For a while, I used to do a trip like this recent one to the Mexican capital every year. After choosing a city, I would spend a week there solo, just walking miles every day with my camera and seeing the sights. No other experience gets me to forget any of my day to day troubles and anxieties so quickly and thoroughly. These trips can be alienating, exhausting, and at times dangerous, but it is the tradeoff for experiences that can be joyful, sublime, and at times even transcendant. And all along, of course, I hope that I come back with photos that capture some of the essence of what I’ve seen.
My week in Mexico City was very much a return to form in this regard. I had a rough itinerary of the places I wanted to see, and walked over fifty miles over the course of the week to get to them all. I visited many of the famous sights and attractions, such as Chapultepec castle, the Zócalo, a bunch of museums and historic churches, and even did a day trip out the Pyramids of Teotihuacan. To be sure, I enjoyed them all, but I found my photos of them were fine, but underwhelming. Instead, it was the candid street shots I was happiest with. I found Mexico City, with its varied architecture and colorful neighborhoods, to be an ideal location for this kind of photography.
So, while in the last three posts I focused on some specific places in CDMX that I wanted to cover in depth, now I’ll highlight some of the random places I came across simply walking around town. I came up with a couple dozen shots that I thought were worth sharing, and divided them simply into Day and Night. Here is the first part, Day.
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The above shot was taken in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s massive and bustling main square. This shaman was giving me a bit of stinkeye when he saw I was photographing him.
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I really loved this house in the barrio of Coyoacán. While in itself it was nothing special, I thought the light and shadow on this afternoon made it striking and gave it an Edward Hopper-esque quality.
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Fittingly, we will end this post at dusk. Above is the Angel of Independence, one of the many statues and monuments on the Paseo de la Reforma.
In the next post: night time in Mexico City.
T A B U L A R A S A photography 