Rodrigo Moya: Photography and Conscience/Fotografía y conciencia (Southwestern & Mexican Photography Series, The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University)

Description

Rodrigo Moya is a prominent Mexican documentary photographer who began as a photojournalist in 1955. He covered the convulsive period that shook Latin America during the 1950s and 1960s, including the guerrilla movement in Guatemala, the invasion of Santo Domingo, and the Cuban Revolution, producing the iconic images “Guerillas in the Mist” and “Melancholy Che.” Since the 1960s, Moya’s work has broadened to encompass more of Mexico and Latin America—the land and sea, people both famous and anonymous, religious processions, the streets of Mexico, laborers, and cultural events involving theatre and dance. Moya’s photography is receiving renewed attention and acclaim in the twenty-first century, including the Espejo de Luz for his photographic career at the VI Bienal Mexicana de Fotoperiodismo and the Medal of Photography Merit from the Sistema Nacional de Fototecas (Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Historia).

Rodrigo Moya: Photography and Conscience/Fotografía y conciencia is the first English-Spanish bilingual retrospective of the photographer’s career. It presents over one hundred striking images grouped into seven thematic suites, each briefly introduced by Moya. Distinguished historian Ariel Arnal provides an essay describing Moya’s impact as a documentary photographer, while Moya writes about his journey to become a photographer in the volume’s introduction, “El nacimiento de las imágenes/The Origin of the Images.” Including photographs that have never been published before, Rodrigo Moya adds an important new chapter to the history of twentieth-century Mexican photography.