Podcast — Episode 1
Photography in Mexico: A Conversation with John Mraz
Our guest on this episode is John Mraz, the world’s leading authority on photography in Mexico. Among his books are Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity ; Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Testimonies, Icons ; and Nacho López: Mexican Photographer. He’s the curator of Los Hermanos Mayo: Photographing Exile, which was recently on view at UT Dallas.
In Part 1
How Los Hermanos Mayo, a photojournalists’ collective, emerged from the Spanish Civil War and how they migrated to Mexico (1:00) — Their working methods and techniques, and how they preserved their enormous archive of negatives (4:00) — How Dr. Mraz entered the documentary field (6:45) — Background on the bracero program for temporary farmworkers in the U.S. (7:45) — How this exhibition, book and documentary was put together (9:15) — Los Hermanos Mayo’s aesthetic and iconographical approach to representing workers (11:45) — The advent of the small-format 35mm camera and its implications (13:15) — Cropping and titling photographs, or how Nacho López and Los Hermanos Mayo fit between art and photojournalism (18:15) — The depths of Los Hermanos Mayo’s catalog, with its millions of images (22:00).
In Part 2
How Dr. Mraz was thrown out of his first three universities, worked in a steel mill and as a dam builder after the Army, and got into Latin American history (0:45) — How he started making documentary films, and moved from UC Santa Barbara to UC Santa Cruz (4:30) — Documenting the workers’ movement from Berkeley to Mexico City (7:00) — Networking over drinks, and making documentary films for Mexican television (9:00) — Working at the once-Marxist, now-neoliberal University of Puebla, and getting commissions to make films (11:45) — The academic status of photography: its contextual and comparative analysis as distinct from the concept of “art” (15:30) — The approach to photography in his current book project (19:30) — Visual analysis as against the power of commercial marketing imagery (22:30) — The need for visual theory (Vilem Flusser, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, Ariella Azoulay) not just literary theory (25:00) — The problems with elitist postmodernism, against the reality principle in Mexican life (26:00) —