Nota Roja: 27 Vintage Photos of Crimes and Accidents

ca. 1970-1980

Nota Roja: 27 Vintage Photos of Crimes and Accidents. [Yucatán, Mexico]: n.d., ca. 1970-1980. Vintage prints, sizes vary slightly, most approx. 13 x 9 cm. Slight curling, a few faded, overall VG+.
This collection presents 27 characteristic examples of Mexico’s nota roja photojournalism in Yucatán, possibly Merída. Nota roja is a genre of sensationalist, violent crime journalism central to Mexico’s tabloid press since the 1950s.

The group documents car crashes, murders, arrests, fires, crime scenes, bodies in the streets with curious crowds, and the death of a woman carrying a Confederación Nacional Campesina flag, presumably attacked during a demonstration.

The ubiquitous public display and consumption of such graphic imagery is often explained in relation to an emerging modern Mexican popular culture and national identity in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Some scholars have resisted the characterization of the nota roja as dehumanizing, writing instead about its reparative force: a public forum against political and institutional corruption. But the escalation of drug trafficking violence in Mexico, and the popularity of cultural forms which celebrate or romanticize this violence (tv shows; corridos; etc.), over the last twenty years has brought renewed criticism of nota roja style and its role in normalizing violence and spreading fear and apathy.

Vintage examples of a controversial photographic genre whose history and cultural importance remain central to contemporary conversations about violence in Mexico and Mexican popular culture.

$350