Slaves of the moment

The Mexican Agustín Víctor Casasola, with the intermittent help of his brother Miguel, began to set up around 1900 one of the most important photographic archives for the history of a country. However, the international recognition of these almost 500,000 photos has not matched its importance. Born in 1874 and raised in the years of the Porfirio Díaz government, Agustín Casasola was a direct witness to all the adversities that led to modern Mexico, and breathed as nobody else the air of a country and a city that developed during the first third of the 20th century at a runaway pace.


He soon abandoned his initial profession of typographer and became a “news-hunting” reporter. Since the moment when for the first time a camera fell into his hands (it seems this was in 1902) he did not cease to hunt for images and to reveal the flow of history. In his own words, he became “a slave of the moment”.


Porfirio Díaz had come to power with a coup in 1876, presenting himself as the only human being capable of bringing order to a country violent and chaotic since splitting from Spain in 1821. Since then, the presidential palace had been occupied by more than fifty governments, some of them almost of an operetta, like the eleven ones of Santa Anna. Mexico was also a country afflicted by the loss of half of its territory to the United States (1846-1848) and by the delirious act of the French of putting Duke Maximilian on the throne of an alleged Mexican Empire (one will always remember Fernando del Paso’s extraordinary novel Noticias del Imperio, 1987, recalling those years.)


The Porfiriato in which Agustín Casasola grew up involved a strong inflow of foreign capital as well as an unbearable growth of social inequalities. Any voice against injustice was silenced by force, quelling any protest with extreme brutality (they reinforced Los Rurales, a semi-military police force which was responsible for pursuing the bandits that proliferated all over the country as well as those who protested against the established order) in agreement with local despots, they developed an enormous bureaucracy, and strictly controlled the means of written communication. Not coincidentally, William Randolph Hearst owned in Mexico a ranch of an unimaginable size of 2,500,000 acres. Each time when creating a modern telecommunications infrastructure, a hydraulic system etc., Porfirio Díaz alienated the country: the United States was in possession of two thirds of the railway network. 1% of the population owned 80% of the land. Nevertheless, Mexico City lived a certain mirage of prosperity fostered by the newspapers which only gave good news about the urban middle class and the residents of the wealthy neighborhoods. Initially the Casasola brothers collaborated in those papers. Their reputation as photographers quickly grew and soon Agustín created one of the first photo agencies, the Agencia de Información Gráfica, where sometimes there worked as many as 480 photographers. His motto was: “I have or make the photo you need.” Indeed, all Mexico is there in this archive.



On 20 November 1910 the shooting started. The moderate Francisco Madero, who was somewhat naive and idealistic for the task he was going to undertake, expelled Porfirio Díaz, but remained only two years in power until he was shot on the order of his friend Victoriano Huerta. There followed ten days of bloodshed in the capital, the so-called “decena trágica”. Then the revolution spread throughout the country with all those endless complications inside and among its leaders that will lead to a figure of more than one million deaths for a total population of fifteen millions. Generals Venustiano Carranza, Álvaro Obregón, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata all went on parade in front of the cameras of the Casasolas. They were first more or less united to overthrow Huerta, then turned to fighting among themselves. But the Casasolas also immortalized with their cameras the anonymous citizens walking down the street, in either direction. The press all over the world demanded photos by them as reliable witnesses of the facts. But while Mexico began to respire a little bit, Europe became entangled into the carnage of the First World War. Mexico was being destroyed, but the world now had other concerns.








The Casasolas were also witnesses to the recovery of Mexico and the conversion of Mexico City into a great modern metropolis. Thus, the city was again their favorite topic, the streets that were flooded by an uncontrolled traffic of cars (20,000 cars per 500,000 inhabitants in 1925). There was peace, and with the peace also a certain prosperity, only threatened by immigration from the countryside to the city. The camera of the Casasolas now explored the night, they tarried in the police stations and courts, in the theaters, cabarets, and wrestling rings, in the poorly lit alleys.






















Agustín Casasola, who no doubt was aware of the recent development of the photographic art and must have known the combative use of photography since the examples of Eugene Atget in Paris in 1895, or Jacob Riis’ How Other Half Lives (1890) of New York, never claimed that his work was art or that it had any value of social intervention. It was life at the moment it crossed the field of vision of his camera – and also a way to earn his life. Nevertheless he was an excellent artist who has defined Mexican photography since its origins. We recently saw a major retrospective exhibition of Graciela Itúrbide and we could realize her great debt to the documentarism of the Casasola brothers.