Matehuala
It was Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil” (1958), with its legendary opening shot, the film which first opened the eyes of the broader audience to the imaginary of the Mexican underworld. For once more, the cinema surpassed the books in terms of visual inventiveness. The location, where all the conspiracies, crimes and murders of this complex scenario unfold, is “Los Robles”, a seedy Mexican-American border town, literally drowned in corruption; a town seemingly reserved only for striptease bars, brothels, occasional gambling enterprises and gangs. At least the plot comes with a “man of Law”, i.e. Charlton Heston, featuring a Mexican drug-enforcement official, who is forced, due to uneasy circumstances, to interrupt his honeymoon with his newlywed girlfriend Janet Leigh, in order to take action against the villains and the self-abusing sheriff Hank Quinlan (featured by Orson Welles).
When it comes to Matehuala, the small Mexican town photographers Gerardo and Fernando Montiel Klint have employed as the subject of their homonymous brand new series, things seem to be less uncontrollable. To put it more accurately, everything in Matehuala points to a tricky silence proper to a no man’s land. Even so, the suspense and mystery condensed in the pictures of the Montiel brothers, alongside the undergoing rumours about the terrifying present of the city and its connections with drug trafficking and illegal business, make it hard for any subconscious mind, bred within all the dramatic tension of the Wellesian plots, not to think, view and feel Matehuala as the contemporary version of “Los Robles”.
Of course, to anyone familiar with the Latino culture, the name “Montiel” resonates for another simple reason. It alludes to female actress-singer “Sara Montiel”, who was to become in Franco’s Spain of the fifties the loyally Catholic, yet still not an any less sexually avid version of Ava Gardner, the first international star of the local film industry and the indisputable queen of legendary and linguistically inventive –at least, in terms of their respective titles– dramas. Admittedly, at first sight, any connection to Sara Montiel seems totally irrelevant and absurd in the context of Matehuala, but just take a closer look and you will come across an underlying parallelism that brings you a step forward when establishing the conceptual thread of the Matehuala project. For, similarly to Sara Montiel’s birth out of the deeper layers of the social imagery, the practice, the iconographical resources and the framework of Gerardo and Fernando Montiel are inextricably tied up to such a deeply rooted popular consciousness and culture, hard to imagine in any other place on earth than Mexico. Needless to say, by contemplating Mexico as such, one does so in terms of an unforeseen heterogeneity and an astounding cultural syncretism; the so-to-speak “Mexicanization of everything”, as Fernando and Gerardo Montiel like to refer to it.
To put it in another way: What happens when the visual conceptualism of the Düsseldorf School is introduced into the cultural and social context of a country so replete of colours, odours and sounds as Mexico? Well, it inevitably then fosters an envisioned “magic realism”, wherein raised walls are demolished, any presumed distance between the photographers and their subjects is cancelled and myriads of sudden, vivid and nothing less than surrealist encounters unfold in the middle of the desert.
Fernando and Gerardo Montiel Klint could go on talking for hours about the stories behind each of these apparently still pictures of Matehuala, all taken after the sunset. They recall camping with their equipment in front of a peculiar tiny house called “Restaurante Base Tomada”. In the middle of the night, to their surprise, lights went suddenly on and a bunch of girls in mini-skirts jumped out, asking them to disappear right away following the owner’s demand. The restaurant had turned out to be a brothel; clients were attended in a small deck room. They recall another scene that took place during the session of “El Rey del Taco”, when they were almost run over by the wife of the owner who thought they were a serious threat. They remember various risky occasions in which they were finally asked to immediately abandon the location with all their equipment. The mafia has full control not just on the earnings of these establishments but also on the people who hang around; above all, on people who pop up at two or four o’clock in the night. But, there is also a hilarious, absurdist side in all these adventures with unexpected endings. Like, for instance, the encounter the Montiels had with a painter in the middle of a deserted village. The man turned out to be a profound admirer of Ansel Adams and thought them to be too. Thrilled for having chanced upon two photographers in the middle of nowhere, he would fiercely insist on them immortalising with their camera the monumental landscape they were sharing! Likewise, another shooting initially planned to take place before an abandoned hotel, ended-up being a large photo session of a group of relatives. Unless they had taken portraits of the whole family, the Montiels would not have gained their permission for the final image!
