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Mariana Yampolsky: MemoriaMariana Yampolsky (1925-2002) is one of Mexico’s most esteemed photographers. The only child of émigrés who fled anti-Semitism in Europe for the United States at the beginning of the last century, Yampolsky studied art at the University of Chicago. Her father died just as she was graduating and her mother decided to move to New York. Mariana preferred to head for Mexico. Through her contacts at the University she had learned of the former director of the Bauhaus school, Hannes Meyer, who was working there with the Taller Gráfica Popular (Popular Graphics Arts Workshop). In 1944, she arrived in Mexico City and immediately began participating in the project as a printer and engraver. She was soon an active member of the group and became the first woman elected to its Board of Directors. Yampolsky became interested in photography in 1948, when Meyer asked her to photograph the members of the TGP for a book he was writing. A couple of years later she worked with Carmen Toscano on the documentary film about the Mexican revolution, Memories of a Mexican and in the late-1950s, she decided to dedicate herself to solely to photography as a means of artistic expression. She began to take classes at the La Esmeralda art school with the renowned Mexican photographer, Lola Álvarez Bravo. One of the events in Yampolsky’s childhood that reverberates in her photography was an early brush with poverty during the years of the Great Depression. Memories of her family not having enough to eat contributed to Yampolsky’s lifelong empathy with the poor and decision to make them the focus of her life’s work. Her father, Oscar Yampolsky, who was an amateur sculptor and painter, was also an important influence on her work. Mariana’s initial contact with sculptural forms is evident in the attention to volume reflected in much of her work, especially her landscape and architectural studies. Yampolsky spent her childhood on a farm and her deep love of the land led her to explore the deserted trails and remote areas of the surrounding countryside. These early childhood expeditions extended throughout her life, echoing in her intrepid travels in rural Mexico which she made the locus of her photographic expeditions. Her great-uncle, Franz Boas, was an anthropologist and he awakened in her an early interest in other cultures. His collection of Mexican ceramics also fascinated Mariana and was her first introduction to the country she came to love so intensely and make her own. In studying with Álvarez Bravo, Yampolsky found that her teacher liked to interfere as little as possible in her students learning process but did encourage them to look at the work of other photographers she respected. Among these was, of course, Tina Modotti whose leitmotif was the melding of aesthetic concerns with a social or political punch. Yampolsky greatly admired Modotti’s life and work and this fusion is present in much of her work. Some of those punches go astray however, as in one of her earliest images, Huipil a Tapar (Head-covering Shawl) Oaxaca, 1962. The image is a study in contrast and movement, the flowing white triangle of the huipil mirrored in the surrounding strong dark geometrical shapes. That the huipil encases a barefoot, Indigenous woman is secondary; the photograph is ultimately a striking example of modernist abstraction. However, by far, the aim of Mariana Yampolsky’s photography is to make palpable Mexico’s diversity through images of its architecture, landscape and most significantly, its pastiche of cultures. She photographed a Mexico that exists primarily as collective memory -- the memory of its indigenous past or “first nation”. Yampolsky worked untiringly to preserve the memory of this other world, to breathe life into the past as she photographed its remnants. Like her great-uncle the anthropologist, Yampolsky too excavates the past, through the use of her camera she sifts through the sediment of centuries and brings to light the symbolic gestures that formed the backbone of these cultures. Her most celebrated body of work is a series of images of the Mazahua nation whose traditions and ceremonies she photographed extensively. A selection of these photographs is reproduced in her book Mazahua published in 1993. The majority of her depictions of the Mazahua are heroic as reflected in her seminal image Mujeres Mazahua (Mazahua Women). Most Mexicans’ contact with the Mazahuas, however, is as the depreciatively called “Marias”; female street vendors who sell trinkets in the maze of traffic that is Mexico City. Yampolsky chooses to ignore this modern-day ignominy of the Mazahua and portray instead the memory of the past present in the Mazahua community today; the extraordinary tenaciousness with which ancient tradition is preserved in the face of such an onslaught. In Bicicleta de Carnaval (Carnival Bicycle), Yampolsky also returns to the past but not entirely. In this photograph, a traditional festival dancer with his bicycle is being helped into his elaborate costume by a fellow reveler. This image highlights the ongoing symbiotic relationship between the traditional and the modern in Mexico -– the dancer’s bicycle, running shoes and racing gloves contrasting with his centuries-old costume. Yampolsky usually employs a frontal perspective in her work, favoring sharp contrasts and off-centre compositions constructed with light and shade, weight and volume. Many of her photographs are so sculptural that even the people in them appear to be wrought in stone. A majesty imbues her work; not only in her portrayal of the Mazahuas but also in her photographs of the maguey cactus -- her images of which constitute another corpus of her work. She attributes a particularly emblematic status, to the maguey. Not only is this plant of great importance as a source of spiritual and physical sustenance to the Mazahuas and other Indigenous communities she photographed, but it too is an endangered species. Edward Weston, whose work Yampolsky was very familiar with, was also fascinated by the multiple forms of the maguey and made some very powerful images of the plant in the 1920s. Yampolsky’s maguey photographs is a much more lengthy series, ranging from homage to its spikes as at times symbolic of strength and invincibility, to its representation suffering as in the crown of thorns, or to her harmonious portrayal of it as landscape in the volumes and delicate folds of the exquisite Maguey de papel, 1991 (Paper Maguey). Landscape and architecture were also of great interest to Yampolsky and she published several volumes of photographs of Mexican architecture among them Traditional Architecture of Mexico, 1991 as well as a book on the haciendas of Puebla, Haciendas Poblanas, in 1992. These enormous homes of the European, criollo class that ruled Mexico from their vast holdings of Mexican land are today like shipwrecked hulks in a sea of dying countryside, marooned by the receding tide of the rural population that has increasingly abandoned the countryside and flooded the urban centers of Mexico and the United States. In her photograph, La Sed de la Hacienda, (The Thirst of the Hacienda) Puebla, 1989, Yampolsky has photographed what was the hacienda’s former water supply, and her image of this monument, moribund on the dusty plain, is a powerful memorial to a long-gone past. In talking about her work, Mariana Yampolsky once said, “… More than anything I want to share what I see with others, to photograph only what moves me, and to be able to capture that without being an intruder. I often feel that the best photographs are the ones I didn’t get, that’s what keeps me going”. And it did, right until the end. Mariana Yampolsky continued taking photographs until just before her death and had even embarked on a new body of work which would focus more on Mexico’s cities. Copyright © 2003 Margaret Hooks |
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