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Mariana Yampolsky
Author: Mary Schneider Enriquez
ArtNexus No. 50 - Sep 2003
|  | With the death of artist Mariana Yampolsky this past year the world lost one of Mexico’s great photographers. Born in Chicago, Yampolsky came to Mexico in the 1940’s and became a Mexican citizen in 1954. She participated in the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a cooperative workshop of printers and graphic artists dedicated to social and political issues lead by Leopoldo Méndez and Pablo O’Higgins, and ultimately, she became the first woman member of the studio’s executive committee. Yampolsky turned from engraving to photography in 1948, but throughout her career she emphasized art’s socio-political role, capturing the dignity and cultural heritage of Mexico’s indigenous populations in her prints. Unlike many photographers, Yampolsky did not interfere in her subjects’ lives; rather her prints impart a sense of the individual and his/her circumstances without manipulating the medium or the situation in which they are shown.
Yampolsky portrayed Mexico’s enduring symbols, the silent figures who propel and maintain the majority of the nation’s indigenous communities. In Waiting for the Priest 1987, she conveyed the camaraderie of four, diminutive, elderly women, heads and shoulders draped with the richly woven shawls typical of their region. They sit upon a bench, their feet barely reaching the stone floor, their heads inclined toward the center woman who leads the conversation, her arm resting upon her crutch. Each epitomizes the aged matriarch of a family whose bodies toil for their children’s survival.
Yampolsky’s photographs are visually striking for the manner in which she captured the radiance of Mexican light and the inky shadows beside it. In Day of the Dead Mazahua 1989, the viewer is all but blinded by the brilliance of the sun illuminating a stone grave and the corner of a building behind it. Three women and a child proceed before the tombstone bearing flowers, their long black braids and the thick drapery of their gathered skirts and blouses spiked with shadows. The deep shadows created by the sun’s angle along the building’s roof frames the sun-scorched adobe walls behind the mourners, creating a whiteness that illuminates the entire picture. Moreover, Yampolsky preserved the women’s solemn reverence towards the deceased by capturing them at a distance, from behind, as they approach the grave. The ritual is observed while maintaining their privacy.
Photography like engraving, was to Yampolsky an art form celebrated for its accessibility to the masses. She spent years focusing her work on Mexican popular culture and traditions, publishing art books, curating exhibitions and at one point, contributing to the natural science textbooks published by the government. Hence, the range of subjects she photographed included not only the people and rituals of indigenous Mexico, but the symbols, living and constructed, that figured in daily life. In The Exterminating Angel 1991, for example, a one-armed, carved stone angel with wings aloft is shown perched above us, affording us a glimpse of its solid form and the heavens towards which it ascends. It is an awkwardly carved figure with chipped paint, an overly long, ill-formed arm with chubby fingers and a bent black wire jutting haphazardly from its base. It’s enormous, majestic wings point to the transparent sky, their expanse emphasized by the angle portrayed and the fact that the left wing continues beyond the frame. Despite the angel’s rather ungainly appearance, its presence both intrigues and unsettles us, qualities typical of Yampolsky’s photographs.
Finally, two of the strongest prints in the exhibition, Mazahua Women 1989 and Pauper’s Grave 1973, epitomize the thematic and visual concerns which preoccupied the artist. Mazahua Women portrays an iconic figure, a Mazahua young woman with long beribboned braids, proudly bearing the weight of a baby wrapped within her shawl upon her back. She stands beside another indigenous woman and toddling girl. They wait beside a wall flickering with sun and shadows, the lead woman’s face commanding our gaze. Her creased brow, pursed, full lips, broad cheekbones and deep, dark eyes mesmerize. She stands as a proud icon of Mexico past and present and is captured, one realizes, as she is, not posed for the lens. She goes about her daily existence, and Yampolsky offered us a glimpse of that life.
Pauper’s Grave provides an unsettlingly evocative perspective on reality in Mexico. Within the tiny doorway of an old squat, stone building, sun-bleached skulls and bones rest upon rubble. Initially, one sees only the house surrounded by a stone wall over which peek the prickly, rounded ears of a giant cactus. The shade of a nearby tree darkens the ground before the doorway and sharply edged shadows, broken by shards of light mark the walls. It is a composition alive with patterns and textures, a decrepit structure with deep fissures bisecting its walls and grass sprouting from its roof. The setting is as anonymous as the skeletons within the doorway, a seemingly forgotten place storing the remains of forgotten persons. Again Yampolsky captured the nature of Mexico, where death figures as vividly as life. Without awe or manipulation she showed the nature of daily life, as we otherwise would not see it. Although she leaves a legacy of enduring photographs, many of which are shown in this exhibit, her absence will long be felt. Yampolsky’s eye, spirit and devotion to Mexican culture resulted in a vision few can imitate.
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