Tizoc (1957) and Macario (1960) are Mexican movies that show people (indigenous people, in particular) who are very different from what the average Mexican looks like. Pedro Infante and Pina Pellicer were incredibly attractive actors whose success was due in part to their gorgeous features. Their white skin and European features were very close to the Western ideal of beauty.
But the average Mexican doesn’t look like that. We do not fit neatly in the ideal beauty standards that were brought by the Spanish conquistadores. The stereotype of the “attractive Mexican” was only reinforced when Ximena Navarrete was crowned Miss Universe, and with Hollywood’s sudden crush on Diego Luna.
As with most cultures, we are the product of a mix of heritages, which has made us a unique people of all sorts of heights, skin colors, and shapes. We are a diverse country.
Mexican photographer Dorian Ulises López worked for Elle magazine for a long time. There he had the chance to work with models with “perfect” bodies and people from the Mexican social elite: tall, thin, light-skinned bodies; people living pampered lives and not very interested in helping anyone else but themselves.
As a photographer for ad agencies, he knows media’s power to impose beauty standards and make them an ideal that people want to attain. Therefore, with this series, he wants to shatter those ideals and show the beauty of ordinary people.
He knows that a tall, blonde Swedish model would have a bigger impact than a regular girl you’d see on the street, but he believes there is beauty everywhere. That’s why his latest series is all about people like him who lead regular lives and who have their own unique beauty. Without making them pose as professional models, he captures their sexy and beautiful side, their real essence. And the way he does it is by getting them to face the camera head-on with self-confidence.
These pictures are portraits, with authentic and natural poses. There is not a lot of work behind these, but this is a great artistic project. For him, subjectivity is vital to understand these images.
To make portraits of everyday people is, for this photographer, a journey between subjective beauty and the history of the people in the images because all of them have a story to tell, and the photographer captures that perfectly. This is why he looks for candid images that tell these stories with a single gesture.
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