`Mexico is light,” photographer Mariana Yampolsky has said, and thus it is a perfect locus for the practice of photography, the medium of light.
Yampolsky, of Polish-Jewish descent, was born in Chicago in 1925 and grew up on her grandfather’s farm in Crystal Lake.
Yampolsky graduated from the University of Chicago in 1944 with a bachelor’s degree in the humanities. She moved to Mexico that year and is now a Mexican citizen.
When she left Chicago Yampolsky was following in the path of a group of artists who went south to bask in the climate and ideals of post-revolutionary Mexico where art and politics intersected. Yampolsky’s experiences in her adopted country, where she worked as an engraver and illustrator until 1955 for the Taller de Grafica Popular (The Workshop for Popular Graphic Arts), a cooperative of printers and graphic artists, informed her vision and nurtured her social conscience.
Primarily self-taught, Yampolsky turned to photography full time after leaving the workshop.
Now in her 70s, she is one of the most revered photographers in Mexico and will be given a major retrospective in Mexico City next year. And in Chicago, at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, her luminous prints grace the walls in a show that introduces her work to a new audience.
The show, “On the Edge of Time,” was organized by the Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern and Mexican Photography at Southwest Texas State University, in San Marcos, which houses the most definitive collection of her work in the United States. A monograph of her work, including most of the images in the show, will be published in the spring of 1998 by the University of Texas Press.
With an elegant eye for composition and chiaroscuro (an influence from her years as an engraver), Yampolsky discloses the dignity and mystery in the “lives of people that others perhaps don’t see or don’t value.”
Her timeless and lyrical images explore the folk customs, architecture and, most of all, the faces of the Mexican people. Her portrait of the four women chatting, for instance, makes no judgment but simply lets the subjects reveal their humanity. She finds beauty in the humblest of environments, simplest of gestures or in the enactment of an ancient ritual such as the crucifixion scene in Oaxaca.
The luminosity of the black and white prints (not fully apparent in newspaper reproduction) brings her subjects even more to life, as if that light she spoke of dances for all of us.
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“On the Edge of Time: Photographs by Mariana Yampolsky” continues at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, 1852 W. 19th St., through Jan. 11; 312-738-1503.
