Beyond the Visible in Mexican Photography

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The photographs featured in the Getty Museum exhibition Instante/revelación: Moments in Mexican Photography represent a fascinating dichotomy: they reveal what caught the photographer's attention, while also engaging in a dialogue with the viewer. People, objects, or scenes cease to be simply what they appear to be. The work surrenders to the imagination of the viewer.

For Julieta Pestarino, assistant curator of photographs at the Museum and curator of the exhibition, the pictures included in this exhibition “offer an excellent window into the transformations that have taken place in Mexico and in its photographic scene over the last century.”

A selection of images from the show is detailed below. They reveal intimate gestures, record encounters between artists, and capture scenes discovered by chance. They subtly emphasize poignant details, turn a familiar scene into something unexpected, and hint at stories that are never fully told.

Diego and Siqueiros by Rodrigo Moya (1934–2025)

This 1957 image (pictured above) is one of the last photographs taken of Diego Rivera before his death. It brings together the renowned muralist with David Alfaro Siqueiros, another key figure in 20th-century Mexican art.

The two were rivals and engaged in ideological disagreements for much of their careers. Moya’s assignment was to take photographs that would show the public that these prominent figures of Mexican art were not actually enemies, but friends. However, the stern facial expressions and the physical distance captured in the picture indicate that Moya’s goal was not achieved.

Moya, who was 23 years old when he captured this fleeting moment, said in a 2019 interview that he also took seven more portraits before Rivera approached him very calmly but firmly and said emphatically, “Enough!” “It was a tense meeting. They never looked each other in the eye, didn’t hug, and didn’t even shake hands,” Moya said.

The apparent iciness projected by Rivera and Siqueiros underscores the political, ideological, and artistic tensions that marked Mexico's cultural life in the 20th century. In turn, the two painters help us understand that Mexican muralism was a passionate space for debate and the confrontation of ideas.

Virgin of the Angels by Flor Garduño (b. 1957)

“I was drawn to the saints, the objects, and the architecture of churches,” says Flor Garduño.

The photographer liked to venture out and “explore small towns,” as she calls her trips along the roads of Mexico in her Volkswagen. Among the places she most enjoyed visiting were churches, where she found objects of great cultural, artisanal, and aesthetic interest. It was in one of these houses of worship, in Tzintzuntzan, Michoacán, where this image emerged.

Garduño recalls that as she was leaving the church, she noticed a wall covered with angelic figures and came across this girl, whose transfixed gaze caught her attention. For the artist, that encounter became a “rendezvous,” a term she uses to describe these revelatory moments. “I go out searching for such a rendezvous because it’s already there; it's a flicker of the shutter that you have to identify,” she says. The clouds, which embrace the winged cherubs, and the halo that frames the girl’s head transform the view and elevate it to a mythical and poetic dimension.

Garduño’s extensive body of work includes pieces inspired by the iconography of the Virgin Mary. Rather than approaching this figure from a religious dimension, Garduño presents her as a symbol of the feminine. Virgin of the Angels exemplifies a constant in Garduño’s oeuvre: capturing the wonder of everyday scenes.

The Reverie (Isabel Villaseñor) by Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903–1993)

Photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo captured the moment when Mexican poet and artist Isabel Villaseñor seems to forget about the camera and merges with the craggy driftwood on which she is resting. Villaseñor had an imposing physical presence, but here her body dissolves into the surroundings, imbuing the atmosphere with the subject’s pensiveness and inner mystery. Although the landscape of Tenacatita Beach, Mexico, seems solitary and inhospitable, and rocky, the ease with which Villaseñor inhabits the space creates an image that conveys serenity and reverie, suggesting emotions without fully explaining them.

Over a career spanning six decades, Álvarez Bravo devoted much of her work to portraying some of the most important Mexican artists of her time, including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, and José Clemente Orozco, among many others. For the photographer, Villaseñor embodied an ideal of Mexican female sensitivity and intellectuality.

Angel Woman by Graciela Iturbide (b. 1942)

When the renowned photographer Graciela Iturbide emerged from a cave adorned with wall paintings in the Sonoran Desert in Mexico, she took several shots, although she does not remember photographing this scene. She discovered the image during the production of the photo book Los que viven en la arena (Those Who Live in the Sand), commissioned by Mexico’s Instituto Nacional Indigenista, and decided to include it. Thus, Iturbide sees Angel Woman as an enigma, but also as a gift from the desert. It’s become one of her most iconic works and a touchstone of contemporary Latin American photography.

But the importance of the picture goes even further. This work and the others included in the aforementioned publication focus on people and their everyday experiences, in contrast to a more conventional approach mainly aimed at documenting the ways of life of Indigenous peoples (in this case, the Seri). Here, Iturbide acts as a witness to a community where ancestral customs, such as traditional clothing, coexist with elements of modernity, like the portable boombox carried by the woman striding with the familiarity of someone who knows the landscape by heart.

Funeral Tree (Quararibea funebris) by Cecilia Salcedo Méndez (b. 1957)

“Mexico, with its cactus and its serpent; Mexico covered in flowers and thorns, dry and hurricane drenched, violent of line and of color, violent of eruption and creation, covered me with its spell and its startling light.”

This eloquent evocation of the Mexican landscape, penned by the Chilean poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda and included in the photo book La espina y el fruto: Plantas del Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca (The Thorn and the Fruit: The Ethnobotanical Garden of Oaxaca), seems to be echoed in the images that Cecilia Salcedo Méndez took for the publication. They reveal the sculptural beauty of the flowers, leaves, stems, and pods of plants linked to Oaxacan culture.

The contrast between white and black in the photograph invites us to observe even the most minute details, as if viewed through a magnifying glass: the sinuous contours of the petals curving outward, surrounding the heart of the flower, from which a slender central structure rises. Regarding this image, Salcedo Méndez has said, “For me, it’s a suspended moment that evokes a dance movement and, at the same time, a sustained emotion.”

Two Pairs of Legs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902–2002)

What happens when a billboard is photographed in late 1920s Mexico?

It becomes an enigma, as is the case with Two Pairs of Legs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo. With his eye attuned to the unexpected, he created this image of an advertisement that, in its original context, likely attracted shoppers, but which, in this work, triggers new interpretations. Two pairs of legs forming an advertisement, the lamps, the windows, and the sign on the facade—these elements, separately, might have an everyday meaning, but when brought together within the frame, they spark the viewer’s imagination. Álvarez Bravo did not need to invent an evocative scene: he found it in the urban landscape.

Two Pairs of Legs is just one example of Álvarez Bravo’s keen eye. A master and an inspiration for generations of photographers, he is featured in Instante/revelación with this and many other of his works.

See Instante/revelación: Moments in Mexican Photography at the Getty Center through January 3, 2027.