From Nezahualcoyotl, the largest working-class suburb on Earth, to La Condesa, Mexico City’s hipster hangout, putas and putos stroll the streets, cruising for johns and surviving on their wit, born out of true desperation. These men, women, and everyone in-between are sex-workers in a country whe... Read more
From Nezahualcoyotl, the largest working-class suburb on Earth, to La Condesa, Mexico City’s hipster hangout, putas and putos stroll the streets, cruising for johns and surviving on their wit, born out of true desperation. These men, women, and everyone in-between are sex-workers in a country where extra-marital sex is considered a mortal sin, and, confoundingly, where they ply their trade without official reprisal. In Mexico, macho husbands consort with other men, and virgencitas are anything but.
Joseph Rodríguez confronts these contradictions head-on in Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico City. In Rodríguez’s series of startlingly intimate black-and-white photographs we encounter a re-sexualized and re-spiritualized country in flux, embracing religious dogma while discarding taboos that once shrouded sex in a haze of artifice, euphemism, and history. Rodríguez’s beautiful and brutally honest images suggest a culture in which spirit and flesh have always been inextricably intertwined.
Internationally recognized photographer Joseph Rodríguez was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in such publications as The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, GQ, Newsweek, Esquire, and Der Spiegel. He has received awards and grants from the Open Society Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, and New York State Foundation for the Arts. He was awarded Picture of the Year by the National Press Photographers Association in 1990, 1992, 1996, and 2002. Rodríguez teaches at New York University and the International Center of Photography.
