{"id":652347,"date":"2026-06-22T15:12:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T15:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/652347\/"},"modified":"2026-06-22T15:12:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T15:12:11","slug":"these-photos-capture-moments-of-beauty-and-surprise-in-mexico-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/652347\/","title":{"rendered":"These photos capture moments of beauty and surprise in Mexico City"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00d3rale: Love and Death in Mexico City<\/p>\n

Gallery \/ 13 images<\/p>\n

\u201cThe best portrait photographers have a kind of mysterious connection with the people that they\u2019re photographing. You can\u2019t fake that; you either have it or you don\u2019t,\u201d says Robert Swope. \u00d3rale: Love and Death in Mexico City, a new book of photography by his late partner Michel Hurst, is a testament to this idea. Shot in the Mexican capital over the course of around six years, there is an intimacy to the photographs, which find their subjects peering at the camera, in states of rest and repose or engaged in rituals of various kinds. It\u2019s a raw and unvarnished depiction of the city, which doesn\u2019t shy away from its social problems, yet one suffused with beauty and sensuality.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Swope first met Hurst in 1980 in New York City, and fell in love with him right away. \u201cI was bowled over by his personal history, the things he had done before I met him: hitchhiking from France to India twice, living in Africa, hitchhiking across the Sahara Desert twice. He was just a really intelligent, kind, generous person,\u201d he says. They became a couple, then went into business together as design collectors, and stayed together until Hurst\u2019s death in 2023, spending their last years in Mexico City. It\u2019s where Swope still lives today, although he has been troubled in recent years by an influx of well-off American migrants \u2013 people not dissimilar to himself, he notes \u2013 turning his neighbourhood of Roma Norte into Williamsburg.<\/p>\n

Hurst\u2019s photography practice, Swope suggests, was similar to that of Nan Goldin<\/a>, a longtime friend who serves as the book\u2019s co-editor. \u201cHe didn\u2019t really care about technique, [but] he was instinctively very good at framing. None of the pictures have been cropped. If you look at the edges of the pictures, you\u2019ll see details he made a point of including.\u201d Hurst considered himself a portraitist above all. \u201cHe had such a profound love and respect for the working class people in Mexico, and the whole point of his work was to honour them,\u201d says Swope.<\/p>\n

\"Pin<\/a>\"\u00d3RALE:Photography by Michel Hurst<\/p>\n

None of the photographs collected in \u00d3rale are posed; Hurst would approach people on the street and ask if he could take their picture, to which the vast majority of them agree. \u201cHe would be very quick, because sometimes at the moment you ask someone, they maybe stiffen a little,\u201d says Swope. \u201cOne thing I noticed, going through the book, is that he always came down to the level of whoever he was photographing. Even when he was in his 60s, he would fall to his knees to be on the level of the subject. The camera is never looking down on them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goldin was an integral part in bringing the book together, and played an equally important role in the beginning of their relationship. \u201cI was Nan\u2019s lover for about a year before I met Michel. I was living in her loft on the Bowery during a big part of the period where she was making The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,\u201d says Swope. As Goldin mentions in her introduction to the book, she realised that Hurst was gay and encouraged him to explore his sexuality. \u201cShe said if I wanted to have some kind of fling with a guy sometime, that was fine with her. So, totally by chance, I went to a bar and met Michel.\u201d If their subsequent decades-long friendship is anything to go by, it\u2019s clear that Goldin approved.<\/p>\n

\"Pin<\/a>\"\u00d3RALE:Photography by Michel Hurst<\/p>\n

It was Goldin\u2019s idea to add a Spanish word to the title, suggesting \u2018love and death in Mexico City\u2019 would work better as a subtitle. Primarily used in Mexico, \u00f3rale is one of Swope\u2019s favourite words. \u201cIt has various meanings, depending on the context, but I\u2019m using it here as the English equivalent of \u2018wow\u2019! \u2013 what you might say if you were walking down the street and saw a car accident or a friend told you they\u2019d got a promotion,\u201d he explains. It can also mean \u201clet\u2019s get going\u201d, an expression used to rally a group of people who are lagging behind. Both uses of the word capture Hurst\u2019s approach, says Swope, not just to photography but the world. \u201cHe was so curious; everything in the world was \u2019wow\u2019 to him and he was always looking for something to discover. He loved life, he loved people, and I just thought \u2019orale\u2019 was very appropriate,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Along with co-editor Barney Kulok and critic Chris Whiley, who authored an accompanying essay, Goldin was heavily involved with editing the book. \u201cShe\u2019s a master editor. That\u2019s really what she does \u2013 with all her books, it\u2019s all about the editing. So she just significantly enriched the project and I couldn\u2019t be happier with the way it has turned out. To me, if something can be perfect, it\u2019s about as close to perfect as possible.\u201d It\u2019s a powerful tribute to Hurst, someone who was deeply talented but, according to Swope, never felt confident about the quality of his work. \u201cWe worked together for 43 years and did a lot of really weird, out there stuff,\u201d he says. \u201cThis book became our final collaboration.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00d3rale: Love and Death in Mexico City is published by Hunters Point Press and available here<\/a> now.<\/p>\n

\"Pin<\/a>\"\u00d3RALE:Photography by Michel Hurst<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00d3rale: Love and Death in Mexico City Gallery \/ 13 images \u201cThe best portrait photographers have a kind…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":652348,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1897,6225,6485,6486,19010,19009,19011,19012,19013,19014,19015,1120,96,709,2332,19007,19008,128,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-652347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-dazed","tag-dazed-confused","tag-dazed-confused-magazine","tag-dazed-and-confused","tag-dazed-and-confused-magazine","tag-dazedconfused","tag-dazeddigital","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-fashion","tag-film","tag-ideas","tag-ideas-sharing-network","tag-music","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652347\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}