Enrique Bostelmann (March 1939 – December 3, 2003) was a Mexican photographer known for his artistic work related to social problems as well as the use of objects and concepts from other artistic disciplines such as sculpture in his work. He did commercial work such as publicity, documentary and photographic reproductions of artwork. However, it was his personal projects in which he experimented with subjects, styles and techniques, which were exhibited in Mexico, other parts of Latin America, the U.S. and Europe from the start of his career in the 1960s until his death in 2003. His artistic work is basically of two types: the first exploring social issues and the second conceptualist, using common objects and concepts from other creative disciplines to create photographic images. Although he won no major awards for his work, he was selected as a judge for a number of competition and was inducted as a member of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana.
Life
Enrique Bostelmann was born in
Guadalajara
Guadalajara ( ; ) is the capital and the most populous city in the western Mexican List of states of Mexico, state of Jalisco, as well as the most densely populated municipality in Jalisco. According to the 2020 census, the city has a population ...
in March 1939. He was tall, husky, blonde and very fair skinned because of his German heritage, which gave him the nickname of “El Sol” (The Sun). He suffered from nystagmus, a constant involuntary movement of the eyes, but it did not interfere with his photographic ability. His widow described him as “consistent, very honest, very formal, hard-working, a fighter and dry, demanding honesty, uprightness.
In 1957 he received a scholarship to study photography for three years at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt fur Photographie in
Munich
Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...
, beginning his career soon afterwards. This career consisted of publicity, documentary and personal, artistic work. Much the last is related to extensive travels in Mexico, Latin America and Europe in which he photographed scenes and objects.
He married Yeyete Bostelmann with whom he had two children Saskia and Alexis. He died on December 3, 2003, at age 64, of heart stoppage while on his way to a routine photography appointment in the Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City.
Career
Bostelmann began his photography career in 1961, which spanned over four decades until his death. He did publicity, documentary and artistic work, not making a strict distinction between publicity and documental, taking photos of industry, businesses, rural scenes, fashion, food and social scenes. He was also noted as a specialist in the photographic reproduction of art.
His artistic work was mostly for his own personal satisfaction, without the intention of sale. However, this work was exhibited in over fifty individual and collective exhibitions.
His first individual exhibition was at the Exposición Club Fotográfico de México in 1961 and his last called Estática Fugaz del tiempo in 2007 at the Gallery of the
Mexico City International Airport
Mexico City International Airport (); officially ''Aeropuerto Internacional Benito Juárez'' (Benito Juárez International Airport) is the primary international airport serving Greater Mexico City. It is the List of the busiest airports in Me ...
. In between individual exhibitions where staged in various parts of Mexico as well as North America, Europe and South America. Important shows include Due Mondi in Rome (1969), Paisaje del Hombre at the Museo de Arte Moderno (1973), La Piel de Aguas in Mexico,
Venezuela
Venezuela, officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many Federal Dependencies of Venezuela, islands and islets in the Caribbean Sea. It com ...
,
Ecuador
Ecuador, officially the Republic of Ecuador, is a country in northwestern South America, bordered by Colombia on the north, Peru on the east and south, and the Pacific Ocean on the west. It also includes the Galápagos Province which contain ...
,
Peru
Peru, officially the Republic of Peru, is a country in western South America. It is bordered in the north by Ecuador and Colombia, in the east by Brazil, in the southeast by Bolivia, in the south by Chile, and in the south and west by the Pac ...
and
Panama
Panama, officially the Republic of Panama, is a country in Latin America at the southern end of Central America, bordering South America. It is bordered by Costa Rica to the west, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north, and ...
(1974-1975), Exposición Integración Visual in various cities in Venezuela (1977), Exposición Comunicación Visual at UAM-Xochimilco (1976), Muestras Fotograficas at the World Trade Center New York (1977), Suicidio y Muerte Natural at the Colegio de México (1979), Fotomorfosis in Mexico City,
Brasília
Brasília ( ; ) is the capital city, capital of Brazil and Federal District (Brazil), Federal District. Located in the Brazilian highlands in the country's Central-West Region, Brazil, Central-West region, it was founded by President Juscelino ...
,
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires, controlled by the government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Argentina. It is located on the southwest of the Río de la Plata. Buenos Aires is classified as an Alpha− glob ...
,
Caracas
Caracas ( , ), officially Santiago de León de Caracas (CCS), is the capital and largest city of Venezuela, and the center of the Metropolitan Region of Caracas (or Greater Caracas). Caracas is located along the Guaire River in the northern p ...
