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The members of the jury of the Photography Biennale met three times, as they had on former occasions. At our first meeting, we were instructed about the event's workings by the team of the Centro de la Imagen. At the second, we spent two days viewing over 600 digital portfolios by photographers and artists who had responded to the call for submissions, and we made a pre-selection. At our third meeting, we viewed the actual artwork of the preselected participants to determine the final selection; we also voted on whose work should receive purchase prizes or an honorable mention. In our last two meetings, in addition to the examining the pieces presented, we discussed the current situation of photography in Mexico.
Unlike previous installments of the Biennale, this time the jury was made up of two curators and three photographers. But perhaps the most significant change in the format of the contest is that two different exhibitions of the works will be mounted this time, organized by photographer Mauricio Alejo and curator Magnolia de la Garza. The idea is that these two projects will display from different perspectives the issues surrounding images that the jury perceived in the work submitted. For this reason, the curators will be including the work of artists who did not respond to the biennale's call for submissions, as well as work submitted but not selected by the jury, since, in their opinion, it will enrich the curatorial discourse of both exhibitions. The shows will be presented in parallel at two venues: the Museo de Arte de Sinaloa (MASIN), and the Fototeca de Nuevo León in Monterrey. And so the Biennale travels outside of the Centro de la Imagen—currently closed for renovations—to be exhibited in other cities around the country.
Reviewing the portfolios of all the artists who answered the call made us realize that certain topics reappeared consistently, from different points of view. Perhaps the most ubiquitous issue was violence: though its depiction was not necessarily explicit, it was often represented by the loneliness it triggers, revealed in the form of abandoned buildings and desolate landscapes.
One of the selected pieces that best illustrates this topic is Yael Martínez Velázquez's The House that Bleeds. Here the photographer documents moments in the life of his family in the state of Guerrero after three of his relatives had died.
Several photographers focus on the commercial and residential property that has been abandoned as a consequence of the wave of violence across the country. In this general architectural desolation, María Luz Bravo's series Reclaims presents a different perspective: the public spaces she photographed are not in Mexico but rather in certain US cities still in the throes of a long‑standing economic crisis.
Another prevalent issue in the portfolios of participants was sexuality and the male body. This interest is represented in the final selection by two dissimilar projects: Rodrigo Ramos Ezeta's Ex Corde, which explores the world of boxing for a very particular view of the male body, and Sergio Fonseca's Stripper: An Allegory of the Constant Construction of Identity, a series of five videos that reveal his quest for male identity in the process of becoming a stripper.
The genre that is perhaps the most blatantly absent from the final selection is documentary photography. Few works were submitted in this category, and those that were were not particularly challenging. This nonetheless left us with a series of unanswered questions, especially regarding the Mexican school of documentary photography, the spaces in which documentary images circulate, and how they insert themselves into a fine art context.
Though they are not the majority, some artists submitted video works that make curious allusions to photography. This is the case of Salomé Fuentes Flores's Fade Away and Adam Wiseman's Moving Portraits. One project in particular, Manuel Marañón Acuña's I Am Your Doppelgänger, caused us to discuss the use of new tools, media and resources in the making and circulation of photographs. Marañón Acuña's project uses images that were made with a smartphone that was stolen from him, and that are stored in the "cloud." Marañón creates or recreates images that establish a dialogue with those taken by his phone's new user. We wonder what new avenues of research and other kinds of projects this discussion may lead to.
We should note the participation of younger artists such as Marañón Acuña, Pamela Zeferino or Carlos Lara Amador, and of emerging artists like Isolina Zulema Peralta de Fernández, a centenarian whose work participated at the Biennale for the first time.
The pieces that were awarded purchase prizes, Fabiola Menchelli's Constructions and María María Acha-Kutscher's Womankind, represent two practically opposing methods of approaching photography. Menchelli's is an abstract work: one might think the images were digitally altered, but the only things she manipulated were the materials and the lighting, which together create the composition. The Womankind series, on the other hand, depicts different domestic settings with gendered images and objects. It is a photographic collage where the scene is composed of various digital materials collected by the artist.
This year the jury decided to grant an honorable mention to three projects: Alejandro Almanza Pereda's The Less Things Change, the Less They Stay the Same, Ramiro Chaves's XXXXXXXXXX, and Fernando Montiel Klint's Doubernard. These projects deal with two of the Biennale's recurring topics: the sculptural in photography (Almanza and Chaves) and the use of personal archival material (Montiel Klint).
It is curious to note that among the works that received honorable mention, one was by an artist who is not a photographer, Alejandro Almanza, and another by a photographer, Ramiro Chaves, who is dealing with media other than photography. For his part, Fernando Montiel invents a device to exhibit images from his family albums.
Reviewing the portfolios and then looking at the actual selected works made us reevaluate certain general aspects of the projects entered into the call for submissions. Our most frequent issue was with projects' hanging diagrams. In various instances, we found that the way the artist proposed to hang the work rendered its reading more difficult, or it superimposed another narrative onto the images' own.
In this kind of contest, where there is no age limit, we advise more established artists to submit projects that reveal novel perspectives or routes of exploration in their work, so as to generate a discussion around new points of view and issues in photography in our country today.
Other recommendations we should make to artists answering future calls for submission include not entering only one photograph, given that it is not always sufficient to explain a project. It would also be very rewarding for the Photography Biennale if artists submitted works that had not already been featured in other contests. Though the call does not require the pieces submitted never to have been shown before, entering new or little-known series of images can help the jury appreciate other, unexpected references in the artist's work.