“A photographer from Mexico can in no case be like a German or an American descendant of the Becher School taking pictures of warehouses, water towers or gas stations”, affirms laughingly Fernando Montiel and, amidst everything narrated above, he seems more than right. Here, in the middle of the desert, the “take the picture and go” attitude is replaced by a more interactive practice that asks for an interference with the subjects, the places and the people who inhabit them. At the same time, and inversely, these very same pictures reflect the fears, inhibitions and constraints imposed by the laws of the local bands and clans, the so-to-say highly complex social reality of these places. Each image contains thousand of stories, as a condenser of the “time before” – of all, properly speaking, coffees and drinks the Montiels had to share, in order to gain the confidence of the local people! It is perhaps for this reason why the two artists decided to dispense with the digital equipment and work with a large-format analogue camera instead. In this way, they could allow for time to intervene between the shutter and the human gaze, recovering the lost primitive immediacy of the photographic image. Far away from the technique of the snapshot, they were looking for a camera obscura effect, guiding the eye through the camera in natural time. As a result, the images of Matehuala are, indeed, “products of a photographic contemplation that dilates the vision in time”, as Gerardo Montiel stresses. What’s more, they are visual containers replete of voices, presences and absences; they are culminations and reflections of hidden stories and rotten façades.
Likewise, the suspension and tension imbuing these pictures is not played out as in a David Lynch film, but is a rather naturally inherent element of the Matehuala ambience. The night with its lights glooming in the darkness speaks for a town of abandoned hotels and old American-type neon panels, rooted next to the highway; the ghost town of a road movie, where in a silent, subtle complicity, many events happen. Almost as much, or even more, as during the ninety-five minutes of “Touch of Evil”. Plain and neutral, the photographic envisioning of Gerardo and Fernando Montiel plays with the façades of old buildings and trolley tracks, transmitting an unbearable sensation of loneliness and witting isolation. The gaze never retreats into the interior of these façades, never gets too close. For Matehuala is a town that safeguards its secrets.
“Matehuala is an ugly town, a town on the verge of nothingness. There is nothing to do in it, nothing more than taking a short break from long trips”, argues Fernando Montiel. “But when coming back from days in the deserts, days one has spent without proper food, drink and shower, then Matehuala can be a real oasis. It transforms into a place where one can have a shower and get some rest between warm sheets”.
Matehuala is a place of transit. Of less than zero interest to Mexicans, it is a small ghost town situated within driving distance, in the middle between Mexico DF and the States. It becomes a necessary stop for American and Canadian travellers and merchandisers. Many of these passers-by are attracted to it because of its local traditions and the cult of peyote, a small spineless cactus with a long history of ritual and medicinal use by the indigenous people. Under its effect, this stop can obtain a supernatural character; hallucinations help the traveller come in deep contact with a land sacred over the centuries for the shamans of the area, whose long ritual processions last for days and nights. But, in full light, the Americanized character of the town contrasts harshly with this mystic background, which still throws its midst on old walls. As if the dark and the bright side of life coexisted harmoniously, the Matehuala people carry on their backs a past and a present steeped in deep ambivalence. They know how to. Those “whose future is all used up”, in the words of the fortune telling madame played by Marlene Dietrich in “Touch of Evil”, know how to carry this ambivalence with dignity …
Fernando and Gerardo Montiel have chosen Matehuala precisely because, with its apparent nothingness, it encapsulates perfectly the “other side” of Mexico, far away from the typical tourist clichés. What’s more, Matehuala has been the starting point of the artistic synergy between the two brothers. Apart from their systematic collaboration on commercial assignments in the fields of fashion and advertising (the Montiels are founding members of Klintandstudio), this is the first time they collaborate on an artistic project. On a personal level, both brothers have gained notoriety and awards for their respective work in fine-art photography and are represented by international galleries. Fernando’s tableaux-vivants of domestic middle-class interiors in destruction and characters in nirvana, question with a handful of irony and sarcasm the “hallucinogenic” effects of contemporary popular myths, consumerism and collective obsessions. On the other hand, Gerardo Montiel introduces into his staged indoor or outdoor settings a much more denouncing documentary-type visual content. His photographic series –all of them the fruit of experiences and reflections recollected during journeys– hover over increasingly common social issues, such as violence and sexual abuse.
