Mexico

During the first four decades of the twentieth century, Mexico underwent revolutionary changes, politically, economically, and socially. Documenting those changes visually was a remarkable photographer, Agustin Victor Casasola, whose pictures of the period stand as works of enormous artistic and historical significance. Casasola photographed everyone who was anyone in Mexico at the time, from the dictator Porfirio Díaz to Mexico's first republican president Benito Juarez from the revolutionaries Francisco (Pancho) Villa and Emiliano Zapata to artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, as well as the exiled Russian Leon Trotsky. New industry, booming city streets, raucous nightlife, and performers of all kinds captured his eye. For this splendid collection of Casasola's work, the noted American writer Pete Hamill, who has lived in Mexico on and off for more than fifty years, has written a rich essay on the photographer and the Mexico he captured so well. Three other essays by distinguished Mexican scholars trace the history of the Casasola Archive and its acquisition by the Mexican government as a national treasure.