ABSTRACT
The issue of cultural identity has its own complicated history within Mexico and its own discursive history within Mexican photography. While the sign of la mexicanidad plays a central role in photographic imagemaking, no consensus exists as to the referent. Like the majority of photographers in Mexico, they are members of the largely white intellectual sector of a country that is overwhelmingly racially and culturally mestizo, where the existence of dozens of ethnic groups and racial hybrids makes it difficult to reduce ‘difference’ to a binary system. Dominated at the onset by the style of photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, a school of imagemaking assumed hegemonic prevalence in Mexico by mid-century, to the point of becoming a stereotype.