Fernando and Gerardo Montiel Klint like to emphasize the way in which the making of the “Matehuala” series not only opened new creative ways, but also enhanced the personal and artistic comprehension and complicity between them. During the process, the Montiels responded successfully to the challenge of attempting a different approach than the one they were used to, heading back to a more direct and archaic photographic practice. Still, they did put a lot of themselves into the project, such as the landscape element of Gerardo, the subtle irony of Fernando, and something of their taste for staging, though not in the literal sense of the word. Within the “Matehuala” series, there are pictures in which the two photographers make their appearance, together or separately, as two mere elements of the surrounding landscape and the human ambience. Their gazes always point somewhere and the spaces that surround them are always related to the states of transit or observation. In an attitude of intuitive contemplation and self-reflection, theses image testify a lot to the creative process; they actually intensify the complicity and the attachment of the photographer to his subject, adding up to the conceptualism of modern landscape photography an enriching entropic flavour. But for the Montiels, these pictures obtain, above all, an autobiographical significance as the celebration of their brotherhood. They are “decisive moments” caught up in time; small pearls of an introspective emotive journey; “petite souvenirs of a family trip, which instead of taking place before the Eiffel Tower, unfolds in the most absurd place of the earth!”, concludes with humour Fernando Montiel.
Matehuala has been just the first page in the diary of this artistic companionship. The Montiels are happy with the results and plan to carry on their projects in many other cities alike, illustrating an aspect of this Mexican double-faceted reality and idiosyncrasy many people still ignore. Now they have started, they do not have the least intention to stop. How could they, anyway? Fernando and Gerardo Montiel Klint are nothing less but two highly inventive “photographic animals”, breathing and living through photography!
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved
All Pictures: Gerardo and Fernando Montiel Klint
Published in Eyemazing 01/2009
It was Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil” (1958), with its legendary opening shot, the film which first opened the eyes of the broader audience to the imaginary of the Mexican underworld. For once more, the cinema surpassed the books in terms of visual inventiveness. The location, where all the conspiracies, crimes and murders of this complex scenario unfold, is “Los Robles”, a seedy Mexican-American border town, literally drowned in corruption; a town seemingly reserved only for striptease bars, brothels, occasional gambling enterprises and gangs. At least the plot comes with a “man of Law”, i.e. Charlton Heston, featuring a Mexican drug-enforcement official, who is forced, due to uneasy circumstances, to interrupt his honeymoon with his newlywed girlfriend Janet Leigh, in order to take action against the villains and the self-abusing sheriff Hank Quinlan (featured by Orson Welles).
When it comes to Matehuala, the small Mexican town photographers Gerardo and Fernando Montiel Klint have employed as the subject of their homonymous brand new series, things seem to be less uncontrollable. To put it more accurately, everything in Matehuala points to a tricky silence proper to a no man’s land. Even so, the suspense and mystery condensed in the pictures of the Montiel brothers, alongside the undergoing rumours about the terrifying present of the city and its connections with drug trafficking and illegal business, make it hard for any subconscious mind, bred within all the dramatic tension of the Wellesian plots, not to think, view and feel Matehuala as the contemporary version of “Los Robles”.
Of course, to anyone familiar with the Latino culture, the name “Montiel” resonates for another simple reason. It alludes to female actress-singer “Sara Montiel”, who was to become in Franco’s Spain of the fifties the loyally Catholic, yet still not an any less sexually avid version of Ava Gardner, the first international star of the local film industry and the indisputable queen of legendary and linguistically inventive –at least, in terms of their respective titles– dramas. Admittedly, at first sight, any connection to Sara Montiel seems totally irrelevant and absurd in the context of Matehuala, but just take a closer look and you will come across an underlying parallelism that brings you a step forward when establishing the conceptual thread of the Matehuala project. For, similarly to Sara Montiel’s birth out of the deeper layers of the social imagery, the practice, the iconographical resources and the framework of Gerardo and Fernando Montiel are inextricably tied up to such a deeply rooted popular consciousness and culture, hard to imagine in any other place on earth than Mexico. Needless to say, by contemplating Mexico as such, one does so in terms of an unforeseen heterogeneity and an astounding cultural syncretism; the so-to-speak “Mexicanization of everything”, as Fernando and Gerardo Montiel like to refer to it.
