Histories of Memory: Recent Photographs by Enrique Bostelmann

Born in Guadalajara, Mexico (1939), Enrique Bostelmann began working in photography in 1960 and was formally educated in the discipline in Munich, Germany. In the early 1970s, Enrique Bostelmann released an important book, America: Un viaje a través de la injusticia (Americas: A Trip towards Injustice) with a prologue by Carlos Fuentes. As a result of the success of this book, Bostelmann's work was featured in 1973 under the title LANDSCAPE OF MEN at the first photographic exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City.

Histories of Memory paid a deserved tribute to his early work and, fittingly, evolved to celebrate Bostelmann's contemporary work, which continued to challenge and define photography.

Jorge Reynoso Pohlenz discussed the importance of the artist’s work, saying, "Enrique Bostelmann intentionally provoked a perceptive imbalance in his work, utilizing within a frame one image that was radically opposed to another daily image, both in scale and perspective. In the series Histories of Memory, Bostelmann gathered together various objects that were for use, used objects, as well as objects that were consumed by use and that were placed in an organized or disorganized way because they were being used, or were used […] Bostelmann redefined the parameters in which these objects of use and their settings were seen in time and daily space, thus expanding the parameters of still life. These objects could coincide formally with photography's produced images of nature and science. In this series, Euclid’s geometry coexisted alongside the placed artificial object, making it look organic. This suggested that an aesthetic coherence existed—mixture of order and diversity, of plain and complex—that transcended the different scales of visible reality. It was still a point of debate, whether such coherence came from the order of the world or from the human being's inner eye.”

^{Organized in conjunction with The Mexican Cultural Institute of New York.}