On the Cover: Aperture's "Mexico City" Issue

How Mexican photographers are pushing new visions for the medium.
IƱaki Bonillas, AdiĆ³s fotografĆ­a, 2018

IƱaki Bonillas, AdiĆ³s fotografĆ­a (Bye bye photography), Mexico City (detail), 2018
Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York

Ghost-like hands reach out from a dark background and create the outline of an invisible camera in IƱaki Bonillasā€™s AdiĆ³s fotografĆ­a (Bye bye photography), the cover of Apertureā€™s fall 2019 issue, ā€œMexico City,ā€ the fourth in a series of city-focused issues, following SĆ£o Paulo, Tokyo, and Los Angeles. The staging of this mysterious photograph echoes the relationship between artist and subject. ā€œHere I asked an actress to portray, with her hands only, a photographer in action,ā€ says Bonillas, in an interview with IvĆ”n Ruiz for Aperture. ā€œWhat we see is nothing but the gestures of the hands while taking a picture and the voids that form around those hands where a camera no longer is usedā€”yet it is somehow still there.ā€

As a young photographer, Bonillas worked for his uncle, the photographer Carlos Somonte, as the assistant to Somonteā€™s assistant. In that role, he was responsible for preparing every step in the photographic process, aside from actually taking the photograph itself. ā€œThis limit allowed me to begin to work in the margins of the notion of the photographic, and to become more interested in the extra-photographic aspects of the medium,ā€ Bonillas recalls. That early education guides the defining works of Bonillasā€™s career, from the phantom camera in AdiĆ³s fotografĆ­a to his inventive reworking of the photographic archive he inherited from his grandfather, who moonlighted as a conceptual artist while working as an aluminum salesman.

Bonillas describes himself as an ā€œattic photographer,ā€ adding, ā€œI spend a lot of time looking for traces of images that are hidden somewhere.ā€ Apertureā€™s ā€œMexico Cityā€ issue is full of photographer-detectives like Bonillasā€”artists who reconsider the past to tell new narratives, from the personal to the collective. Throughout the issue, artists like Graciela Iturbide, Gabriel Orozco, Miguel CalderĆ³n, JesĆŗs LeĆ³n, Pablo OrtĆ­z Monasterio, and Tania Franco Klein, and writers and curators Chloe Aridjis, Ɓlvaro Enrigue, Kit Hammonds, and Sarah Hermanson Meister examine the diversity of Mexico City and its vibrant cultural scenes, reflecting on the ways Mexican photographers are pushing new visions for the medium.

Read moreĀ fromĀ ApertureĀ issue 236, ā€œMexico City,ā€ orĀ subscribe toĀ ApertureĀ and never miss an issue.