Documentary Captures the Life of Mexico's Premiere Crime Photographer Laurence Butet-Roch - TIME
go to original June 1, 2016

A new documentary film looks at the life of Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides, the man behind some of the most haunting pictures of crime scenes.



“I was just nine years old, I’d see 20 to 40 corpses every day”, recalls Enrique Metinides, sitting stiffly in front of a black backdrop looking into the camera. Since the turn of the century, the Mexican photographer, who dedicated his career to “La Nota Roja”, the accident and crime beat, has seen his work transcend the pages of local tabloids and enter the international art world. Amongst those who both facilitated and interrogated his rise in notoriety, is Trisha Ziff. She worked with him on the book 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides and an exhibit that toured in New York and Arles amongst other major cities. After spending years immersed in his images, she turned her attention to the man himself and the context that enabled him to thrive.



“A film allows you to go way beyond the physical photograph and tell another kind of narrative. There’s a freedom because the walls disappear and you can go in several directions,” says the British curator and filmmaker currently residing in Mexico City. Though Metinides is the spine of the movie, he’s also a means to an end, an entry point into a much broader discussion about the place of the tragic in media and in the arts. A street newspaper vendor reflects on the ever-growing sensationalism of covers, a shoe-shiner reveals that some of his clients hide the fact that they’re reading the tabloids by dissimulating the pages behind a more respectable publication, hoping to keep up appearances.

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