Photography in Mexico: A Conversation with John Mraz Part 2

Our guest on this episode is John Mraz, the world’s leading authority on photography in Mexico. Among his books are Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity ; Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Testimonies, Icons ; and Nacho López: Mexican Photographer. He’s the curator of Los Hermanos Mayo: Photographing Exile, which was recently on view at UT Dallas.

In Part 2
How Dr. Mraz was thrown out of his first three universities, worked in a steel mill and as a dam builder after the Army, and got into Latin American history (0:45) — How he started making documentary films, and moved from UC Santa Barbara to UC Santa Cruz (4:30) — Documenting the workers’ movement from Berkeley to Mexico City (7:00) — Networking over drinks, and making documentary films for Mexican television (9:00) — Working at the once-Marxist, now-neoliberal University of Puebla, and getting commissions to make films (11:45) — The academic status of photography: its contextual and comparative analysis as distinct from the concept of “art” (15:30) — The approach to photography in his current book project (19:30) — Visual analysis as against the power of commercial marketing imagery (22:30) — The need for visual theory (Vilem Flusser, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, Ariella Azoulay) not just literary theory (25:00) — The problems with elitist postmodernism, against the reality principle in Mexican life (26:00) —