Pablo Ortiz Monasterio

Huichol: Mountain, Desert, New York '95-'21

"The first person to photograph the Huichol in their remote communities in the inaccessible canyons of the Western Sierra Madre was probably the Norwegian anthropologist, Carl Lumholtz. He ventured into their territory in 1895, shortly before the arrival of the French naturalist and ethnographer Léon Diguet, who was also a photographer. Like so many who were engaged with documenting Indigenous peoples across the Americas in those brutal years of expansion and settlement, Lumholtz believed that the disappearance of his subjects was inevitable: “the weaker must succumb to the stronger, and the Indians will ultimately all become Mexicans.”

The photographs of the Huichol by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio—taken on some twenty trips over the past three decades—prove that Lumholtz was fortunately, terribly wrong. They reveal abundant evidence of cultural survival (what the Huichol call “la costumbre”), made possible by their extraordinary resistance to the religious, nationalist, and economic forces that have long assaulted—and that continue to assault—Indigenous communities everywhere. Though Ortiz Monasterio is also an outsider, he does not operate—like Lumholtz or Diguet—as an old-fashioned preservationist, nor is he confident in the superiority of Western culture, nor is his work only destined for museum vitrines or archives. Rather, these complex images are the result of long and patient attempts at negotiation and collaboration, of working with the Huichol, amongst them, and ultimately making pictures as much for them as for audiences far from the Sierra Madre.

In 1996, Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, an ecologist and engineer, was invited to design a bridge to allow the Huichol to safely cross a deep riverbed that became an impassable and dangerous torrent during the summer rains. An image by his brother Pablo records the bloody sacred sacrifice that celebrated its completion, just as he later documented a Huichol pilgrimage to another suspension bridge, in distant Brooklyn. Perhaps the only ethical position of the contemporary photographer engaged with Indigenous subjects is to work as a bridge or conduit, as a sanctioned recorder of sacrifices, pilgrimages, and other ceremonies—some more secret than others. These remain in the hands of the Huichol, and none of us will ever truly comprehend their spiritual meanings." - James Oles

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