BPF Interview – Keith Dannemiller

“Callegrafía” a photo project by Keith Dannemmiller about the streets of Mexico City was a much awaited show at this year’s Budapest Photo Festival. A joint project between the festival, the Mexican Embassy in Budapest and the Red Door Gallery, “Callegrafía” takes us behind the scenes in the Mexican capital with more than 30 years of continuous hard work. Although the original dates had to be changed, the exhibition is now open again and can be visited until the 31st of August. As a boost of motivation, the festival conducted an interview with the photographer himself. Enjoy!

When the show opened in April, there was a lockdown in Hungary due to the pandemic, this was the reason why you couldn’t be present. Although the coronavirus didn’t seem to affect Hungary that much in the end, this is certainly not the case with Mexico. How do people handle the situation there, and how did you personally survive this period?
Mexicans and foreigners who live here are like people anywhere — some are afraid, some don’t give a shit, some abide by the rules and many don’t. The government of Mexico City has some strict rules in place and tries to convince people to follow them, but there are no requirements to do so, and people are not fined if they don’t. So the results are as you would expect —
the country has one of the highest contagion rates in the world, and only recently — this past week — are Mexico City cases dropping a little. It is still worrisome. I organized and participated in a Festival of Memory in a refugee camp in the state of Chiapas, the first week of March. I returned to Mexico City on March 10th, and have stayed in semi-lockdown since then. I go for a long walk very early in the morning; sometimes go out to the bank; sometimes for food and groceries. But the majority of my time is here in my apartment, in the office working. I have not made one photograph since the first week of March. This is intentional.

You were born and raised in the United States, and studied organic chemistry in the university. How does one go from here to photography?
As a kid, I had various influences which I think led me to becoming a photographer. My father was an amateur photographer and documented our family celebrations with his Argus C3 loaded with Kodachrome. My brothers and sisters and I would put on our pajamas, our Mom would make popcorn, and we’d watch a slideshow of his photos. From a young age I associated looking at photos as a fun thing to do. We also had an extensive collection of stereopticon cards and a couple of viewers. I would pass hours fascinated by the exquisitely composed 3-D images of exotic destinations and the beauty of the world landscape. We had subscriptions to LIFE and SPORTS ILLUSTRATED magazines. They obviously nurtured my photojournalistic tendencies. I moved to San Francisco with a degree in Biochemistry and began to photograph on the street there in my free time. While I had made photos before I moved to San Francisco, my first camera was the result of a drug deal. A friend of a friend was visiting from Tennessee and needed money to get home. He asked for a loan of $150 to buy a quantity of weed, which he presumed he could resell on the street at a profit. I lent him the cash but asked for some collateral. He gave me his Canon TL camera with a 50 millimeter lens. I never saw him again.

You moved to Mexico in 1987 because something was missing from your life. What exactly persuaded you to take such a big decision?
What persuaded me was a profound confusion about what I wanted to do as a photographer in Austin, Texas. I was not happy there personally or professionally. While still living there, I began to focus my work more on political and social issues both in Texas but also in Central America and Mexico. When I moved to Mexico City in 1987, I knew it would change my life. It did, and I am glad I made the move. I used photography as a means to try to understand Mexico City and the Mexicans. Not knowing anything of the city, making photographs was a way to look, to see what this new place was about. It took me into parts of the city I would never have gone if I didn’t have the camera with me to use as a key to get in those places.

It was a big shift both personally and professionally. How did life in Mexico differ from the one back home? What were the initial challenges and what were the great rewards of this move?
The vast majority of people in the US believe wholeheartedly in the importance of the individual. They think they have accomplished everything in their lives by themselves — with no help from the government, with no help from society, with little from friends. This idea that one must ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’. All that works to isolate people in their daily lives. Alone in your car. Alone in your house. Alone at work. Mexico on the other hand, like many Latin countries, is a much more collective society. The human scale and the shared experience way of doing things is still alive and functioning here. People do things together. Extended families are important.
And in my case, I began working at a photo agency, Imagenlatina, that was a collective endeavor. We went out to photograph events — marches, meetings, protests — together. We developed film and printed the day’s images together. We went to eat and drink at the cantina together. In our free time we walked the streets of Mexico City and they taught me so much about how people in this megalopolis interact and get along. This life was so different from the one I had left in Texas, where I had been on my own — professionally and personally. The one great reward that facing the challenge of a new home gave me, was a clearer direction to my life and work. What you don’t learn in workshops or from your colleagues on the street while you work is that the very personal quest for a convincing image will eventually lead you back to yourself. That’s the way it should be. Being a humanist photographer, that was a fundamental discovery for me. Where my personal exploration of consciousness took me and the questions it provoked required me to make radical changes to how I approached the world and my place in it. That challenge to change and the journey to do it, was my reward. And it is on-going, as I continue to learn more of myself through my photography.

