Picturing Los Angeles and Mexico City

Yolanda Andrade studied photography at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, in 1976–77. For several decades she devoted herself exclusively to working in black and white, developing an extensive project on Mexico City for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994. In 2003 she began to take color photographs in digital format and in other countries. Her work has been published in photobooks and shown internationally, including a 2025 solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City.

Elizabeth Ferrer is a curator and writer whose work has primarily focused on Mexican and Latinx photography. She is the author of Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History (2021), the first comprehensive survey of the field. Ferrer has curated exhibitions at Aperture; the Smithsonian Institution; El Museo del Barrio; and the Americas Society in New York. Her most recent exhibition, Chicano Camera Culture: A Photographic History, 1996–2026, is on view at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture through September 6. Born and raised in East LA, Ferrer is based in New York.

Pablo Ortiz Monasterio is a photographer and editor. He has managed four important editorial collections: México Indígena, Río de Luz, Luna Córnea, and Círculo del Arte, comprising more than 50 publications in collaboration with key figures in Latin American photography. He cofounded the photography institution Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City. Ortiz Monasterio has published more than 20 photobooks and has had solo exhibitions in Latin America, the United States, and Europe. He has been honored with several prestigious Mexican awards, most recently the Fine Arts Medal issued by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (2019).

Reynaldo Rivera’s large body of photographic work captures LA’s queer clubs and house party scene in the 1980s and 1990s, depicting a version of Los Angeles that has all but disappeared. Recent solo exhibitions have been organized at PS1 MoMA, University of Mexicali, Mexico, and Reena Spaulings. He has published two books with Semiotext(e) and his work is in the collections of numerous major museums.

George Rodriguez has recorded a visual history that spans over 45 years. He experienced some of the most tumultuous episodes in LA’s history: the Chicano Moratorium, the Cesar Chavez United Farm Worker’s movement, and the 1992 Los Angeles protests. His photographs document events through gesture and expression, allowing us to better understand the pathos of the times. In 2019, his first career retrospective, George Rodriguez: Double Vision, was held at the Vincent Price Museum of East Los Angeles College.