Josée Bienvenu gallery 529 West 20th Street 10011 New York États-Unis
Josée Bienvenu Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of the never before shown vintage prints of renowned photographer Enrique Metinides. Often referred to as "the Mexican Weegee", Metinides is known for his images of car accidents, suicides, explosions, accidental electrocutions, train derailments, murders, and plane crashes. As early as the age of twelve, Metinides was working side by side with the rescue teams, photographing the tragic scenes. "No one thought anything of a kid, even one with a camera. I became the youngest photojournalist in the city. In the morning, I took pictures of the dead, in the afternoon, I went to school." From the late 1940's until his retirement in 1993, Enrique Metinides worked for Mexican tabloids such as La Prensa and Crimen. His work defined the "nota roja" or "bloody news", a genre noted for its sensationalism.
While taking as its initial subject scenes of wreckage and mutilated bodies, Metinides' work also focuses on the gathering crowds, the bewildered and transfixed passers-by. His photographs are poignant examinations of spectatorship imbued with cinematographic qualities and an otherworldly element achieved, in part, by the use of daylight flash. In many photographs, crowds have gathered around the scene of an accident but they are not looking at the scene , they are staring into the photographer's lens, they are staring at us. In that sense, the photos are less about death than they are about our own fascination with it.
The exhibition brings for the first time to the public a selection of fifty of the only original vintage prints known to still exist and offers a new insight to his rich universe, revealing the most intimate side of his work. For instance, a collection of photographs of car crashes taken in his neighborhood, constitutes his personal work before he became a professional photojournalist. They were first printed on a very small scale and subsequently published in La Prensa.