When photographer Ryan O’Toole Collett arrived in Mexico City in 2024, he didn’t intend to start the challenge that will later grow to be A Caged Dog Barks the Fiercest. “I arrived during the build-up to the general election. There were posters everywhere, and everyone was talking about the likelihood of Mexico electing its first female president,” he explains. As he moved by way of the town by metro, he turned conscious of the women-only sections on public transport methods. “Learning that they existed in response to violence against women opened up questions for me around gender, systems of power, state responsibility, tradition and change.”
Alongside this, the photographer started to look at how a lot of his personal understanding of Mexico had been formed earlier than he had even set foot there, pulled collectively as an alternative from “media, films, news, and the subconscious assumptions they form within us,”. Together these traces of thought turned central to the challenge, which appears at how folks in Mexico City outline themselves past the classes imposed onto them from the skin.
In the challenge, O’Toole Collet pictures greater than 40 people from Mexico City and presents 30 of their tales facet by facet in English and Mexican Spanish. While the work is about id, it resists providing a one-dimensional portrait of the town: “I didn’t want to make grand establishing images that claimed to summarise the city,” he explains. Instead, it captures a community of individuals whose lives and communities overlap, and is extra broadly “about how people negotiate who they are within contemporary social, political and economic conditions.”
Within its pages, topics are seen throughout places within the metropolis: in an area park, in opposition to a shuttered store, a packed avenue, an house stairwell, and on the mattress of a tattoo studio. Some stare deadpan into the digital camera, others contort their faces into stretched smiles or camera-ready poses. Rather than approaching topics randomly, he began out with a membership performer earlier than being invited to shoot and interview her pals.
In this fashion, the folks inside A Caged Dog Barks the Fiercest come from overlapping artistic scenes: DJs, artists, designers, writers, college students, performers and membership youngsters. Their photographs seem alongside each other, whereas the interviews and textual content are grouped individually. “I didn’t want a person’s image to be pinned to a single statement, identity or explanation,” explains the photographer. “For me, that was a way of resisting the idea that people, places or moments can be easily defined.”
Even although he turned immersed within the metropolis, he stays effectively conscious of his relationship to it. “As someone from outside Mexico, and outside many of the communities represented in the book, I knew the work carried a lot of ethical weight. Photography has a long history of turning people into symbols, especially when photographers from Europe or the Global North work in other places,” he says. “But I also think the idea that people should only make work within their own communities can become limiting. If we only ever make work within communities we already belong to, we lose the possibility of new conversations emerging at the point of contact.”
There’s a vulnerability that runs all through the challenge, because the trade between topic and photographer unfolded, which additionally helped O’Toole Collet to study himself: “I realised how much photography has become a way for me to deal with disconnection. I often feel slightly outside of things – people, places, communities, even myself at times – and photography gives me a way to move towards the world rather than away from it.”
While it may appear pure for the challenge to proceed, maybe in one other metropolis or with a brand new community of people, the photographer’s subsequent steps underline how singular this physique of labor feels: “At the moment, I want to learn to sail and go to sea. That might sound a bit off-piste, but maybe it isn’t. I’m interested in movement, uncertainty, distance, and the ways people navigate the world. So perhaps the next work begins there.”
A Caged Dog Barks the Fiercest is on the market to buy on-line here