Lance Richardson: de MéXICO

Overview

The everyday scenes in the statement accompanying Lance Richardson's de MéXICO are almost as good a snapshot of Mexico as the exhibition itself. His photos come  from right across the country — from Mexico City to Spanish colonial towns like Taxco and Guanajuato, from the ghostly and peyote-soaked Real de Catorce in the Mexican Desert, and along the US border in Tijuana and San Diego. Mausoleums lean. Kids play in an outdoor boxing ring. A rude pig's head hangs in front of a butcher's stand in a market: behind it, the butcher smirks. A boy lazes on the bright yellow, green and red scoop at the front of a barge in the Aztec canals of Xochimilco. In the next photo a Mariachi in another barge scowls — he looks up from the bridge of his little guitar and out across the water.  Finally, a shelf of bright US sweets sit in a border store, one of many tacit foreign influences.

Most striking is the photo of a hillside in Taxco. Small things leap out: ripples of white arches and prim pink facades cascading down the hill. Little bell towers poke out. There's washing on the rooves, and green patches of tufty scrub in the few green spaces. The long zoom in this photo flattens out the houses, so only the vaguest depth remains — stepping down the hill like stacks of shallow louvers.

A long zoom is a metaphor for the distance in these photos. People are usually far off, and the camera looks more at the landscape than at the faces. These scenes are ordinary things. Things an average Mexican wouldn't notice any more than I can remember the asphalt on the way to work. But if the photos themselves don't have much to teach a Mexican, there’s plenty there for the average Sydneysider.