Livia Corona / “Enanitos Toreros” / A Selection of Photographs

During the summer of 1998, I was on a photo shoot in Guanajuato, Mexico, and a poster taped to a storefront window caught my attention: “Directo de Taurilandia—Los Enanitos Toreros [Direct from the Land of Bulls—The Dwarf Bullfighters].” Like most people, I did not know anything about dwarfism. The issue had rarely come up in my life, and when it did, it was usually presented, in film and radio shows, with the purpose of comic effect. The poster I saw displayed a different perspective. In it, there was a man (a dwarf) in control of his own, standing his ground against a fearsome animal.The show was scheduled for that evening, at the bullring located next to the place where I was staying, and I went to see it. Several performers, all dwarfs, appeared in front of a small audience, while their average-height promoter introduced their sketches over a loudspeaker in a tone less formal than the poster had implied. When the show ended one of the performers saw me leaving with my camera in hand and asked me if I would photograph her. She introduced herself as Isabel Cortez—she was from Mexico City, and at that time she needed a publicity head shot. Her husband, Gustavo, asked for the same, and so did a few other people employed by the same promoter.While I was photographing her backstage, Isabel invited me to join her cuadrilla [team of bullfighters] for its upcoming shows in the state of Queretaro. We traveled in a small station wagon driven by their promoter, who had once been a famous bullfighter and now made his living promoting his Enanitos Toreros show. While traveling, Isabel, Gustavo, and I became friends. Through this and some coincidences that followed, I got to know and befriend many other people employed as Enanitos Toreros in the eight or more cuadrillas that currently perform throughout Mexico and parts of the United States.

Livia Corona / Portraits

Livia Corona / “Two Million Homes For Mexico” / A Selection of Photographs

In 2000, Mexican presidential candidate Vicente Fox Quezada proposed an unprecedented plan to build two million low-income homes throughout the country during his six year term. On the eve of his election, Fox proclaimed, “My presidency will be remembered as the era of public housing.” To enact this initiative, the federal government agency INFONAVIT ceded the construction of low-income housing to a small group of private real estate investors. Then, almost overnight, grids 20 to 80,000 identical homes sprouted up, and they continue to spread in remote agrarian territory throughout the country. To encounter these developments by land, by air, or even via satellite imagery, evokes a rare sensation. These are not the neighborhoods of a “Home Sweet Home” dream fulfilled, but are ubiquitous grids of ecological and social intervention on a scale and of consequences that are difficult to grasp. In these places, urbanization is reduced to the mere construction of housing. There are nearly no public amenities—such as schools, parks, and transportation systems. There are few commercial structures—such as banks and grocery stores. Yet demand for these low-income homes continues to increase and developers continue to provide them with extreme efficiency. During Fox’s six-year presidency, 2,350,000 homes were built, at a rate of 2,500 homes per day, and this trend is set to continue.

During the past four years, I have been exploring these developments in Two Million Homes for Mexico. Through images, films, and interviews, I look for the space between promises and their fulfillment. In my photographs of multiple developments near Mexico City and in Baja California, I consider the rapid redefinition of Mexican “small town” life and the sudden transformation of the Mexican ecological and social landscape. These urban developments mark a profound evolution in our way of inhabiting the world. I my work I seek to give form to their effect upon the experience of the individual… what exactly happens in these two million homes? How do they change over time? How are tens of thousands of lives played out against a confined, singular cultural backdrop?

Livia Corona / “Two Four Six Eight”

In Two Four Six Eight, Livia placed film extras in situations around a newly constructed section of architect Thom Mayne’s celebrated 2-4-6-8 House in Venice, California, originally built in 1978. In designing the new section to replace elements damaged by fire, architects Johnston Marklee adopted rules of the game established twenty years earlier by Thom Mayne—a primary color palette and concentric geometric multiples. Livia’s photographs in turn offer a guessing game of what might occur if the new home dwellers soaked in their own handed-down colors and geometries.

Livia Corona / “Of People and Houses” / A selection of Photographs

“The pictures by Livia Corona capture staged moments of the architecture and thus tell little stories. Her sensibility for timing together with her sophisticated narratives make for a spectacular photo essay.”
Dérive

“Livia Corona’s Pictures do not only illustrate what could and does indeed happen, but also give us a glimpse of how the many complexities, the juxapositions of the old and new, the local and the global, prostitution and other passers-by, in short the complexity of our dialy glocal life, through the intervention of the 12 architecture projects honoured in this book, allow us to travel beyond the cliché without disqualifying the familiar until it becomes uncomfortable.”
Roemer van Toorn

With her photo series for the yearbook, Livia Corona further developed her conceptual approach to staged photography in a fascinating way: fictitious, staged aspects are seamlessly combined with observations of real scenes that happened coincidentally and that Corona captured with the presence of mind of a photo reporter. At some point, the categories are totally interwoven: the staging seems real and reality seems staged. Both are equally authentic. For each built project, Livia Corona developed a scenario that takes up and transforms thematic and formal aspects of the respective architectonic concept. Her “stories” tell us something about the life of the project, the peculiarities of its protagonists, the special characteristics of the site, and the atmosphere of its spaces. Unlike architecture photographs, Livia Corona’s pictures never claim to document architecture. They direct our gaze more to selected aspects; they have what Roland Barthes describes in “Camera Lucida” as the point of a photograph: that minimal anomaly that falls outside of a picture’s general tone, gives it a particular twist, and thereby tears our attention away from the study of the overall sign-landscape of the picture. These singular aspects are what enable us to develop an immediate emotional relationship to a picture. We cease being a distanced observer and become part of the picture’s reality.

Ilka & Andreas Ruby

Livia Corona / “Estarbucks” / A selection of Photographs

Livia Corona

Livia Corona was born in Ensenada, Baja California. She is a graduate of Art Center College of Design and works out of New York and Mexico City. Most recently she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for completion of her current photography and film project titled “Two Million Homes for Mexico”. Corona’s work for this effort focuses on the surge of mass-scale neighborhood developments in Mexico, exploring their role in the ongoing transformation of the ecological, social and cultural landscape of the nation and its citizens. This project, consisting of images, interviews, archival research and texts also reveals broader trends in the way we inhabit the world today. Her earlier work, Enanitos Toreros (PowerHouse Books, New York, 2008), is a ten-year documentary on both the personal and public experiences of people with dwarfism who work as the famed Dwarf Bullfighters of Mexico. The photographs and interviews for this book explore issues of social mobility, performance, and the representation of dwarfism in modern times. The project centers on how we see dwarfism rather than in what people with dwarfism look like. The book tells complex and personal accounts rather than develop general theories.