Los Juguetes Portfolio

Enrique Metinides is one of the great characters in the story of contemporary photography. His new work is as vividly authentic as the photographs of crime and disasters he spent his life documenting for the Mexican tabloid, La Prensa.

These are the photographs of an older man who can no longer go out with the ambulances and firefighters as he did for fifty years. Today he spends much of his time at home, finding new ways to revisit the themes of his life’s work. In this series, Metinides has rephotographed images made early in his career, constructing fictional rescue scenes from his collection of over ten thousand toy firemen and medics. The work maintains a childlike quality, a naivety, and yet is made by a man who remembers every detail of every tragedy he ever photographed. Metinides has looked for new ways to understand the things he has witnessed, this time with irony and black humor. These late pictures are a new twist on an extraordinary career, representing a poignant moment in a personal journey, and a reflection on a life in photography. The prints were made at the artist’s local Costco in Mexico City and are offered in the paper Costco bags in which he picked them up.

Portfolio of Ten C-Prints, presented in a signed Costco bag
Edition of 20
Initialed and numbered by the artist

Details of prints included in this portfolio:
7 horizontally oriented images
Image Size: 9 x 12 inches
Paper Size: 10 x 12 inches
3 vertically oriented images
Image Size: 12 x 9 inches
Paper Size: 12 x 10 inches

Enrique Metinides (b. 1934, Mexico City, Mexico) is an artist living in Mexico City. He published his first photo at the age of twelve, earning him the nickname “El Niño.” A year later, he became an unpaid intern under the crime reporter for La Prensa, beginning a prolific career in photography that to date has spanned five decades. His work is in collections all over the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yale University, and many others. His retrospective, 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides, was prepared with curator and filmmaker Trisha Ziff and opened in July 2011 at Rencontres d’Arles. A book of Metinides’s work was published by Aperture in October 2012.