MARIANA YAMPOLSKY
Mariana Yampolsky has garnered broad recognition for her photographs through numerous publications and exhibitions that have been seen throughout the Americas and Europe. Born in 1925 in Chicago, Illinois, Mariana graduated from the University of Chicago in 1948. Her experiments with the camera began in the late 1940’s when she had the good fortune to enroll in photography classes at the Academia de San Carlos with Lola Álvarez Bravo. The formal rigor with which Yampolsky approaches photography might best be observed in those compositions in which people are absent, in her architectural images as well as her elegant studies of maguey plants and other aspects of the rural landscape.
Tradition, as photographed by Yampolsky, is part of a continuum that necessarily embraces the past and present. Rather than seeking to photograph an idealized version of Mexico’s traditional legacy, she increasingly sees the need to photograph the country (especially the countryside), as it undergoes radical, even violent change. In an age when the veracity of photographic imagery is broadly questioned (and indeed, as traditional forms of the medium are being supplanted by digital imaging and other more technologically advanced forms of visual recording), Yampolsky remains firm in her reliance upon the camera and in the unmanipulated black-and-white print not only for its unique expressive capabilities, but for its ability to impart truth.
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