Enrique Metinides

In their focus on traumatic events, sensationalist images amplify the mimetic quality of photography, depicting the pain of others with a shock-inducing, exploitative specificity. Sensation manages to shed its usual association with the brash and unseemly, however, in the work of the Mexican newspaper photographer Enrique Metinides, whose five-decade career is presented here in a selection of carefully composed images of crisis and destruction. Focusing on train wrecks, car accidents, and high-rise suicides, Metinides’s photographs represent the muted moments of postcatastrophe rather than the more heated points of literal combustion. In Untitled, Empleado de Telefonos de Mexico electrocutado en el km, 13 de la carretera Mexico-Toluca (Untitled, An Employee of Telefonos de Mexico Electrocuted at the 13-km mark on the Mexico-Toluca Highway), 1971, an electrocuted phone-company technician lies splayed in the lap of tangled power lines as if part of a modern-day pietà, while in Untitled, Primer plano de mujer rubia arrollada e impactada contra un poste, en avenida Chapultepec, Ciudad de Mexico (Untitled, First Image of a Blond Woman Rolled and Impacted Against a Post, Avenue Chapultepec, Mexico City), 1979, a blond car-crash victim, glamorous as a Hollywood starlet, stares blindly into the distance, her hand lifelessly hugging a fallen post. In their emphasis on stark diagonal lines, Metinides’s formally meticulous photos owe less to the aesthetics of point-and-shoot and much more to a Constructivist such as Rodchenko. Rather than suggesting an unreserved idealization of machinery as an instrument of progress, however, Metinides offers a more complex stance—commenting on the deadly intersection between man and machine even while using his own mechanical contraption to capture the effects of that lethal encounter.