Mexico at the Hour of Combat: Sabino Osuna’s Photographs of the Mexican Revolution is both a new book as well as a travelling exhibition based on the Sabino Osuna Collection of 427 glass negatives of the Mexican Revolution, held at the Special Collections section of the University of California, Riverside. The collection mainly covers the period 1910 to 1914 although little is known about the principal photographer, Sabino Osuna. Evidence suggests that he was a commercial photographer in Mexico City, whose work shifted from portraiture and architectural studies to photo history when the Revolution began. The book, edited by Ronald Chilcote (Professor Emeritus in Economics at UC Riverside) and published by Laguna Wilderness Press, provides striking images of the Mexican Revolution that are unique and largely unknown.
Sabino Osuna had access to the protagonists on all sides and captured many moods of this dramatic revolutionary period. The collection displays an internal unity, with several concentrations of subject matter. As a result the book is centred on four portfolios that cover:
- The Madero Revolution – the phase of Franciso Madero’s challenge to the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz;
- La Decena Trágica (the Tragic Ten Days) – a coup by Victoriano Huerta, followed by ten days of reprisals between 9-19 February 1913, the assassination of Madero, and the defeat of the federal army and Huerta by the Constitutionalists in 1914;
- Revolutionary Scenes – capturing the action of Venustiano Carranza, Álavaro Obregón, Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa, and Emiliano Zapata against the Huerta regime; and
- Revolutionary Portraits – reflecting Sabino Osuna’s role as a commercial portraiture of prominent personalities of the Revolutionary era before the effective end of the revolutionary period and the beginning of its institutionalisation and legitimation of the Mexican state.
As Ronald Chilcote relays in his perceptive introduction to the volume, ‘the Osuna photographs are not only interesting but of higher quality than the work of other photographers of the Mexican Revolution’. The Osuna archive is therefore an invaluable supplement to the Augustín Víctor Casasola Archive held at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) Fototeca. Mexico at the Hour of Combat also contains extremely useful essays by Eliud Martínez on the invention of Mexico as a nation as a result of the Revolution; by Carlos E. Cortés on the Mexican Revolution in U.S. film; by Georg M. Gugelburger on the complementarities between the Osuna Collection and the 500,000 images of the Archivo Casasola; and by Peter Biscoe on the story of the acquisition of the Osuna Collection by UC Riverside that was acquired in 1986 and housed in the Special Collections and Archives Department of the Tomás Rivera Library.
Perhaps most illuminating, though, is Tyler Stallings essay in the 118-page book that traces how Sabino Osuna’s work is a new chapter in the history of war photography. As Artistic Director at the Culver Center of the Arts and Director of the Sweeney Art Gallery at UC, Riverside, Tyler Stallings traces how the photographs represent a transition from portraitism through to photojournalism. For example, he encourages the reader to compare the staging of composed portraits constrained by heavy equipment (such as the image of Fransciso ‘Pancho’ Villa dismounting his horse, above) to the greater mobility enabled by the use of the German single-lens reflex Graflex camera and reflected in the street scenes of battle (such as the scene of troops known as Felicistas, affiliated to Félix Díaz, firing on rebels, immediately above). In this image, states Stallings, ‘violence is everywhere, at every turn, on the x or the y axis of life in the capital city’.
Similarly gripping is Stallings’ depiction of a nurse giving water to a wounded man, employing a Neoclassical triangle composition, as seen opposite. The nurse has placed her white flag of neutrality on the pavement, aiding the wounded soldier – more than likely a Federalista – between the daylight on the right side of the street and the shadow of the doorway on the left.
The woman is at the centre of this convergence, suggesting that she is a kind of intermediary between the forces of light and dark or, more literally, the battle between Díaz’s dictatorial, aristocratic government and the rebellious populace demanding a voice in government and equitable distribution of resources. In fact, the woman’s sash is at dead centre, as if her body were the only thing keeping the country tied together.
In contrast to the famous Casasola Archive, the Osuna Collection presents one person’s viewpoint, rather than that of hundreds of photographs, thereby providing an historically important and photographically impressive standalone compilation. The book also reproduces the handwritten inscriptions for many of the 427 negatives, indicating the location and subject of the photograph. Many of the images have also been restored to provide installation-quality prints from the book with an eye toward future touring exhibits in the United States, Mexico, and beyond.
It is my hope that through my new institutional affiliation that I can bring this important exhibition to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, at the University of Sydney, to reveal the importance of the insights of Sabino Osuna on the Mexican Revolution, as an itinerate witness to those events and as an important contributor to the wider history of war photography in the twentieth century more broadly.
Famously in his book La revolución interrumpida (published in English as The Mexican Revolution), the historian Adolfo Gilly commented that not once ― as in all the classical bourgeois revolutions ― but twice did the victorious bourgeois leadership (led by Carranza and then Obregón) move against the extreme wing of the revolution (led by Villa and Zapata) in order to hold the movement within the confines of capitalist property.
This fantastic book of photography by Sabino Osuna wonderfully captures these social forces that shaped the living history of Mexico’s “interrupted revolution”.
Sabino Osuna photos are reproduced here courtesy of the UCR ARTSblock and Special Collections Library, University of California, Riverside.