Moving Portraits

The photographer momentarily tricked his subjects, telling them he was going to take their picture. The setting is almost always the subject's house, studio or garden. The photographer studies the light, picks a spot, places the camera on a tripod, frames the shot, and then suddenly says: "I think I'm going to change the lens. Can you wait a minute?" The subjects then remain alone in a front of a camera that they think is not doing anything, when they are actually being filmed. At the end of the session the photographer tells them what he did, and when the subjects have gotten over their surprise, he asks them permission to include them in the project.

The subjects are visual artists, musicians, curators, photographers, writers: people who are more used to observing than to being observed as subjects. The result is a series of introspective, silent, intimate moments in which people remain lost in thought. Moving Portraits is a protracted version of Cartier Bresson's "decisive moment." These portraits appeal to our fascination with watching someone who does not know he or she is being watched. For the viewer, the act of watching is both embarrassing and captivating.

The series also includes the still portraits that the photographer took after "changing the lens." In these, the subject puts on his or her "portrait face," conscious of the camera's gaze, so that these portraits act as a counterpoint to the filmed ones. Thanks to this apparently simple idea, using current technology, the artist experiments with still portraiture technique, especially with the notion of "objectivity," which is traditionally present in documentary photography, though it is an inherently subjective medium. The visual language is distorted, questioned, and renewed.

Mexico City, 1970. Studied ethnographic film at New York University and the photojournalism program at the International Center of Photography. He has worked as a freelance photographer and fine art printer for the Magnum agency, and as an editor for the magazines DF, Fahrenheit and the Spanish edition of National Geographic. His work has been featured in various shows in Mexico, Venezuela, the United States, Switzerland, France and Japan. He has received numerous awards including a nomination to the Pictet Prize 2014, the Photo Review Best of Show 2012, the Critical Mass Photolucida Top 50 2012 and the Sistema Nacional de Creadores grant (2012-15). His work has been published in several international magazines and newspapers and in the books Área conurbada (Edition One Books, 2012), Sonora, Magic Market (Editorial RM, 2008), and Endless City (Phaidon, 2008). His work is in the collection of Coppel, Banamex, the Smithsonian Institute, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the World Bank. He recently participated in Paris Photo Los Angeles 2014.

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