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A small community in Cherán, Mexico has banded together to rid itself of the violent La Familia Michoacana Cartel who is illegally logging the area. Here a member of the reforestation team with the best moustache in history makes a phone call after lunch.
Wired has the full story
Photo by Brett Gundlock, a member of the Boreal Collective.
Mexican Manifesto a short story by Roberto Bolaño:
Laura and I did not make love that afternoon. In truth, we gave it a shot, but it just didn’t happen. Or, at least, that’s what I thought at the time. Now I’m not so sure. We probably did make love. That’s what Laura said, and while we were at it she introduced me to the world of public baths, which from then on, and for a very long time, I would associate with pleasure and play. The first one was, without a doubt, the best. It was called Montezuma’s Gym, and in the foyer some unknown artist had done a mural where you could see the Aztec emperor neck-deep in a pool. Around the edges, close to the monarch but much smaller, smiling men and women bathe. Everyone seems carefree except the king, who looks fixedly out of the mural, as if searching for the improbable spectator, with dark, wide-open eyes in which I often thought I glimpsed terror. The water in the pool is green. The stones are gray. In the background, you can see mountains and storm clouds.
The boy who worked at Montezuma’s Gym was an orphan, and that was his primary topic of conversation. On the third visit, we became friends. He was only eighteen, and wanted to buy a car, so he was saving everything he could: tips were scant. According to Laura, he was a little slow. I thought he was nice.
In every public bath, there tends to be a fight from time to time. We never saw or heard any there. The clients, conditioned by some unknown mechanism, respected and obeyed every word of the orphan’s instructions. Also, to be fair, there weren’t very many people, and that’s something I’ll never be able to explain, since it was a clean place, relatively modern, with individual saunas for taking steam baths, bar service in the saunas, and, above all, cheap. There, in Sauna 10, I saw Laura naked for the first time, and all I could do was smile and touch her shoulder and say I didn’t know which valve to turn to make the steam come out.
(Read the rest of Mexican Manifesto at The New Yorker)
(translation by Laura Healy)
Alex Webb
San Ysidro, California. 1979.
Mexicans arrested while trying to cross the border to United States.
This is from his incredible series Crossing
Check out some of the wild treats in store for Melbourne crew at Mesa Verde. I’m yet to go but I’ve tried those tacos and the Gazpacho and they’re out of control.
Peeps should follow chef extraordinaire and my pal Kathy Reed @loveandtacos.
The Thousands has a little review and some photos, I’m stoked that the name was derived from a Leone film!
Alex Webb
Tehuantepec, Mexico, 1985
Digital Type C print, 71 x 47 cm
I take complex photographs because I experience the world — particularly more and more as I get older — as a very complicated and ultimately inexplicable place. My experiences in the world, my travels as a photographer, lead me to believe that there are no simple solutions, no easy answers, just a lot of difficult and perhaps unanswerable questions.My most basic process as a photographer is to wander, allowing the camera and my experiences to lead me where they will. I try to arrive initially in a situation, or a place, with as few rational preconceptions as possible. Of course, that is ultimately impossible; we all are conditioned by our culture, our education, our experiences — what makes us who we are. Nonetheless, I make an effort to be as open as possible to alternative possibilities, possibilities that may contradict what I rationally might expect.The words “planning and forethought” imply a level of rationality. Instead, I sense the possibility of a picture. It might be a group of people, it might be the look of a corner, I can’t say what it might be until I see it. It’s all about having a feel for the street.My photography at its purest is about response, about visual exploration, about discovery. On one level, if I knew what it was I wanted in advance, I’m not sure I would choose photography as a medium. Part of what excites me about photography is its very uncertainty, the fact that it is not just the photographer, but the vagaries of the world that result in the photograph. If I had a greater inkling of just what I wanted in advance, why not choose a medium where there is much greater imaginative control, like painting?
—Alex Webb
Joel Meyerowitz
Mexico, 1963
Click through to the BBC to hear Joel Meyerowitz’s backstory behind this and several other of his most iconic street photos. He’s in his fifth decade of photography and has a new book entitled Taking My Time.
(Aussies can pre order it from Phaidon for the bargain basement price of $995)
A U.S. Customs agent points his gun at a car suspected of transporting marijuana, and a scene from U.S. Customs’ anti-drug smuggling effort, “Operation Intercept,” along the U.S.-Mexico border, 1969.
As efforts to legalize marijuana intensify around the country, LIFE recalls the efforts of Customs agents to stem the flow of drugs as far back as 1969 with a program dubbed Operation Intercept.
José Guadalupe Posada
The Calavera of the Morbid Cholera 1910
PDR: A broadside showing a man with the body of a snake in the center of a group of skulls, representing the disease cholera, his arms are outstretched and tongue out, flying insects surround him. The skulls that surround him are depicted with worldy objects. The image is accompanied by a sarcastic and ironic ballad describing how cholera has afflicted the various social classes of Mexican society. Death kills everyone, regardless of the their place in society (1910)
AOTP: Jose Guadalupe Posada’s Calavera Catrina (Dapper Skeleton) was originally published as a broadside around 1910. This most fashionable calavera represents one of Jose Guadalupe Posada’s most famous works of art. Diego Rivera, in fact portrayed Posada with a full length figure of ‘Catrina’ in his 1947 Hotel del Prado mural.
“The Spanish word ‘calavera’ means ‘skull’, and by extension ‘skeleton’. Jose Guadalupe Posada used his ‘calavera’ prints as social reportage, as manifestos and as political and social satire; in this he has been followed by numerous later graphic artists in Mexico … This kind of print taps sources that are typically Mexican, for both the Indian heritage (skulls and death-goddesses are common in pre-Columbian art) and the Spanish heritage (the death-orientation of the monastic orders, and the dance-of-death and ‘memento mori traditions) have blended in the average Mexican’s stoic, but far from humorless, view of death.”
The 100 year anniversary of Posada’s death was three days ago.
Check out more of his amazing work at the Library of Congress.
On weekends in the summer, families from Ciudad Juárez come to the edges of the Rio Bravo to relax.
July, 2009. Photo: Jerome Sessini/Magnum.
From 2008 to 2011, the photojournalist Jerome Sessini submerged himself in some of the most violent Mexican cities—Culiacan, Tijuana, and Ciudad Juárez—and documented their increasing social decomposition. Recently published by Contrasto as a book titled “The Wrong Side,” these photographs offer vivid insight into the urban landscapes of the Mexican border. “I’ve always been fascinated by Mexico,” Sessini told me. “I felt it necessary to enter the houses, to hear the stories of the workers, prostitutes, and heroin addicts, and to show an image other than the cliché of the super-rich Mexican drug lord with a mustache and a golden rifle.”
Dr Lakra
Untitled, 2009
Ink on Vintage Lithograph, 10.9 × 18 cm
I’ve been keen on this guy for a little while now, here’s a profile on him
Also he’s got to have outdone Andres Serrano, he’s got an Ed Hardy chest tattoo of demons dancing around and pissing on Christ’s face. Hot damn.
