Traffic, Mexico City
Photograph
Traffic, Mexico City
1963
Chromogenic development print, printed 1992
5/30
Image: 44.5 x 67.6 cm (17 1/2 x 26 5/8 in.)
Paper: 51.7 × 75 cm (20 3/8 × 29 1/2 in.)
Matted: 60 × 82.2 × 0.3 cm (23 5/8 × 32 3/8 × 1/8 in.)
Gift of Sherman F. Levey, 2014
2014.0086.0001
Inscriptions [verso not available at time of cataloging]
TextIn 1963, Magnum photographers Ernst Haas and Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908–2004) traveled to Mexico on assignment for the country’s tourist bureau. Haas had been a member of the international cooperative of photojournalists for sixteen years and was Magnum’s premier color photographer at a time when color photography was not yet widely accepted in art or photojournalistic circles. To Haas, black-and-white photography was “more suited for photojournalist prose,” but color photography, he explained, “lends itself especially to expressing a kind of visual poetry.”
