‘Witness’ to daily life in Mexico

“Witness: Contemporary Mexican Social Documentary Photography,” a nine-person group show at Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Gallery, delivers exactly what its title promises: a bystander’s glimpse of modern Mexican life, grounded in that country’s venerable documentary tradition.

“Tradition” is a key term. There’s nothing new or flashy here -- no wall-size Cibachrome or fancy digital tricks -- and nothing that’s likely to radically alter your expectations for the medium or the genre. The nine photographers have similar sensibilities and intentions, and their work mingles as easily with one another’s as it might with that of predecessors a generation or two back.

Adherence to tradition is not a quality typically celebrated in the American art world today. The integrity of this work, however, reminds one of what can be lost in the ceaseless pursuit of innovation and individuality. These are good, honest photographs, aesthetically sound and respectably principled. At their core is an old-fashioned but well-founded faith in the power of the camera to bear witness -- to take in the details of the world, then expose them again in a new and potentially revelatory way. Technique is involved, of course, and each photographer has stylistic quirks -- some more successful than others -- but the real power of the work comes from the world and the sensitivity with which the photographer frames it.

In a brief statement posted at the beginning of the show, curator Rod Slemmons, director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago, where the exhibition originated, attributes this sensitivity to a historically blurry line, in Mexico, between art and journalism. In the absence of a large-scale commercial gallery system, he suggests, there has been no significant “marketing advantage” to keeping the former distinct from the latter. “The split between self-expressive or art photography and documentary that occurred in the work of Robert Frank in the United States, for example,” he writes, “did not happen in Mexico. Mexican documentary has always been equally interested in what is in front of the lens and what is behind it and uses picture design to amplify knowledge of a given subject rather than transform it to moral decoration or formal experimentation.”

All of the nine assembled have worked as photojournalists, and all demonstrate a journalistic feel for the rhythms of social space. Most of the images -- five to 13 per person -- are slice-of-life street scenes taken in a particular city or region.

Among the more lighthearted are Yolanda Andrade’s affectionate if aesthetically unexceptional images of street life in Mexico City’s central square, most of which focus on Day of the Dead-related objects and activities. Costume is a recurring motif throughout the exhibition, and one of the best appears in a photograph of a man leaning casually against a streetlamp, wearing nothing but angel wings, a sword, a butterfly-shaped codpiece and hiking boots.

Francisco Mata Rosas’ 10 photographs cover a wider swath of the same city and reflect a similar interest in costume and carnival-like festivities, albeit with sharper compositions. One of the show’s most memorable images is his depiction of a man in contemporary dress holding a megaphone to the mouth of another man in the alarmingly convincing guise of a crucified Christ.

Jaime Baillares’ work charts a considerably darker path through the city of Juarez. In an accompanying statement, Baillares explains that he took the pictures while working as a photojournalist in the 1990s and notes, with perceptible grief, that “people died looking at [his] camera.” Here are young men making gang signs through the bars of an overcrowded prison cell; a body sprawled face down in a public square; a pile of clothes, shoes and bones waiting to be collected from the hot desert sand -- grisly side effects of that city’s uneasy relationship with El Norte.

Antonio Turok and Eniac Martinez explore the border region as well, with broader if ultimately less potent results. A solemn portrait of a grizzled old man holding a naturalization certificate and another of two young couples posing alongside Echo Park Lake, both by Turok, touch on what lures so many Mexicans northward. A row of crosses silhouetted across the crest of a hill in one of Martinez’s pictures reminds one of that journey’s dangers.

Alberto Ibanez explores a lesser-known corner of Mexican life in his spirited photographs of transvestites, all gorgeously clad in elbow-length gloves and party dresses, at celebrations called velas in the southern city of Juchitan. Marcela Taboada focuses on another unlikely community in “Women of Clay,” a lovely series focusing on a group of women who, with financial help from the Vatican, set about hand-building adobe houses for themselves and their children.

A touch of surrealism characterizes the work of all of these photographers -- Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the grandfather of modern Mexican photography, is an obvious influence -- but it is especially pronounced in that of the final two: Enrique Villasenor and Jorge Lepez Vela.

The former has a playful touch. Several of his works revolve around the tension between two- and three-dimensional imagery: a man reading a newspaper, for example, is photographed in such a way that he appears to be growing out of an image on the front page. The others are blurry, beautiful swirls of movement taken in the heat of a bullfight.

Vela, the most stylistically distinctive of the nine, has a keen eye for negative space and a knack for spare, roomy compositions. His focus in most of the images seems to be not the figures or objects within the frame but the space that floats between them. One of the most striking presents a bird’s-eye view of a patch of dirt with a single, lifeless deer head and several children’s shoes poking in around the edges of the frame. One of the most strange and enchanting depicts several figures clothed, head to toe, in leopard-print fur, against a rock wall painted with nearly the same pattern.

Slemmons alludes, in his statement, to a heightened American interest in Mexican art after the success of films like “Amores Perros” and “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” clearly hoping to build on that interest. What he offers is only a taste of what’s out there, but it’s enough to keep one looking for more.

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‘Witness: Contemporary Mexican Social Documentary Photography’

Where: Luckman Gallery, Cal State Los Angeles, 5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles

When: Noon to 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and Saturdays

Ends: Oct. 30

Price: Free

Contact: (323) 343-6610