Stefan Ruiz: Daniel Cortes, CEA, Televisa Acting School, 2004

For eight years, Stefan Ruiz gained special access to Mexico’s Televisa studios, known as “The Factory of Dreams,” where nearly fifty thousand hours worth of telenovelas (soap operas) are produced and exported annually to more than fifty countries. These intriguing tales of revenge, love, money, and despair are one of Mexico’s largest exports, popular throughout Latin America as well as in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Former Televisa stars turned Hollywood favorites include Salma Hayek, Diego Luna, and Gael García Bernal. Rogelio Guerra, who starred in Los Ricos También Lloran (The Rich Also Cry)—a show whose finale was watched by 70 percent of the population of Russia—once delivered the Russian New Year’s presidential address when Boris Yeltsin fell ill. Ruiz’s photographs of the factory and its people offer a behind-the-scenes look at this special place with humor and affection. Ruiz’s photographs uncover a secret world of elaborate and surreal studio sets, and include portraits of the television stars in character and students being groomed for future celebrity at the Televisa “soap school.” This is the world of beautiful women, handsome men, and rags-to-riches Cinderella stories, which reveal the underlying fantasies of social aspiration, as well as entrenched racial hierarchies.

For the Aperture edition, Ruiz chose the image used to illustrate the cover of the monograph from Aperture, Stefan Ruiz: The Factory of Dreams. Here, a young and handsome aspiring telenovela star is ready for his close up, as he practices for the camera in the onset classroom at the Televisa Acting School.

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