Nacho López

Who is Nacho López?

Nacho López was an important figure in the photojournalism of Mexico in the 20th century. Unlike the current of the time, he mostly rejected the creation of images that made Mexico exotic and preferred the photographing of the common people of Mexico City over that of the country’s political and social elite. He is credited for being the first in Mexico to work on photographic series, which he called “photo-essays” meant for publication in weekly pictorial magazines in the country. About half of his photographs were events staged by López designed to capture the reactions of bystanders. Although he was an active photojournalist for less than a decade in the 1950s, he was influential to the generations of photojournalists that followed him, with a collection of about 33,000 images now at the federal photograph archive in Pachuca, Hidalgo.