Aurora Eugenia Latapí (México, 1911–2000) was a Mexican photographer, and the first woman to enter the Club Fotográfico de México. Her work has been associated with an avant-garde language that drew apart from the Pictorialist tradition that was in vogue at the beginning of the 20th century, due to the capture of geometric forms, the presence of foreground elements, and the process of overprinting.
Artistic trajectory
Aurora Eugenia Latapí was born in Mexico, in 1911.
In 1926, when she was fifteen years old, she returned from a trip in Europe with a camera that had been given to her by her mother, Aurora Estévez de Latapí. Three years later, she began her career as a photographer. In an interview published in Alquimia magazine in the year 2000, she explains she began taking photographs as a hobby: “I enjoyed taking pictures, and since my mother liked it, I took them.” For this reason, she started studying photography at the American Photo Supply Co and at the industrial school Malina Xóchit. A few years later, she was admitted at the Academy of San Carlos, where she studied with the renowned Mexican photographer Agustín Jiménez.
In December 1929 she participated in the group show Guillermo Toussaint y 11 fotógrafos mexicanos en la Galería de Arte Mexicano at the National Theater (now Palacio de Bellas Artes) in Mexico City. The exhibit was organized by Carlos Mérida and Carlos Orozco Romero, and it featured works by sculptor Guillermo Toussaint, photographers Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Hugo Brehme, Rafael García, Librado García Smart, Agustín Jiménez, Ricardo Mantel, Luis Márquez, Juan Ocón and Roberto Turnbull, as well as Aurora Eugenia and her mother Aurora Latapí. Criticism of the show was positive and, according to José Antonio Rodríguez, this exhibition allowed Latapí to formally enter the Mexican photography scene, which was still ruled by the already weak Pictorialist style. In November 1931, during her first year at San Carlos, she showed 50 pictures in the Exposición Fotográfica Jiménez-Latapí at Galería Excélsior, along with Agustín Jiménez. Latapí exhibited still lifes portraying organic materials or industrial objects, which allowed her to experiment with different mechanical processes such as overprinting negatives, and which she would push toward abstraction. In this second exhibition, her work spoke an avant-garde language that reflected, according to José Antonio Rodríguez, a more “mature” approach toward photography.
On this occasion, the critics’ opinion was divided. On the one hand, Latapí's and Jiménez's works were praised by some for “accurately expressing the aesthetic inquiries of our time”. On the other hand, an anonymous review was printed in Helios magazine (published by the Asociación de Fotógrafos de México, where the most influential Pictorialist photographers of Mexico came together), in which both photographers were accused of imitating the work of Edward Weston and Tina Modotti. It was common then, for Mexico-based photographers, like Weston and Modotti, but also like Latapí, Agustín Jiménez, and Lola and Manuel Álvarez Bravo to capture aspects of Mexican culture and landscape, as well as valuing high contrasts and compositional rhythms in photography, so it was frequent to find these similarities in photos taken by many artists in Mexico during those years.
