Portraits of urban drama.

• Author: Snow, K. Mitchell
• Position: Photographer Yolanda Andrade

A few steps away from the ruins of an Aztec temple that diverts the flow of commuters in Mexico City's Pino Suarez metro station, a young family stands in rapt attention before a half-dozen nearly life-sized photographs. The looming figure of Death on stilts commands the admiration of a mother and her two infant sons. In a photograph alongside Death, a devotee of the Virgin of Guadalupe kneels in the plaza before her basilica, come to adore her dressed as a masked wrestler holding a bullwhip. Another image depicts the climatic moments of a wrestling match between Super Ecologist and Thermal Inversion.

Yolanda Andrade, author of these captivating images, claims Mexico City's metro is her preferred exhibition space. "There are thousands of people in a big hurry, and all of the sudden they stop to look at my photographs."

Andrade's riveting photographs capture the spontaneous dramas of urban life, the telling moments that reveal the essence of Mexico City's multifaceted personality. Although several of her most striking images feature masked actors who appropriate the streets for performances aimed at political or social ends, she is just as adept at showing the faces behind the masks that city dwellers don every day.

Carlos Monsivais, Mexico's leading exponent of popular culture, points out that masks are as central to Andrade's photographs as they are to Mexican popular culture. In his introduction to Andrade's first book, Transparent Veils, Veiled Transparencies (1988), he also recognized that her masked actors consistently tell the truth. "The habit of protection doesn't exist and appearances don't fool," he observed. "The undefended presence doesn't lie and the mask cedes the truth of its features."

Like the documentary photographers from the 1950s and 1960s whose work she admires, Andrade finds her actors on the streets. She scours the newspapers for notices of local festivals, political demonstrations, and other events. Her attraction to such gatherings arises from the surprising transformations they inevitably produce.

"I'm very interested in the ways that people take on other personages," she explains. "I really enjoy the art that is born spontaneously. I'm fascinated by the play between reality and the unreal."

Andrade had to conquer her natural timidity to begin approaching people on the streets with her camera. She specialized in city scenes while she was studying photography at the Visual Studies Workshop and the State University of New York, both in Rochester, in the mid-1970s. Unlike her current photographs, the streets Andrade captured in her student work were mostly unpopulated. She acknowledges that cultural differences between New York and Mexico account for some of these empty scenes. But even when the California Museum of Photography invited her to document Mexican-American life in Riverside, California, she still found it difficult to work north of the border. Communities in the United States simply aren't laid out to encourage the vigorous interactions that enliven her work, she observes.

Still, her studies in the U.S. left a profound impression on the young photographer. Her experience with teacher Chick Strand was so intense she...