To put it in another way: What happens when the visual conceptualism of the Düsseldorf School is introduced into the cultural and social context of a country so replete of colours, odours and sounds as Mexico? Well, it inevitably then fosters an envisioned “magic realism”, wherein raised walls are demolished, any presumed distance between the photographers and their subjects is cancelled and myriads of sudden, vivid and nothing less than surrealist encounters unfold in the middle of the desert.
Fernando and Gerardo Montiel Klint could go on talking for hours about the stories behind each of these apparently still pictures of Matehuala, all taken after the sunset. They recall camping with their equipment in front of a peculiar tiny house called “Restaurante Base Tomada”. In the middle of the night, to their surprise, lights went suddenly on and a bunch of girls in mini-skirts jumped out, asking them to disappear right away following the owner’s demand. The restaurant had turned out to be a brothel; clients were attended in a small deck room. They recall another scene that took place during the session of “El Rey del Taco”, when they were almost run over by the wife of the owner who thought they were a serious threat. They remember various risky occasions in which they were finally asked to immediately abandon the location with all their equipment. The mafia has full control not just on the earnings of these establishments but also on the people who hang around; above all, on people who pop up at two or four o’clock in the night. But, there is also a hilarious, absurdist side in all these adventures with unexpected endings. Like, for instance, the encounter the Montiels had with a painter in the middle of a deserted village. The man turned out to be a profound admirer of Ansel Adams and thought them to be too. Thrilled for having chanced upon two photographers in the middle of nowhere, he would fiercely insist on them immortalising with their camera the monumental landscape they were sharing! Likewise, another shooting initially planned to take place before an abandoned hotel, ended-up being a large photo session of a group of relatives. Unless they had taken portraits of the whole family, the Montiels would not have gained their permission for the final image!
“A photographer from Mexico can in no case be like a German or an American descendant of the Becher School taking pictures of warehouses, water towers or gas stations”, affirms laughingly Fernando Montiel and, amidst everything narrated above, he seems more than right. Here, in the middle of the desert, the “take the picture and go” attitude is replaced by a more interactive practice that asks for an interference with the subjects, the places and the people who inhabit them. At the same time, and inversely, these very same pictures reflect the fears, inhibitions and constraints imposed by the laws of the local bands and clans, the so-to-say highly complex social reality of these places. Each image contains thousand of stories, as a condenser of the “time before” – of all, properly speaking, coffees and drinks the Montiels had to share, in order to gain the confidence of the local people! It is perhaps for this reason why the two artists decided to dispense with the digital equipment and work with a large-format analogue camera instead. In this way, they could allow for time to intervene between the shutter and the human gaze, recovering the lost primitive immediacy of the photographic image. Far away from the technique of the snapshot, they were looking for a camera obscura effect, guiding the eye through the camera in natural time. As a result, the images of Matehuala are, indeed, “products of a photographic contemplation that dilates the vision in time”, as Gerardo Montiel stresses. What’s more, they are visual containers replete of voices, presences and absences; they are culminations and reflections of hidden stories and rotten façades.
Likewise, the suspension and tension imbuing these pictures is not played out as in a David Lynch film, but is a rather naturally inherent element of the Matehuala ambience. The night with its lights glooming in the darkness speaks for a town of abandoned hotels and old American-type neon panels, rooted next to the highway; the ghost town of a road movie, where in a silent, subtle complicity, many events happen. Almost as much, or even more, as during the ninety-five minutes of “Touch of Evil”. Plain and neutral, the photographic envisioning of Gerardo and Fernando Montiel plays with the façades of old buildings and trolley tracks, transmitting an unbearable sensation of loneliness and witting isolation. The gaze never retreats into the interior of these façades, never gets too close. For Matehuala is a town that safeguards its secrets.