As a photographer you worked for newspapers and photo agencies, covering different events in and out the region. Callegrafía on the other hand is a deeply personal project. How and why did you find the time to work on something for yourself?
A freelance photographer is not a full-time job, as much as we would like to think it is. In my free time I still needed to explore and discover on my own, the streets and people of the city. I made the time to get away from my photojournalism responsibilities to photograph for myself. It was necessary for my survival and my mental health. As a photojournalist, you are responsible to many outside persuasions — the story you are working on, the editors with their directions, the reporter wanting a certain type of photo, etc. The search for the image, for the photo, is primordial. You are under pressure to make relevant, meaningful photos. Photographing for the work in Callegrafía is nothing like that. I was free when I went out on my own, to look for what the street was saying to me, to wait and watch as scenes developed before me and my camera, and to respond appropriately at the moment and place that felt right. I try to photograph what the street shows me. This requires contemplation and immersion in the moment, so as to bring together the parts of the urban ecosystem. That process, when everything in unison, can be transcendental. It can feel like you are without a camera, that the process of seeing is the beginning and the end.

The pictures in Callegrafía were mostly taken in the historic centre of the city. Why only there?
Just to say, Mexico City is not one homogenous megalopolis. It is in fact many different cities. I really need a city and its people to photograph, and the Centro Histórico of Mexico City provides that for me. The Centro is one of those places where the surreal and the quotidian meet serendipitously on the street, greet each other with an embrace and then walk off, arm in arm, the best of friends. With many of my images, questioning the things that are normally taken for granted is preeminent. How is this done? By incongruity and unusual juxtaposition of objects, people and space. (The Centro Histórico is a very rich environment for such searches.) This normally creates some kind of tension in the viewer as he/she tries to reconcile the image with reality. This momentary confusion makes the viewer look more closely, to confront the lack of order until one sees that the image does make sense. With the photos I make in the Centro, I feel that I myself and the viewer of my photos get to see the world in a different way.
I have photographed in other parts of the city, but the Centro is where I feel the energy is present for the kind of photography I like to do. Other neighborhoods, maybe not so much. Mexico City is one of the largest urban centers in the world. It has safe neighborhoods, and it has dangerous neighborhoods. I have gone into the not-so-safe places and have been robbed of cameras and beaten. Hopefully, experience has taught me now where I can go, and where I better not go. If I had a reason to photograph in a marginal barrio here, I would go with someone who lives there and can act as a guide for me.

Shooting 30+ years in the same neighborhood requires a certain attitude and perseverance. It is not easy to see the same area with fresh eyes over and over. Have you ever felt burnt out?
The never-ending reality of the Centro Historico is constantly being drawn and re-drawn. All I do is see and record a significant moment that elucidates it, but hopefully, also retains a bit of the riddle of Mexico for me, as a foreigner. Yes, I have lived here for over 30 years, but I still don’t know anything about Mexico. That’s one reason why I go to the Centro. It is a constant challenge for me. I am not here to show you how the Centro is; I’m here to show you how I see it. I am excited every time I get on a bus to go back down to the Centro to photograph because I know I will encounter a different scene from the last time I was there. That is because of the people. Photographically speaking, I am not too concerned with the architecture of the Centro as an element in my images. The buildings are a nice backdrop to the activity on the street, but I don’t visualize my photos around the physical space of the Centro. Nor am I terribly attentive to the light. I am obviously aware of it, but I take the light that is given to me and look for the energy within it as provided by the characters who are present. If I felt burnt out, I would not go back down to photograph there, or I would take a break. Maybe this time away from the Centro because of the COVID-19 will be of benefit when I resume photographing there one day.

