Reveal and Detonate: Contemporary Mexican Photography

The images gathered in this volume function as a paranamic cartography of contemporary Mexico. The photographers have captured the complexity and diversity of the country, renewing our perceptions of it’s geographical and idiosyncrasy, and shuffling, breaking, or corrupting the models of national representation fostered by the modernity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Reveal and Detonate is not simply a selection of names and authorial promise, but rather an assemblage of visions that help us to see the present from many angles. To reveal: to uncover, display, unveil, and expose what was concealed. To detonate: the shared semantic field of firearms and photography: the camera shoots, is fired like a gun. Reveal and detonate is a broad constellation of images - almost 200 by 53 different photographers - has not been put together in a methodical or linear way, but by visual groupings that form and break apart along the main axes of photography: landscape, portraiture, montage, and abstraction.