Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides is known for his tabloid photography of grizzly scenes, much as the American photographer Weegee. The book Series represents some of the stories from his career of more than fifty years, by including 14 photo-stories with short descriptions which were created during the period from 1950 to 1993. As far as gossipy blood-lust goes, the photos serve their purpose: there is a plane crash and a blood-soaked suitcase, suicide attempts, fires and explosions. These are the scenes from the nightmares of reality, and perhaps we can be grateful that many of them are in black-and-white to spare us the gore.

Yet fiction copies reality (or is it the other way around?), so the lines between what we produce and what we experience get blurred. Aside from the shock and awe of the bloody photography Metinides created, Series includes stories of perspective, characters which evolve into good guys and bad guys, and tension of mystery. The book is not only a portfolio work of Metinides, and not only a view into the specific news of Mexico, it is also an expression of the way that we create narratives within our news and within our lives, to better communicate the drama of the human experience.

Series is available for sale from Kominek gallery.

Kominek gallery in Berlin will also host an exhibition of Metinides’ work, opening March 3, 2012.

For more information about Enrique Metinides, you can also read a review that the New York Times wrote of a previous Metinides exhibition in 2006, and read a short entry about him from the blog Iconic Photos.

Reviewed by Katherine Oktober Matthews.