Enrique Metinides "Series"

Enrique Metinides, born 1934 in Mexico City, got into gangster and action films early in life and transferred
these aesthetics into his pictures. He photographed his first corpse at the age of 10, at 12 his first photo appeared on the cover of a newspaper. From the late 40s to the late 90s, Metinides worked for the yellow press, especially for “La Prensa”, a newspaper that with its sensational and shocking images is attributed to the “Nota Roja” (bloody news). But despite their shocking, and at the same time fascinating, effect, the exposures are particularly characterized by the absence of blood. The photographer concentrates on the bystanders, curious onlookers, desperate and concerned people, on people’s poses and facial expressions, and on the
actual composition of the details he depicts. His images appear like film stills, staged, contrived, and too comely and precise to be real.

The ambivalence between fact and fiction makes Metinides’ photographs disturbingly fascinating and could be one of the reasons his works have been perceived more and more by the art world in the last 10 years. His photographs have been exhibited in Mexico, New York and London, among others, and were presented together with the “Car Crash Series” by Warhol in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Also the polish painter Wilhelm Sasnal became inspired by his images and produced the so-called “Metinides paintings.”

With the exhibition “Series” Kominek Gallery presents a completely new view on the work of the “Mexican Weegee.” As in the book published by Kominek Books in 2011, the main focus is on the serial aspect of his photographs: the before and after and the whole dimension of the event, whose narrative quality only becomes apparent in the sequence. “Series” sheds light on Metinides’ activity as a photojournalist and contrasts the iconic-like and often disturbing character of the single picture with a narrative cinematic perspective. The exhibition places his photographs in a larger context, for which the “Nota Roja” mostly didn’t have enough space.