The boy tagged along before school to sites of crime and calamity, including hellish Lecumberri, the city’s main prison. Photograph: Enrique Metinides/212Berlin films Prodigy … at the age of 12 Metinides was already a seasoned street photographer and apprentice to “El Indio”, Antonio Velázquez. One day, a press photographer saw him at the site of a car crash and took him under his wing – launching his career as prodigy of the nota roja, or red pages, the uniquely Mexican newspaper and magazine genre, heavy on violence, calamity and shock visuals, in which Metinides would star for a half-century. His father subsequently opened a Greek restaurant frequented by cops and officials, who helped the schoolboy and his Brownie get special access, even to the morgue where, at the age of 11, little Enrique snapped his first corpse (well, more a severed head). “So I began taking photos of car accidents outside our house, in the style of those films.” One of the tall stacks of DVDs on his living-room floor shows the snarling faces of Jimmy Cagney in The Roaring Twenties and Edward G Robinson in Little Caesar: the sources of Metinides’ celebrated “cinematic” style. “I snuck off to movies all the time,” he says. The very young Metinides was mad about Hollywood gangster films. He points to it now – on display with a hodgepodge of mementos, accompanied by a joke Brownie held in big Mickey Mouse hands. When Metinides was 10, his father gave him a box Brownie camera. (Jaralambos, I later learn, invokes the name of a horribly tortured early Christian martyr.) His father had a camera shop, near where the collapsed hotel in Metinides’ striking 1985 earthquake shot stood. Jaralambos Enrique Metinides Tsironides was born in Mexico City in 1934 to Greek parents stranded in the country by the first world war. I began taking photos of car accidents outside our house, in the style of those films Enrique Metinides “I always carried a frog – and a Virgin de Guadalupe – when I went to work.” I snuck off to movies all the time. And what is this? A vertical display case swarming with cartoonish green frogs? “For luck,” explains my host. Kitschy comical figurines cosy everywhere. Pictures of the photographer and his three generations of offspring pack the mantel. Instead, festive facemasks cover one wall. Metinides has an awful lot of these toys, apparently. ![]() El Niño … Metinides at home in Mexico City with some of his 3,000 toys.
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