Mexico City Unveiled - by Joseph Heathcott

About the Book

This book uses photography to explore Mexico City's many and varied landscapes as they emerge from the rich urban culture and vernacular artistry of the people who live there.

Book Synopsis

Captures the rich urban culture and everyday landscapes of Mexico City through photography, highlighting the interplay between tradition and modernity in its built environments.

Mexico City is the largest metropolis in the Western Hemisphere and one of the most populous places on earth. With some twenty million people spread out over three states, its political, economic, and cultural dominance remain unchallenged by any of the country's other cities. When we think of Mexico City, we tend to imagine it as vast, grandiose, frenetic, and vulnerable. And it is all of these things. However, in every nook and corner of the metropolitan expanse, a tangled patchwork of neighborhoods and communities has emerged over time, ordinary places that people call home.
It is precisely the everyday life and landscape of these places that the present book explores. It uses photography to trace the rich urban culture and vernacular artistry of the city's residents as they continually create and adapt the built environments that surround them. The photographs have been selected from thousands taken by the author from around Mexico City. The images reveal a city that is at once deeply rooted in urban traditions stretching over many centuries, and at the same time transformed by the changing political and social forces of an independent nation, a revolutionary state, and the vicissitudes of a globalizing world.
The book includes 150 photographs divided into eight sections, featuring a wide variety of spaces and places, from the canals of Xochimilco to the bustling shops of Santo Domingo, and from the towers of Tlatelolco to the quiet streets of Santa Maria La Ribera. The images explore the layered materialities, aesthetics, and social relations of the urban landscape, and the many ways that people have shaped and adapted the city to suit their needs. An introduction and detailed captions help the reader to interpret the patterns and routines unfolding in the images, and to build a sense of how this bewildering city hangs together from day to day. In the end, even if the totality of Mexico City remains elusive, we can at least come to know it through its fragments, liniments, and traces.

About the Author

Joseph Heathcott is a writer, photographer, and educator based in New York, where he teaches at The New School.