, Maricabo and
Bogotá
Bogotá (, also , , ), officially Bogotá, Distrito Capital, abbreviated Bogotá, D.C., and formerly known as Santa Fe de Bogotá (; ) during the Spanish Imperial period and between 1991 and 2000, is the capital city, capital and largest city ...
(1977-1979), Estructura y Biografía de un Objeto in Mexico City (1978-1979), Quince Murales,
Knoxville
Knoxville is a city in Knox County, Tennessee, United States, and its county seat. It is located on the Tennessee River and had a population of 190,740 at the 2020 United States census. It is the largest city in the East Tennessee Grand Division ...
(1982), Juan de la Mancha in Mexico City (1986), La Vida Todos los días in Mexico City (1987), Espacios Habitados at the Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros (1994), a retrospective shown in various countries in Europe in
Berlin
Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...
,
Bonn
Bonn () is a federal city in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, located on the banks of the Rhine. With a population exceeding 300,000, it lies about south-southeast of Cologne, in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr region. This ...
,
Budapest
Budapest is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns of Hungary, most populous city of Hungary. It is the List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, tenth-largest city in the European Union by popul ...
,
Prague
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and
Łódź
Łódź is a city in central Poland and a former industrial centre. It is the capital of Łódź Voivodeship, and is located south-west of Warsaw. Łódź has a population of 655,279, making it the country's List of cities and towns in Polan ...
,
Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...
(1993-1994), Los Entusiamos de la Belleza at the Centro Cultural Tijuano (1996), a retrospective at the Art Institutes of Dallas, Fort Lauderdale and Houston (1997), Secuencias y Consecuencias in various parts of Mexico (1997- 1998), Memoria del Tiempo in
Querétaro
Querétaro, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Querétaro, is one of the Political divisions of Mexico, 32 federal entities of Mexico. It is divided into Municipalities of Querétaro, 18 municipalities. Its capital city is Querétaro Cit ...
(1999), Memories of History in Washington, New York and Montreal (2004-2006) and Tiempo Recurperado and Estática Fugaz del Tiempo in various parts of Mexico (2001-2007) . He participated in about forty collective exhibitions from 1958 to 2002 both in Mexico and abroad. After his death, there have been several exhibitions of his work including Enrique Bostelmann: Imagen, espacio inagotable at the Museo de Arte Moderno in 2013.
Books published with and about his work include América: Un Viaje a Través de la Injusticia (1970, 1984) with prologue written by
Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes Macías (; ; November 11, 1928 – May 15, 2012) was a Mexican novelist and essayist. Among his works are ''The Death of Artemio Cruz'' (1962), '' Aura'' (1962), '' Terra Nostra'' (1975), '' The Old Gringo'' (1985) and '' Christop ...
, El Paisaje de México (1974), Estructura y Biografía de un Objeto (1980), Juan de la Mancha (1982), Los Murales de Bellas Artes (1996), Los Murales de Tamayo (1997), Los Murales del Palacio Nacional (1997), Los Murales de Siqueiros (1998), Federico Silva-La Cueva de Huites Una Pintura Rupestra al Norte de Sinaloa (1998), Sebastián: El Lenguaje del Universo (1999), Alameda:Visión Histórica y Estética de la Alameda de la Cd. De México (2000) and No Anunciar: Narrativa Fotografía (2003) . His work also appears in some editions published abroad such as Contemporary Photographers (London, 1981), World History of Photography (New York, 1985) and The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1 (London, 2004).
As an artist he did not win major awards for his work, mostly because such did not exist in Mexico during his lifetime. However, he was recognized in other ways. He served as a judge and conference speaker at events such as the Biena de Artes Gráficas and the Bienal de Fotografía, both of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes; the Instituto de Bellas Artes of Caracas, Venezuela; the Premio Kinsa in Rochester, NY; the Premio Geomundo in Mexico City; the Premio Casa de la Américas in
Havana
Havana (; ) is the capital and largest city of Cuba. The heart of La Habana Province, Havana is the country's main port and commercial center.Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Graciela Iturbide .
His work can be found in institutions such as the
National Library of France
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Art Institute of Chicago
The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. The museum is based in the Art Institute of Chicago Building in Chicago's Grant Park (Chicago), Grant Park. Its collection, stewa ...
University of Arizona
The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona, United States. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it ...
, the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, the Museo de Arte Moderno and the National Photographic Archives of Mexico in Pachuca as well as in private collections in the United States, South America and Tokyo.
