Mexico

Publisher's description

These two seminal photographers first met in New York in the spring of 1935. Cartier-Bresson had just spent a year in Mexico, while the American had only just started photographing the theatre of New York street life. In 1941, fascinated by Cartier-Bresson's work, Levitt decided to visit the same destination. The two journeys to Mexico turned out to be pivotal points at the beginning of their long careers, during which the two photographers each forged their own respective conceptions of photography.

For Cartier-Bresson, Mexico was the place in which he first began to reconcile his fine-art education with an impulsive and intuitive eye for street photography. He experimented with framing and took advantage of the dramatic sunlight of Mexico City streets to refine his technique and take some of the most highly-regarded photographs of his career.

Helen Levitt, meanwhile, travelled to Mexico City in 1941 in her only extensive photographic journey outside of New York. She captured a city torn between tradition
and modernity and, as in her celebrated works from her hometown, she focused on children at play in working-class neighbourhoods.

For both photographers, the Mexican landscape and its citizens proved to be a fundamental education that would shape their entire oeuvre.