Doing a deep dive into the Art Gallery of Ontario’s photography collection, curatorial assistant Marina Dumont-Gauthier was struck by the selection of work from Latin America, a vast array of images that had seldom been exhibited.
She pulled together Recuerdo – the title means both “I remember” and memory in Spanish – an exhibition of more than 100 of these photos, ranging from photo journalism and street photography to modernist art photography. Her approach was heterogenous: She includes both famed Mexican photographers such as Manuel and Lola Álvarez Bravo and Graciela Iturbide, and Canadians associated with the region such as Reva Brooks and Rafael Goldchain.
Here are some highlights from the exhibition, which continues to Oct. 19.
The Chilean-Canadian photographer Rafael Goldchain took this picture, Traffic, México City, Mexico during a trip there in 1985. Three years later, he organized the Canada/Mexico exchange, with help from the Toronto Photographers Workshop (Gallery TPW) and Gallery 44. The influential project in which 29 Mexican and 20 Canadian photographers showed their work in each other’s countries introduced Canadians to photographers such as Graciela Iturbide, ultimately increasing the presence of Mexican work in Canadian collections.Rafael Goldchain/AGO/Supplied
In 2008, the Art Gallery of Ontario received an anonymous gift of photography witnessing a traumatic event in Argentinian history. Still sitting in their original box, the photos were shot by an unnamed photographer on June 20, 1973 when former president Juan Perón returned to Argentina to be met by rival groups of loyalists near the Ezeiza airport. This image shows a left-wing Peronist youth group walking toward the airport; later images show what happened when right-wing Peronist snipers fired on the crowds in what began known as the Ezeiza massacre.AGO/Supplied
The Italian-American photographer Tina Modotti arrived in Mexico as a studio assistant to the American photographer Edward Weston, settled there and established her own style, documenting the struggles of the working class. El Machete of 1926 shows a man reading a local Communist newspaper with a headline denouncing Western attempts to suppress the new Soviet Union. When Modotti, also a political activist, was deported from Mexico in 1930 she gave her Graflex camera to Manuel and Lola Álvarez Bravo, foundational Mexican photographers.Tina Modotti/AGO/Supplied
In 1984, Canadian photographer Michael Mitchell was commissioned
by the National Film Board to travel to Nicaragua to record the aftermath of the Sandinista revolution that helped overthrow the Anastasio Somoza dictatorship. This image shows a little girl being thrown in the air, celebrating the moment Sandinista president Daniel Ortega lowered the voting age to 16. Teenagers had argued that if they were old enough to fight for the revolution, they were old enough to vote.Michael Mitchell/AGO/Supplied
The Canadian artist Reva Brooks travelled to Mexico in 1947 and never left, settling in San Miguel de Allende where she began photographing her surroundings. This image, Velorio (The Wake) – Elodia’s Child, is one of a series she shot in 1948 when invited to photograph the dead body of a young child alongside his grieving mother.Reva Brooks/AGO/Supplied
In the 1980s Graciela Iturbide spent years photographing the Indigenous Zapotec people of Oaxaca, a matriarchal society whose women welcomed the photographer and her camera into their homes. She also shot several non-binary people, members of a third gender known as muxes who are permitted into the Zapotec’s female-only spaces. This is Magnolia en el espejo, Juchitán, México (Magnolia with Mirror, Juchitan, Mexico), 1986.Graciela Iturbide/AGO/Supplied
The Chilean-Canadian photographer Rafael Goldchain traveled widely in Latin America in the 1980s, producing a book of rich and surprising photographs entitled Nostalgia for an Unknown Land. It included this 1987 image, Nocturnal Encounter, Comayagüa, Honduras, shot in the historic city that was once the Honduran capital.Rafael Goldchain/AGO/Supplied
Lola Alvarez Bravo was one of a key group of early Mexican photographers who recorded the landscapes and people of their country in the years following the revolution of 1910-1920. The Recuerdo exhibition features several of her striking images of pre-Colombian architecture, such as this 1950s photo, Chichen Itza: Nunnery Annex (right), Church (left).Lola Alvarez Bravo/AGO/Supplied
The Ottawa photographer Robert Bourdeau is known for his finely detailed black-and-white images of landscapes and architecture, including this 1986 photograph, Valladolid [Cathedral], Yucatan, Mexico.Robert Bourdeau/AGO/Supplied
Graciela Iturbide is one of Mexico’s most prominent contemporary photographers, known for her idiosyncratic vision of a land and its peoples as well as projects in Japan and India. In 2023, the Art Gallery of Ontario made a major acquisition of her work including what is probably her most famous photograph: Mujer Ángel. Desierto de Sonora, México (Angel Woman, Sonora Desert, Mexico) from 1979. A mix of tradition and modernity, it shows a woman from the Indigenous Seri people striding into the desert with a boom box as though about to take flight.Graciela Iturbide/AGO/Supplied