He taught photography at the Instituto Paúl Coremans in Mexico City.
His career resulted in an archive of over 200,000 negative and about 5,000 prints. Although some of this archive was donated to the Centro de Imagen in Mexico, much remains in the possession of the family, which stores it at the family home in
San Ángel
San Ángel is a ''Colonia (Mexico), colonia'' (neighborhood) located in the southwest of Mexico City in Álvaro Obregón, Mexico City, Álvaro Obregón borough. Historically it was a rural community called Tenanitla in the pre-Hispanic period. It ...
, Mexico City, which is clean, but lacks professional conservation facilities. Much of the archive contains images of rural Mexico from the 1950s to the 1970s. Any money earned with the photographs is put back into equipment needed to preserve the collection.
Artistry
Bostelmann is considered to be one of the most important Mexican photographers of the second half of the 20th century. Like Mariana Yampolsky and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, whose work is often compared to his, he called himself a “seeker of light.” He believed that photography changed the way man sees himself and how he relates to the rest of the world since photography is now part of many routine and grand events in life. His most passionate work involved studying something in depth, generally with a theme, such as a street, a neighborhood, a religious space or a shopping center. He experimented with both black-and-white and color photography as well as print techniques, but his best-known innovations are related to subject matter as well as collaboration with other creative people such as writers, painters and sculptors. His photography avoided ideological overtones and his photography of his home country of Mexico was not overly sentimental, folkloric or exotic, even though he photography much of the rural areas of the country from the late 1950s through the 1960s.
A significant portion of his work, especially his early work, is related to social problems and anthropology, as part of a generation of young, “rebellious” photographers such as Pedro Meyer, José Luis Neira and Lázaro Blanco . Much of this early work comes from the 1960s, when he extensively travelled in Latin America, including Mexico, photographing common people. Much of this work became part of a series called Paisaje del hombre (Landscape of man) and a book called América, un viaje a través de la injusticia (America, a voyage across injustice), published in 1970. The first is a series of diverse images, both depicting landscapes which have been heavily altered by human activity as well as depicting the human body as a landscape. Many of these photographs included images that were unusual and abstract. The book explore social problems in Mexico and other countries in Latin America. A later, socially themed work was to photograph the wall along the U.S.-Mexican border in
Tijuana
Tijuana is the most populous city of the Mexican state of Baja California, located on the northwestern Pacific Coast of Mexico. Tijuana is the municipal seat of the Tijuana Municipality, the hub of the Tijuana metropolitan area and the most popu ...
.
His work was influenced the conceptualist movement in the 1970s. He began to work with creators from other fields, such as sculpture, paintings, writers and architecture. For this, art critics such as Raquel Tibol and the Museo de Arte Moderno have judged his work to “transcend” the limit of the medium. One of these was to experiment with the use of installations and art objects, gathering and creating objects for the purpose of photography rather than for their own existence. El despliegue de la imagen gathers industrial materials and publicity to create images. La ola es agua y también escultura is a series of images that explores the possibility that photography has, linked with the other arts. Its name was taken from the eulogy of Mathias Goeritz . His best-known work from this time is in collaboration with sculptor Sebastián using ordinary objects such as a coffee pot, combining the concepts of photography and sculpture. The object would be put in different situations such as in liquid, frozen, flattened, set as if conversing with another object and more. Many photos are portraits of objects, influenced by photography work done in the 1920s as well as his relationship with Mathias Goeritz and Sebastián. He photographed unusual items such as a roll of barbed wire, a hanging hose, a clothesline, a well-worn tire, TV antennas and water storage tanks. Some of these object studies were part of portraits of notable people such as Chucho Reyes and
Juan O'Gorman
Juan O'Gorman (6 July 1905 – 17 January 1982) was a Mexican painter and architect.
Early life and family
Juan O'Gorman was born on 6 July 1905 in Coyoacán, then a village to the south of Mexico City and now a borough
A borough is an admini ...
. Some completely stood in for the person such as Manuel Felguérez’s pipe surrounded by burned wooden matches, empty paint tubes belonging to Arnold Belkin and Salvador Novo’s old worn typewriter, which he gave to Emilio Carballido. These portraits avoid sentimentality but are emotive.
Other work experimented with three-dimensional and other effects. One of these is “Nudo en la garganta” (Knot (lump) in the throat), which is an image of several congested roadways twisted together. Another photographs if of an old cabin whose falling window seems touchable. Sucedió en el metro is an over print of images to create a commentary of the Mexico City metro system .