-Los Amorales Carlos Amorales Artist's Book Latin American Photobook Graphic Design Mevis & van Deursen Piet Zwart Photography

AMORALES, Carlos.
Los Amorales.
(Amsterdam: Artimo, 2001).

(289 x 214 mm), pp.[212]. 162 black-and-white and colour photographs and video stills, texts by Amorales, Patricia Ellis, Cuauhtemoc Medina, Philippe Vergne, and Rein Wolfs, design by Mevis & van Deursen. Photo-illustrated wrappers, white, printed in red.

First edition. In 1996 Carlos Aguirre Morales decided to reinvent himself as a Luchador named ‘Amorales’. He commissioned a wrestling mask based on his own face and began using it in a number of performances. In 1999 he introduced his character to a series of live fights with wrestlers from the Lucha Libre circuit. In each fight the mask was worn by a professional wrestler who assumed the identity of Amorales. Together with the live performances, Amorales also exhibited video footage, stills and photographs of the events and their preparations.

This book was created in conjunction with Dutch designers Armand Mevis and Linda van Deursen who, like Amorales had studied at the Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. ... The book seems to be a homage to the avant-garde graphic design of the 1920s, like the work of Piet Zwart, called to mind by the excellent typography (san-serif typefaces, constant changes of color and body size, overlays od paragraphs) which highlights the images, photographs and vibrant stills that change color along with the typography. ‘It is a great and unashamed work of “typophoto,” in which… [they] set aside prejudices and showed how simple and beneficial it is to forget about the differences between high and low culture’ (The Latin American Photobook).

The Latin American Photobook

Horacio Fernandez (Author)


A growing appreciation of the photobook has inspired a flood of new scholarship and connoisseurship of the form--few as surprising and inspiring as The Latin American Photobook, the culmination of a four-year, cross-continental research effort led by Horacio Fernandez, author of the seminal volume Fotografia Pública. Compiled with the input of a committee of researchers, scholars, and photographers, including Marcelo Brodsky, Iatã Cannabrava, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio and Martin Parr, The Latin American Photobook presents 150 volumes from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru and Venezuela. It begins with the 1920s and continues up to today, providing revelatory perspectives on the under-charted history of Latin American photography, and featuring work by great figures such as Claudia Andujar, Barbara Brändli, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Horacio Coppola, Paz Errázuriz,Graciela Iturbide, Sara Facio, Paolo Gasparini, Daniel González, Boris Kossoy, Sergio Larrain and many others. The book is divided into thematic sections such as "The City," "Conceptual Art and Photography" and "Photography and Literature," the latter a category uniquely important to Latin America. Fernandez's texts, exhaustively researched and richly illustrated, offer insight not only on each individual title and photographer, but on the multivalent social, political, and artistic histories of the region as well. This book is an unparalleled resource for those interested in Latin American photography or in discovering these heretofore unknown gems in the history of the photobook at large.

Open publication - Free publishing - More piet zwart

Art Talk! - Carlos Amorales door VBS_tv