“Matehuala is an ugly town, a town on the verge of nothingness. There is nothing to do in it, nothing more than taking a short break from long trips”, argues Fernando Montiel. “But when coming back from days in the deserts, days one has spent without proper food, drink and shower, then Matehuala can be a real oasis. It transforms into a place where one can have a shower and get some rest between warm sheets”.
Matehuala is a place of transit. Of less than zero interest to Mexicans, it is a small ghost town situated within driving distance, in the middle between Mexico DF and the States. It becomes a necessary stop for American and Canadian travellers and merchandisers. Many of these passers-by are attracted to it because of its local traditions and the cult of peyote, a small spineless cactus with a long history of ritual and medicinal use by the indigenous people. Under its effect, this stop can obtain a supernatural character; hallucinations help the traveller come in deep contact with a land sacred over the centuries for the shamans of the area, whose long ritual processions last for days and nights. But, in full light, the Americanized character of the town contrasts harshly with this mystic background, which still throws its midst on old walls. As if the dark and the bright side of life coexisted harmoniously, the Matehuala people carry on their backs a past and a present steeped in deep ambivalence. They know how to. Those “whose future is all used up”, in the words of the fortune telling madame played by Marlene Dietrich in “Touch of Evil”, know how to carry this ambivalence with dignity …
Fernando and Gerardo Montiel have chosen Matehuala precisely because, with its apparent nothingness, it encapsulates perfectly the “other side” of Mexico, far away from the typical tourist clichés. What’s more, Matehuala has been the starting point of the artistic synergy between the two brothers. Apart from their systematic collaboration on commercial assignments in the fields of fashion and advertising (the Montiels are founding members of Klintandstudio), this is the first time they collaborate on an artistic project. On a personal level, both brothers have gained notoriety and awards for their respective work in fine-art photography and are represented by international galleries. Fernando’s tableaux-vivants of domestic middle-class interiors in destruction and characters in nirvana, question with a handful of irony and sarcasm the “hallucinogenic” effects of contemporary popular myths, consumerism and collective obsessions. On the other hand, Gerardo Montiel introduces into his staged indoor or outdoor settings a much more denouncing documentary-type visual content. His photographic series –all of them the fruit of experiences and reflections recollected during journeys– hover over increasingly common social issues, such as violence and sexual abuse.
Fernando and Gerardo Montiel Klint like to emphasize the way in which the making of the “Matehuala” series not only opened new creative ways, but also enhanced the personal and artistic comprehension and complicity between them. During the process, the Montiels responded successfully to the challenge of attempting a different approach than the one they were used to, heading back to a more direct and archaic photographic practice. Still, they did put a lot of themselves into the project, such as the landscape element of Gerardo, the subtle irony of Fernando, and something of their taste for staging, though not in the literal sense of the word. Within the “Matehuala” series, there are pictures in which the two photographers make their appearance, together or separately, as two mere elements of the surrounding landscape and the human ambience. Their gazes always point somewhere and the spaces that surround them are always related to the states of transit or observation. In an attitude of intuitive contemplation and self-reflection, theses image testify a lot to the creative process; they actually intensify the complicity and the attachment of the photographer to his subject, adding up to the conceptualism of modern landscape photography an enriching entropic flavour. But for the Montiels, these pictures obtain, above all, an autobiographical significance as the celebration of their brotherhood. They are “decisive moments” caught up in time; small pearls of an introspective emotive journey; “petite souvenirs of a family trip, which instead of taking place before the Eiffel Tower, unfolds in the most absurd place of the earth!”, concludes with humour Fernando Montiel.
Matehuala has been just the first page in the diary of this artistic companionship. The Montiels are happy with the results and plan to carry on their projects in many other cities alike, illustrating an aspect of this Mexican double-faceted reality and idiosyncrasy many people still ignore. Now they have started, they do not have the least intention to stop. How could they, anyway? Fernando and Gerardo Montiel Klint are nothing less but two highly inventive “photographic animals”, breathing and living through photography!
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved
All Pictures: Gerardo and Fernando Montiel Klint
Published in Eyemazing 01/2009
