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23/7/2003

Two exhibitions

The Photographers' Gallery, London

Enrique Metinides

This exhibition is the first to be devoted to the extraordinary work of the Mexican newspaper photographer, Enrique "El Nino" Metinides (b. 1934). His nickname, 'the kid', refers to his outstandingly precocious talent - Metinides published his first front-page photograph at the age of 12.

From the late 1940s to his retirement in 1993, Metinides worked for the Mexican popular press, in particular for the big-selling tabloid La Prensa. He was a key figure in defining the nota roja, or 'bloody news', a section of the mass media dedicated to violent, tragic or sensationalist real-life events, in which is expressed a distinctively Mexican approach to death, and its representation.

Metinides' lifelong focus has been with the imagery of disaster and destruction, whether as the result of bad luck, human violence, or divine retribution. His subjects, all witnessed in or around his native Mexico City, include infernos, floods, aeroplane crashes, car crashes, train crashes, bus crashes, murders, accidents and suicides.

It's tempting to characterise Metinides as a 'Mexican' Weegee: and certainly he shares with the older American a sense of the dark drama of human existence; an intuitive aptitude to frame and compose at often point blank range and breakneck speed; and an unerring ability to arrive first at the scene of the crime. (Weegee tapped into police radio, while Metinides, working simultaneously as a volunteer for the Red Cross, often arrived in an ambulance.) But where Weegee's best work is confined to one decade in New York - the mid-30s to mid-40s - Metinides' camera sweeps across five decades of life in Mexico City, and accumulates into a richly metaphoric archive of misfortune, vicissitude and vulnerability. Here, in a huge and hugely populous city, tragedy occurs on a crowded stage. Metinides' photographs capture a very distinctive sense of the human -and even, at times paradoxically, the humourous- dimensions of catastrophe. His work is characterised by a level of compositional invention very rare in reportage photography. This arises from his early interest in the aesthetics of film noir, as well as a fascination with the spectators, as much as the survivors or victims, as protagonists in the drama of a particular event.

Enrique Metinides continues to live in Mexico City where his attention has turned from photography to video. From his apartment, equipped with numerous cable and satellite TVs, Metinides sits day and night monitoring the unfolding of world events, and cataloguing different orders of disaster - from hurricanes to suicide bombing - into a rapidly growing archive.
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Hackney Wick

Hackney Wick lies between the Eastway A106, the Grand Union Canal, and the River Lea. It's a bleak and desolate place which fifteen years ago boasted a speedway track and greyhound stadium and has new aspirations as a site of the 2012 Olympic Games. In the meantime, on Sundays, it has become home to a sprawling, impromptu market, known locally simply as the 'black market', which has grown to giant proportions.

Part-scrap yard, part-car boot sale, part-flea market, here in The Wick the detritus of the inner city finds its way to the edges to be sifted and sorted, recycled and bartered, often by people living outside the city's official economies. Exhausted white goods, mountains of computer chips, yards of copper wire stripped from derelict buildings and defunct electronic equipment: the scraps and shards of hi-tech and industrial waste join piles of ersatz designer handbags and trainers, as well as a stew of personal possessions that many people come to sell week after week. In the economic anarchy of The Wick (with a brisk trade in mobile phone unlocking, it's an anarchy that sometimes borders on the illegal), everything has a certain value, even if that value is endlessly fugitive and fickle. What starts the day as a desirable commodity can be easily abandoned at the end as so much rubbish. Hackney has long provided a refuge for immigrants and asylum seekers from all over the world, and nowhere is the area's cultural richness reflected more clearly than at The Wick, with its endlessly diverse traders and buyers - English, African, Albanian, Romanian, Bengali, Bangladeshi, Polish, Somali, Turkish, Jewish and Vietnamese among them.

In January, the young British photographer Stephen Gill purchased a Bakelite camera at the market for 50p and has used it, over several months, to document The Wick's strangely self-sufficient world and the frenetic activity of the people who occupy it. A plastic camera with a plastic case and lens, the camera has no focus or exposure controls. Its no-frills technology mirrors the functionality of the market itself and Gill's resulting photographs exploit the spontaneous effects of the camera to reflect the energy and chaos and - faced with closure in July when the market's licence expires - the fragility of the environment.

Stephen Gill was born in Bristol in 1971 and has worked as a freelance photographer since 1993. His photographs have appeared in many international journals including The New York Times Magazine, Granta, The Sunday Times, The Observer Magazine and The Guardian Weekend. His work has appeared in exhibitions at The National Portrait Gallery and Agnès B, Galerie du Jour, Paris.

Kate Bush
Senior Programmer

Image: Enrique Metinides, Jesus Bazaldua Barber, a telecommunications engineer, fatally electrocuted by more than 60,000 volts whilst installing a new phone line, Toluca, Mexico, 29 January 1971.

The Photographers' Gallery
5 & 8 Great Newport Street
London WC2H 7HY
Telephone +44 020 7831 1772
Fax +44 020 7836 9704

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