This long period of time in pictures can also show us how the city and the country changed over decades. How do you view Mexico City’s evolution? What do you welcome and what do you miss from the past?
Yes, obviously looking at my photos of how I see the Centro will show you something of the changes over the last 30 years. There is an anthropological facet to my work for sure. But it is not an architectural survey of Mexico City. I try to show how people in an urban environment relate to themselves and to that physical space they inhabit. The differences of that relationship over time is much more subtle and difficult to express in a photograph. What has changed here in Mexico City is the society, more so than the physical structure of the place. I hope my images say something about how Mexicans are, the ‘Mexicanness’ of the city. Their collective idiosyncrasies. But also my evolution as a photographer here has also been important. How I move with the camera has changed. I interact more now with people on the street and I try to be open and receptive to them and what they are naturally doing. I am also ‘looser’ with my manner of photographing. I don’t look for the perfect visual frame, with all graphic elements in their place before making the photo. I try to be more reactive to the scene, to the potential energy present, to the life of the moment I’m in.

Who are your biggest inspirations / greatest idols when it comes to color street photography?
Joel Meyerowitz. Saul Leiter. Garry Winogrand. Cig Harvey. Robert Herman. Gus Powell.

If you had to choose only one image from Callegrafía which is closest to your heart, either because of its artistic value or the story behind it, which one would it be and why?
The majority of my photos don’t have a story behind them. The story hopefully, is in the image and discernible by the viewer. My favorite of the ones here in Callegrafia is that of the man leaning against a store window with his arms and hands up to support himself in front of a mannequin with her hands open downward. It is titled ‘Looking for Redemption’. I was raised as a Catholic. The churches are full of statues of saints, virgins, Jesus. The mannequin in the window has an attitude like that of many of those statues — welcoming and receiving the sinner who has come for redemption. (God knows, I need redemption.) By his body language the man below seems as if he is broken spiritually and has come to ask for forgiveness and then redemption — of the stylishly-dressed mannequin! The whole scene is a street interpretation of what you might see in a Catholic Church. It only lacks the candles burning in front of the statue.

What are your plans for the future? Will you keep on shooting in Mexico City or you have other destinations and projects in your mind when it comes to your personal work?
I will always return to photograph in the Centro Histórico of Mexico City. It has been my photographic touchstone for decades and will continue to be. Insha’ allah. I do have a project in North Carolina in the US, started in 2017 that I continue to work on with the view towards a large, one-person exhibition entitled ‘HomeSweet, Homeland’. It deals with a bunch of different ideas — home, homeland, belonging, identity and rootlessness. I am also working on a book of my photographs and recollections from the first Palestinian Intifada. I’m looking for a publisher at this point.

Are you planning to come to Hungary some time? What message would you like to send Hungarians who plan to visit your exhibition?
Are Hungary’s borders open? If so, send me a plane ticket and I will be there the next day. 🙂 Seriously, I would love to visit and photograph on the streets of Budapest. It would be great. For those who take the time to visit my exhibition, I say ‘thank you’. And as I said before, look at the photos as my personal view of Mexico City — how I SEE the place — not a definitive picture of how it is. I think you will see that I have painted the city in the broad strokes that it deserves — the beautiful, the imperfect; the sacred, the profane; the functional, the dysfunctional. I hope you enjoy the photos as much as I did in making them.
Speaking of the exhibition, as a final word, I want to thank everyone who has been behind ‘Callegrafía’ being presented in Budapest during these difficult times. The Mexican Embassy in Hungary and the staff of Alejandro and Angelika. The Ambassador, my friend, David Nájera. And the work of Tim Nugent-Head at The Red Door Gallery. His creativity and perseverance in making videos for the public to see my work while the gallery was closed has been remarkable. Mil gracias a todos.

Interview by: Kornél Kocsány

Interviews – Keith Dannemiller

BPF Interview – Keith Dannemiller