The bigger picture

Gritty photographs of Mexico City by Enrique Metinides

Enrique Metinides is one of Mexico’s most celebrated photographers, whose career spanned some 50 years from the 1940s to the end of the 1990s. His inspirations were life and death on the streets of Mexico City. He published his first photograph in 1946, aged 12, and the following year started his lifelong association with the city’s

La Prensa newspaper as an unpaid assistant, before taking on the crime beat in 1948. His was a diet of shootings, robberies, car crashes – with moments of levity such as teenagers hanging off the bumper of a car on a flooded road.

Metinides’ photographs are unflinching in graphic detail yet beguiling and mesmeric. His images have a cinematic quality – looking staged, yet not – which is perhaps unsurprising given he was influenced by the films he watched as a child. Referring to his photograph of a pistol used in a double murder, he said, ‘I included the shadow; it reminded me of scenes in gangster movies.’

Through his photographs we become witnesses, complicit in the unfolding drama, voyeurs in a lurid scene, unable to turn away from tragedy, impending catastrophe or simply the surreal drama of life on the city’s streets.

Enrique Metinides: The Man Who Saw Too Much, February 9 to March 24, Michael Hoppen Gallery, 3 Jubilee Place, London SW3; michaelhoppengallery.com. The gallery will be screening the documentary, The Man Who Saw Too Much, in conjunction with Journeyman Pictures, directed by Trisha Ziff, 212BERLIN Films, on February 18 at 4pm