Miguel Calderón Journeys into the Soul of Mexico

Miguel Calderón is a hunter of good stories. Once, he traveled by taxi from Mexico City to Tijuana—a journey of more than 1,700 miles—only to end up with one photograph, an image of a man whom we see from a distance, with his back to the camera, urinating. It’s a testament to an adventure that began when Calderón asked various taxi drivers if they would be willing, at that very moment, to take him to the Mexico-US border, a drive of more than thirty hours traversing extremely rough regions of the country—controlled by drug cartels—so that he could produce a piece for a festival on borderland art. After a few attempts, one brave driver decided to accompany him on the adventure, from which that extraordinary image emerged. This is Calderón: an artist whose work extends from a photo of himself vomiting upon leaving a party when he was twenty-something years old, to a complex video installation wherein a panther approaches the spectator in total darkness, revealing itself solely by the glint of a pair of alert eyes and some sounds. 

Calderón works in video, installation, painting, and drawing, but his photography, in particular, is sui generis. It isn’t the image per se that matters, but the story behind it. I recently spoke with Calderón at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, where his exhibition Materia estética disponible (Aesthetic material available) was on view—a small but carefully curated survey that covers his trajectory from the 1990s to the present. 

María Minera: What is your relationship to photography? Perhaps you wouldn’t define yourself as a photographer because you use so many different mediums, but it’s clear you have an important relationship to photography. 

Miguel Calderón: Without a doubt. Throughout my career there’s been a lot of back and forth between considering myself a photographer or not. These days I consider myself a photographer, but one who has renounced technique and decided to grab a camera and take snapshots. Of course, there are cases in which I work with a professional team to achieve certain effects that are more difficult to attain, but that’s dependent on the work. 

My history with photography is strange. When my parents separated, my mother married a photographer who had a darkroom, various cameras, and all the photographic paraphernalia, and this really interested me. He also had an enormous collection of National Geographic. My parents’ separation was incredibly painful for me, but in the midst of distress, I found very valuable things, as much thanks to my mother’s husband as to my father’s wife, who was interested in art. My parents had no interest in art; they never took us to museums. So these new presences, with all their associated problems, were tremendously enriching. I remember my mother’s house was robbed and they took the better part of her husband’s photography equipment, including his favorite camera. This had a major impact on me, and to this day, when someone says Nikon, it’s like hearing Ferrari. 

Because of the disillusionment of having lost everything in the robbery, my mother’s husband quit photography, but, interestingly enough, my father’s wife decided to buy the few things that remained off him—filters and light—and put up her own darkroom. She enrolled in the Escuela Activa de Fotografía (a photography school in Mexico City), and I remember her returning with her assignments for class and that making a significant impression on me. So when I had the opportunity, I decided to study photography. And of course, my early attempts were incredibly pretentious, they strove to imitate the work I admired: Nacho López, Tina Modotti, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Ansel Adams. 

For this exhibit, we decided to show some of what I created during that period, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. They’re photographs that perhaps never had any intention of being works of art, but in which I nevertheless found a certain value for their attempts at imitating other photographers. I think they contain some salvageable moments while also being a way for me to see a different me: the Miguel at fifty looking at an enthusiastic teenager eager to document his surroundings, to immerse himself in situations that call his attention, and an obsessive thirst for life. 

Minera: We’re standing in front of two photographs from very different periods, and what seems incredible to me, in a certain sense, is that your work hasn’t changed that much over time. There are still many aspects of that initial spirit of searching that persist, of trying to understand the world that surrounds you, and trying to find yourself in that world. This is a constant in your work. I’m thinking, for example, of the piece from 1998 that’s called Vómito postmoderno (Postmodern vomit).

Calderón: For me, the nineties in Mexico City are like a cloud of memory and forgetting. We lived in tremendous chaos and amid a lot of uncertainty, because what we did wasn’t accepted. People would ask you: “What kind of protest is this? Are you an artist? What are you?” And being really young, that makes you question yourself. 

During that time, I lived in a warehouse and lots of people stayed in my house. I remember that the most fun wasn’t going to a party, because by the time you got there everyone had already left, there were plastic cups thrown all over, an empty bottle of Bacardi. What was most fun was the journey in search of the party, roaming all over the city with your friends. And it was pretty typical at that age to end up vomiting. So I started to compile an archive of photos of my friends vomiting. And one day, after developing material that I’d taken with a 35 mm Olympus, I found that there was a photo of me that of course I couldn’t have taken myself, but I also couldn’t remember who had taken it. But when I saw it, it immediately brought me back to Bruce Nauman and his Self-Portrait as a Fountain; this was my own uncomfortable version, my self-portrait as an adolescent fountain. I mounted it in a lightbox because that was the exact size of the illuminated images that they used to put up in bus stops. 

Minera: And alongside it, we see Espacio abierto (Open space), a more recent work, from 2013, a diptych, of two birds of prey. 

