cate the place of photojournalists in Mexican
publications. In the 1950s,Siempre! became the
first really pluralistic periodical in Mexico.
Despite governmental control of the press during
the party dictatorship which lasted until 2000,
some photojournalists challenged the status quo.
Among the first to do so were the Hermanos
Mayo, who arrived in Mexico during 1939, fleeing
from their defeat as members of the Republican
forces in the Spanish Civil War. Composed of five
‘‘brothers’’—Francisco (Paco), Faustino, Julio,
Ca ́ndido, and Pablo—this photojournalist collec-
tive had taken on the ‘‘nom de guerre’’ of Mayo in
honor of May Day. In Mexico, their commitment
to working-class democracy was largely co-opted
by the mass media, but they revolutionized Mex-
ican photojournalism by introducing the 35-mm
Leica camera and using it with such skill as to
overcome the objections to its ‘‘tiny negatives.’’ A
direct result of that technological innovation were
dynamic photographs taken in the very center of
action. The Hermanos Mayo played somewhat the
same role that other refugees from Europe, such as
Robert Capa and Alfred Eisenstadt, did in U.S.
publications. Since their arrival, they have pro-
vided images for more than 40 newspapers and
magazines, and their archive of some five million
negatives is the largest in Latin America.
Notwithstanding their technical contributions,
perhaps the most important assest of the Mayo
was their development of a photographic discourse
which insists that identity is formed in the process
of people making something out of what their
situation is making of them. Social struggles ofMEXICO, PHOTOGRAPHY IN