For photojournalists these prints are ambrosia, particularly for Enrique Metinides, who portrayed the most tragic face of the city, with fortuitous models for the covers of police magazines and red note newspapers, when the Internet did not exist.
what a cool chamba you shoot
The son of a couple of Greek immigrants, Enrique Metinides Tsiroides, was born in Mexico City on February 12, 1934. Even as a child, he began to photograph the dead with a small Brownie Junior camera, a gift from his father, who was dedicated to selling of photographic articles on Juárez Avenue in the Historic Center.
Inspired by action and gangster movies, he began his professional career by publishing photos of crashed cars in the newspaper La Prensa at the age of 11. With the authorization of a judge from the Public Ministry interested in the child’s work (nickname with which he would later be known), he toured the Cuauhtémoc delegation every day before going to the primary school, which he stopped attending after finding in the photographs his greatest passion.
His constant walking through the streets of Chilanga led him to be well known in all emergency service stations. With the camera around their necks, firefighters and policemen carried the boy so that he could obtain the best plates with the certainty that the photographs would occupy the front pages of the red newspapers.
Impressed by “El Nino”’s skill, La Prensa reporter Antonio “El Indio” Velásquez invited Enrique to be his assistant. After a few months, the student of “El Indio” traveled the city looking for accidents dressed as a lifeguard to get confused with the emergency services to obtain the image of the last breath of hundreds of people.
Carcacha and they are retacha
Up a tree, on a post or in the middle of the streets, Enrique Metinides Tsiroides had 19 serious accidents, 7 broken ribs and a couple of heart attacks as a result of his journalistic work before retiring at the age of 80.
Michael Kimmelmal is one of the journalists who have highlighted his work, he wrote an extensive critique for The New York Times “it is not that he proclaims himself a pure artist, but that there is art in his images”.
Metinides has the satisfaction of knowing that his photographs – mostly printed in black and white as a result of the influence of the action movies he watched as a child – have traveled the world and have been exhibited in the most important galleries.
“El Niño” grew old and died at the age of 88. He left behind an untold collection of newspaper license plates and covers, in addition to more than 3,000 toy emergency service cars, action movie videos and newsreels. Metinides I never stop being a child at heart.