Mexico Through Foreign Eyes, 1850-1990: Visto Por Ojos Extranjeros

A vibrant, disquieting hymn to Mexico's irreducible complexity, this catalog documents a photography exhibit opening in Mexico City and traveling to the International Center of Photography in New York City. The 225 color and black-and-white photographs reproduced here for the most part avoid anthropological documentation or local specificity; instead, they aim at an emotional comprehension of the cauldron that is ``many Mexicos . . . a multitude of coincidental lives.'' Naggar and Ritchin, curators of the exhibit, have assembled pictures by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Steichen, Andrew Kertesz, Paul Strand, Laura Gilpin, Swedish child psychologist Kent Klich and 52 other photographers for whom travel in Mexico was a transformative encounter. The images are spliced with 16 texts, including Andre Breton's incantatory homage to Diego Rivera, Sergei Eisenstein's reliving of the ironically life-affirming Day of the Dead festival, and Swiss journalist Gertrude Blom's report on the rape of Mexico's tropical jungles. (Apr.)