the 1950s and 1960s offered the Mayo many oppor-
tunities for constructing their visual dialectic. Their
images may be the best taken of the 1958–1959
strikes, where teachers, telegraphers, and railroad
and oil workers clashed with government forces
during one of the most important movements in
Mexico since the revolution of 1910–1917. There,
they captured the outrage evident on a telegra-
pher’s face as he glared from the background in
the occupied offices at a bayonet-bearing soldier
who dominates the photo’s foreground. The Her-
manos Mayo also covered the student movement
of 1968, preserving for perpetuity the dialectic of
oppression and resistance in images of students
captured and forced to lie on the ground during
the army’s invasion of the university: even under
the reflected glare of the bayonets that threaten
them, they persist in their pursuit of free expression
by flashing the sign of ‘‘Victory.’’
Nacho Lo ́pez is a pivotal figure in Mexican photo-
graphy. He enjoyed the most autonomy within mass-
circulation magazines, usually selecting his own
themes and, in some cases, being given the power
of decision over image choice and lay-out. His focus
on the daily life of the downtrodden was an attempt
to rescue the importance of the seemingly insignif-
icant, the dignity of the poor, and the significance of
the apparently commonplace. He represents a sharp
break with prior Mexican photojournalism, both in
terms of his social commitment as well as in the
aesthetic explorations which mark him a true author
of images and the foremost practitioner of the
photoessay form in Mexico.
Lo ́pez was clearly the chosen photojournalist of
Siempre!, the most respected periodical, for his
essays appear in the first six issues. There, in 1954,
Lo ́pez published the single most critical photoessay
to appear in the illustrated magazines, ‘‘Only the
humble go to hell.’’ For Lo ́pez, Hell was the police
stations where only the poor were at the mercy of
‘‘insolent, insulting, and ill-humoured police who
are indifferent to the pain they cause the helpless’’;
the rich paid off the police in the street in order to
spare themselves such ignominy. Corrupt and with
impunity, the Mexican police were as deserving of a
critique in 1954 as they are today, but Lo ́pez’s
indictment was one of very few that can be found
in the entire history of the Mexican press.
Although his career as a photojournalist lasted
only from 1950 to 1957 (he then went on to work in
the cinema), Lo ́pez’s concern for the downtrodden,
his aesthetic search, and his insistence on carrying
out authorial intent were a crucial example to later
generations of Mexican photojournalists. His
reflections on his craft were important guidelines
for his colleagues and students: ‘‘My profession is
the most appropriate to understand dialectically
the world of contradictions, to exhibit the struggle
of classes, and to comprehend man as an indivi-
dual.’’ He left an important legacy in his classes at
the National University (UNAM); Elsa Medina,
one of the outstanding New Photojournalists,
said: ‘‘He taught me to see.’’
He ́ctor Garcı ́a is another important Mexican
photojournalist who began his career in the 1950s.
His pictures of the 1958–1959 strikes were so damn-
ing of government intervention that the newspaper
Excelsiorrefused to publish them. Forming the
magazineOjo, una revista que ve, Garcı ́a was able
to print images of striking railroad and oil workers,
as well as of the brutal beating of a male nurse who
attempted to aid a woman overcome by tear gas.
Garcı ́a embodies contradictions characteristic of
the ‘‘perfect dictatorship’’ within which Mexicans
lived under the rule of the official party: he pro-
duced many flattering images while working for
President Luis Echeverrı ́a during the 1970s, but
was one of the first photojournalists to explicitly
critique the country’s powerful. In a 1947 photo-
graph, he poked fun at the wealthy, showing their
foibles in an image where a tuxedo-suited man
raises the toes of his shoes to free the long train of
the woman’s fancy dress on which he has trod.
Garcı ́a also produced one of the few photos in
which the sharp class distinctions characteristic of
Mexico are made manifest: it is September 15th, and
people are strolling near the central plaza (Zo ́calo)
where the yearly ‘‘Cry of Independence’’ will soon
take place. In the foreground is a poor peasant
couple, loaded down with bundles of goods they
hope to sell in order to eke out their precarious
existence. Behind them come a very different two-
some, dressed in evening clothes. The title Garcı ́a
placed on the image speaks eloquently about the
unfair distribution of wealth (and the muted protest
against it):Each With Their Own Cry(1965).
In a photo taken in 1955, Garcı ́a directly con-
fronted the cultural mechanisms utilized by the
governing party to legitimize its rule. A young
sugar cane cutter, covered with the filth of his
grueling task, stands in front of a typical post-
Revolutionary mural of a colonial scene in which
an overseer whips peasants as they work in a cane
field. Wall paintings such as this emphasize the
Spanish exploitation of the Mexican people and,
by extension, sanction the Revolutionary regime by
inferring that such oppression is now a thing of the
past. By placing the cane cutter against the mural,
and submerging him into it through lowering the
contrast, Garcı ́a creates a confrontation betweenMEXICO, PHOTOGRAPHY IN