Anton BRUEHL
Australia 1900 – United States of America 1982
United States from 1919

Mexico: Photographs of Mexico by Anton Bruehl 1933
collotype
113/1000 copies
signed "Anton Bruehl" frontispiece
book (closed) 41.4 (h) x 31.8 (w) x 1.5 (d) cm
Purchased 2002
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
NGA 2002.116.1-25

These photographs were taken within a few hundred miles of Mexico City. They show nothing of Mexican cathedrals, public buildings, or ruins. They do not undertake to present Mexico.

To me the beauty of this country lies in the people of the land and their simple mode of living. Their faces are exciting with a strange beauty, a beauty that has in it centuries of suffering. Their eyes sparkle with a strange pride.

Everywhere I found the people friendly and patient with the mechanics of the camera, and so completely unaffected that anything but a direct presentation of the scene before me seemed insincere.

Anton Bruehl, preface to Photographs of Mexico