Calderón: It’s a white hawk that was in a refuge for injured animals. The story comes from long before—when I moved with my mother and her husband to Balcones de la Herradura, a kind of American-type suburb. My mom’s husband had a dog, and one time when I went to pick him up from the veterinarian’s office, where they were bathing him, there was a hawk there and I fell madly in love with it. I wanted to connect with nature in a different way than what was taught in school, where you were just taught to repeat exactly what was in the book. At that time, I had bicycles that I built myself—maybe that was my first introduction to making art unconsciously, off the page. So I became friends with the veterinarian, Pedro, who lived in a nearby town. I would go to his house and we would talk. In reality, I wanted to buy his hawk, but I didn’t have enough money. But one day, he saw my bike and he said: “I’ll bet you the bike for the hawk if you do one hundred sit-ups while hanging from the van where I transport the dogs.” And so I did the hundred sit-ups and when I got to the ninety-ninth he shouted: “110! 110!”; and I cried and looked up at the sky while thinking: “The hawk, the hawk.” And I won it—I had it in my house and I learned to take care of it. That’s where my interest in them began. Now I’m making a documentary, not so much about the hawks, but about people like me, who find a kind of anxiolytic through their relationships with hawks. 

The piece you see here has to do with the nictitating membrane that all hawks have. It isn’t an eyelid, it’s a layer that protects the eye, for example, when the blood of their prey splashes into it when they hunt. What’s incredible is that they don’t lose their field of vision. And what I wanted to do was put myself in the place of the prey; feel what they feel when they confront a bird like this one, right at the moment before being attacked. 

Minera: I’m drawn to the fact that each photograph has a distinct size and quality. There is a myriad of photographic decisions involved. 

Calderón: A fundamental shift occurred in my life when I saw one of Cindy Sherman’s photographs in the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo. It had a tremendous impact on me. For one thing, the scale. Second, her colors. Third, the question of the artist’s multiple personalities, of exploring the self by virtue of various physical manifestations. And it was something that I felt: I am many different selves in different situations and with different people. It made such an impression on me that I began taking large-format photographs. Time passed and I understood that not all photographs require that. It was something intuitive. 

Minera: We’re now standing in front of Taxímetro (Taximeter), a piece from 1997 comprised of a single image and a running taximeter. Tell me the story of this piece, which is the one you presented at InSite that same year. 

Calderón: This story is a little long, it involves two trips to the border and a failed art piece. But in the end, the piece emerged from a trip that I made by taxi to Tijuana from Daniel Garza, the neighborhood where I was living in Mexico City. I stopped various taxi drivers and everyone told me: “No, you’re crazy, that’s terrifying.” Until one of them said: “Yes, come to my house with me.” We went to get his things and we left at sunrise. The trip took four days, and we went to bars, we drank, got drunk, and just saw everything. And, in the midst of all that, it was incredibly interesting to try to convince him of the validity of my work—which I never managed to do. We ended up striking up a deep, though passing, friendship, as I never saw him again. I took lots of photos—of cities, of him and I cohabitating in the hotel, drunk in our underwear. In the end I chose the image that most called my attention, where he’s seen urinating, completely out of his element, alongside the taxi, which was allegedly ecological, though the only remotely ecological thing about it was that it was painted green. 

We were in La Rumorosa, an extremely dangerous highway. He wanted to stop, although it was a total risk, to urinate. After the trip, he gifted me the taximeter and I decided to show it alongside the image. I liked adding this element of running time and money. How do you do the accounting for something as endearing as this trip we undertook together? I felt the influence of an artist like Félix González-Torres here, whose work always interested me. 

Minera: Your series Chapultepec (2003) also has an interesting backstory, right? 

Calderón: The Daniel Garza neighborhood was a pretty dangerous place, and going out into the street was a whole adventure; there were always run-ins with people, lots of drinking, violence. The mere exercise of going to Chapultepec Park, which was right next to it, was like a border crossing, because of the cars and buses giving off tons of smoke, and the amount of trash to get through. This gave me a sense for human fragility. And then in the park I’d come across dead animals or see fish, and I had no idea how they survived in this filthy lake. I’ve always been interested in studying chaos. And unconsciously I started to make a connection with the disasters depicted by Goya in his series The Disasters of War. We often think of the disasters of war, but what about the disasters of peace—an incredibly precarious peace, like the kind here in Mexico—which also exist. 

So, I started to go to the park without really knowing exactly what it was I wanted to do, and more as an exercise for calming my distress. As a child, I celebrated all my birthdays in this park with my family. It’s the quintessential place for celebrating whatever the occasion might be with elaborate picnics. And that’s where it occurred to me to ask these families to let me take a photo of them pretending that a disaster had just occurred. Of course, they refused. So, I asked a friend of mine who’s a curator to accompany me, and I imagine a female presence changed the dynamic because people started to agree and even invited us to eat with them. And so, I became obsessed and over the course of ten weekends in a row, I went to document these scenes. I thought a lot about La jetée, Chris Marker’s film, about something that could be but isn’t, but once you do it, it becomes a reality. Of course, there’s a lot of humor in this work, even though it also speaks to the fragility in which we can all collapse at any given moment. When COVID-19 emerged and I looked at these photos, I felt a tremendous resonance. 

Translated from the Spanish by Elianna Kan.