Camera Obrera (2009)

The Mexican photographer Héctor García has a long and varied career that spans more than half a century of professional activity, several continents, and multiple genres, including ethnographic photography and film, advertising, mixed media assemblages incorporating painting, photographs and found objects, often in collaboration with visual artists, and every sort of photojournalism. In spite of the range of styles and places in which he has worked, the core of his body of work is his street photography from Mexico City. García has not only defined himself unequivocally— “I am a street photographer”—he has posited street photography as central to the medium itself, stating “the world is photography is the street, for it is there that one finds the element essential for good photographs: the human factor.” This exhibition focuses on his street photography, raw, socially engaged, and (at least seemingly) spontaneous, a body of work that subtly but significantly revises the norms of the genre, adapting it for a different class position and a different experience of modernity.

In his essay on the painter Constanin Guys, Charles Baudelaire celebrated the experiences of the strolling, urban dandy—the flâneur—as the archetype of a certain type of modern subjectivity: detached, observant, mobile, and forever curious. For this inquiring, attentive pedestrian, the city’s crowds, the ever-changing theatricality of the street provides an incomparable titillation, a series of nearly physical thrills. Baudelaire wrote that for the flâneur, “the crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes.“ Street photography, with its aim of fixing fleeting moments of urban life, is intimately linked to the sort of modern subjectivity that Baudelaire celebrated. Thinkers seeking to theorize this practice repeated evoke the flâneur as a model. Baudelaire’s flâneur, though sometimes taken as a universal model, nonetheless carries a specificity of culture, history, and social class. García rewrites the tropes of the genre from the perspective of the urban poor. Rather than photographing from the perspective of a flâneur, García shoots from viewpoint of the scrambling lumpenproletariat, and in doing so not only reconfigures the genre of street photography, but also rewrites the politics, subjectivity and the experience of modernity that it embodies to suit the cultural specific experiences of the pedestrian on the streets of the Mexican Capital.