Enrique Metinides: Los Juguetes Portfolio

Enrique Metinides is one of the great characters in the story of contemporary photography. His new work is as vividly authentic as the photographs of crime and disasters he spent his life documenting for the Mexican tabloid, La Prensa.

These are the photographs of an older man who can no longer go out with the ambulances and firefighters as he did for fifty years. Today he spends much of his time at home, finding new ways to revisit the themes of his life’s work. In this series, Metinides has rephotographed images made early in his career, constructing fictional rescue scenes from his collection of over ten thousand toy firemen and medics. The work maintains a childlike quality, a naivety, and yet is made by a man who remembers every detail of every tragedy he ever photographed. Metinides has looked for new ways to understand the things he has witnessed, this time with irony and black humor. These late pictures are a new twist on an extraordinary career, representing a poignant moment in a personal journey, and a reflection on a life in photography. The prints were made at the artist’s local Costco in Mexico City and are offered in the paper Costco bags in which he picked them up.

Each limited-edition print is hand-packed with great care and ships from New York within 3–5 days.