MoMA welcomes Mexican artist Sandra Blow: ‘I add salsa to the photos. Salsa that’s spicy’  | Tradition

Sandra Blow makes use of her lengthy gel nails to brush again her hair, which consistently obscures her gaze. The Mexican photographer says that, when she began taking footage, what was thought of “beautiful” adopted a normative sample. “They were very blond models, with blue eyes. You didn’t see Latin models; you didn’t see brown skin.”

“I’ve always been the way I am,” she shrugs. “Tattooed, always a little outside the norm. And, well, my friends are like that, too. I’m not going to get along with the fresas (“strawberries,” slang for snobs) from Polanco (an prosperous neighborhood in Mexico City). What would I do there?” she asks rhetorically.

This is how she started to turn out to be keen on completely different esthetics, documenting queerness, nightlife, and sexual expression. In September of this yr, the Mexican photographer will deliver 19 of her pictures to the Lines of Belonging exhibition on the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, one of many world’s nice cultural venues. And earlier than that, in August, she plans to current Sandra Blow XV, a photobook compiling her 15 years of expertise.

She sits on one of many classic sofas that beautify a central Mexico City café, the place classical music performs loudly. The area appears to be designed for younger individuals who desire a latte, or for septuagenarians on the lookout for a café con leche. There, Sandra Villavicencio, 34, displays on the precise second she started to just accept that her work was good. She’s considered it on different events, particularly whereas making ready her photobook… however she hasn’t been capable of give you a solution.

Born within the municipality of Atizapán de Zaragoza, a couple of 45-minute drive from Mexico City, she tells EL PAÍS that she studied promoting at college and felt a connection to her digicam from the very starting. “My teacher motivated me a lot. He told me, ‘You have a good eye.’ When the semester ended, he told me to do whatever I wanted, but to not stop taking pictures,” she recollects.

Shortly earlier than graduating, she began out as a meals photographer for a big Mexican publishing home, the place she labored for numerous magazines. Her first skilled pictures have been of delicacies, areas, and cooks. She additionally had her first publicity to nightlife when she labored for the leisure part of a kind of magazines. “I took pictures in bars, crowded places, with music and people dancing. The time [I spent working] at magazines was very useful to me. To this day, I really like taking pictures of food.” She mixed that work with taking footage of ladies who caught her eye at events or on the road, at a time when her funds didn’t but permit her to rent company fashions.

Classical music, a pause and Palestine

About 10 years in the past, when she was already established within the subject of pictures, “suicide girls” turned modern in Mexico City. These women don’t match into any typical subculture: they’re usually related to the goth and punk genres.

Around that point, Veracruz-based photographer Alan Yee started the I really like low-cost lodge undertaking, which he outlined as “naked girls, luxury hotels, and scandalous poses.” This erotic method shortly attracted Blow. “Many photographers were doing more sexual things, nastier, dirtier […] I loved taking alternative photos with my tattooed girls. Obviously, esthetics change, everything changes… and then, at some point, I also started noticing this absence of brown skin, of fat bodies, of people who weren’t two meters tall,” she notes.

Blow believes that her work additionally helps the LGBTQ+ group in instances like the current, the place sure extremist tendencies — similar to these expressed by U.S. President Donald Trump, who, again in January, denied the existence of trans individuals — have permeated some sectors of society. And she additionally highlights the affect of the LGBTQ+ group. “It’s always been a community that’s been very aware of social issues. Now, with what’s happening in Palestine, I notice it’s one of the communities that’s the most attentive, that’s boycotting the most. Many people make stupid comments like: ‘But if you go to Palestine and you’re gay, they’re going to kill you.’ That’s something that, for example, the [LGBTQ+] community isn’t paying attention to. It doesn’t matter. Right now, it’s not about [us]. First, we have to try to stop them from killing [the Palestinians] and then we’ll see.”

Classical music continues to play loudly within the background. “I feel totally intellectual,” she jokes. Blow talks about her work with completely different media shops. Then, out of the blue, she cuts off the interview. “Um… I have to do something before I forget. I’m working on the acknowledgments for the book.”

She grabs her cellphone. Types for a bit. Then, she returns to the dialog.

“So, I tried to write articles talking about these topics that interested me; things about the community, feminism, the marches. I showed my mom one of my articles. [That’s when] she understood what a trans person is,” Blow explains.

She admits that she at all times likes to make use of a movie digicam. It’s simply transportable and permits her to be spontaneous… and he or she doesn’t must danger her digital digicam.

“If anything happens to it, I’m dead. But you have to be practical; you’re not going to [be able to document] a performance [or] a concert with film,” she factors out.

Blow nearly by no means goes out to search for areas that look good in her pictures. She permits room for improvisation, however she nonetheless pays consideration to sure places when she’s strolling down the road or driving in a taxi. “I see a place and say, ‘This spot is great.’ Then, I shoot it and become obsessed,” she explains. It’s this spontaneity that has allowed pictures like Yin and Yang to emerge, taken in 2020 at a nightclub in downtown Mexico City. In it, Paco Santander, a drag queen from the capital, and one other man pose. A couple of seconds earlier, they hadn’t even met. “I think [the importance of the photographer and the model is] 50-50, because if the model doesn’t let themselves go — if they’re stiff — it’s probably not going to be a good photo. My job is always to make their lives easier, right?” she muses.

When requested how she would outline her photographic type, Blow responds: “Latina, sexy, boombastic, glitter, flow. I don’t know. I think it’s like a shiny documentary or something. Like a documentary with glitter.”

There’s one thing very Mexican about her pictures. “I think it’s the colors,” she notes. “The people I choose, the locations… who knows? No one has ever [said] that before. I have no idea. I add salsa to the photos. Salsa that’s spicy.”

Blow’s pictures that might be exhibited at MoMA — and which might now be seen on the museum’s official web site — be part of these belonging to different artists from all over the world who’re additionally taking part within the exhibition. Three extra Mexican artists are a part of the present: Tania Franco Klein, Francisca Rivero-Lake and Carla Verea. Lines of Belonging seeks to deliver collectively artists from cities which have existed as “centers of life, creativity, and communion for longer than the nation states in which they are presently situated.”

The alternative leaves Blow feeling bittersweet: she’s completely satisfied to have landed on the main gallery, however melancholic about nonetheless not resonating with the general public in Mexico. “I think I’ll believe it [when I actually] have that display in front of me […] But life goes on: the rain, the depression, Mexico City, the Third World. I hope that, above all, [this exhibit] will be a door to a greater appreciation for [my work] in my country.”

When she’s requested which picture she’ll keep in mind probably the most, out of all of her pictures which can be set to reach at MoMa, she falls silent. She searches for the {photograph} on her cellphone, showing to caress the display. Finally, she pulls up an image from 2017 — Allan Balthazar — by which the younger artist seems dressed as a virgin, holding a bouquet of flowers. “[I’ll remember this one the most] because of who he is, because of the moment in my life and in the photograph. He’s a friend who passed away. I love him deeply. This would be it, without a doubt.”

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