El Norte

Many an American lens has been poised on the romanticized “exotic elsewheres” of Mexico, rendering a “reality” that is often simply a traveler’s notebook barely scratching the surface of truth.

Mexican-born photographer Pedro Meyer’s work embarks on a fair game of turnabout. A Guggenheim fellow and founder of the Consejo Mexicano de Fotografia (Mexican Council of Photography), Meyer has distinguished himself as the first photographer to extensively document the United States from a Mexican perspective.

Covering more than 25,000 miles in the last five years, Meyer’s latest bilingual exhibition is Truth & Fictions: A Journey from Documentary to Digital Photography (at UC Riverside’s California Museum of Photography until Nov. 28).

The show toys with perceptions by trapezing between glimpses of U.S. terrain through the eyes of “the outsider” and moody studies of the Mixtec people of Oaxaca, Mexico.

It features patched-together “new realities”--a body of surreal dreamscapes created by computer, ink-jet printer and interactive CD-ROM discs. But the high-tech mechanics of his craft, Meyer ensures, do not clutter his meaning.

From the stark, wizened visage of a lettuce picker in Yuma, Ariz., to the long-looming stereotype of larger-than-life serape-and-sombrero-clad icon hovering above a Malibu eatery (“Mexican with a positive attitude within a negative environment”), Meyer’s astute juxtapositions and eye for irony communicate multifold messages, sharing worlds about the schizophrenic journey between two cultures.