Author Description

Mexico City-born photographer Agustín Jiménez (1901-1974) was at the center of his country's flourishing avant-garde, which emerged in the 1920's when international photographers like Edward Weston and Tina Modotti began to travel extensively there and relationships between the local and foreign artists led to aesthetic breakthroughs on both sides. Jiménez is known for crafting an indigenous version of Romantic Pictorialism very akin to Weston's. Jiménez also collaborated closely with the Mexican illustrated press throughout the 1920s and 3̓0s, and in the latter decade became involved with the country's burgeoning motion picture industry--first as a still photographer and then as a cinematographer, in collaboration with such seminal figures as Sergei Eisenstein, Adolfo Best Maugard and Fernando de Fuentes. This volume contains a substantial selection of Jiménez's photographs and provides a deserved overview.