Juan Rulfo, a fundamental writer with the spirit of a photographer, died 40 years ago.

A less known facet of Juan Rulfo (1917-1986), a fundamental writer, among others, of the 20th century, whose 40th death anniversary is commemorated tomorrow, is that of a photographer. In 1980, when an individual exhibition of his work was held at the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts, conceived as a national tribute, many were surprised.

The author of the story book The plain on fire (1953) and the novel Pedro Paramo (1955), undoubted “classics” of the 20th century, he was not an improvised photographer; delved into the topic. According to his son, the painter Pablo Rulfo, his father even pretended to be a photographer at some point: “He started taking photos before writing. He took them from the late 1930s, and in the 1940s he participated in a contest organized by the newspaper The Universal. In the 1960s, his images were exhibited individually in Guadalajara, in a state gallery located in the Agua Azul park.”

For Pablo, his father’s photos had many reasons: “on the one hand, he traveled a lot. After finishing school in Guadalajara, he toured the country for a year. Later, when working as a sales agent at Goodrich-Euzkadi, he traveled and captured many images. Apparently it was a mix between the interest in capturing them and that which photography itself gave him.

“In his library he kept a large number of books and yearbooks on that discipline. He had great technical and historical knowledge of it.”

If he did not dedicate himself fully to that profession, it was because “the same survival dynamic led him to work at the tire company.

“He also worked on the Papaloapan Commission, an important state project, whose purpose was to create a hydroelectric dam. There, his work consisted of photographing and collecting information about the communities, as well as publishing a magazine that talked about the towns. It was an almost sociological topic.”

Juan Rulfo’s vocation as a photographer, although artistic at heart, had more to do with a human theme. According to Pablo, it was a way of collecting images that were significant to him, that had a human content, rather than an aesthetic one. It was “very personal” work.

Exhibitions in Fine Arts

It was Juan José Bremer, in his capacity as general director of the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature, who invited Juan Rulfo to exhibit his work at the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts.

“Bremer, a very sensitive person, knew my father well, so he proposed to do the exhibition in 1980. He accepted because of the appreciation he had for him.”

A hundred images were exhibited and a book was published. At the beginning of this millennium, a new exhibition of his work was held in the same space.

Juan Rulfo was a friend, in turn, of fellow photographers such as Nacho López, Héctor García, Antonio Reynoso, Gabriel Figueroa Flores, Rafael López Castro and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who photographed him.

With Álvarez Bravo he carried out a kind of “exercise or game”, which consisted of photographing each other.

“My father appreciated that there were photographers who followed him and took his portrait.” Photographer Daisy Ascher made the book Rulfo: My images and my death (1987).

According to Pablo, his father’s personality as a photographer “was shaped over time. He had great curiosity about photography and practiced it after all with iconographic interest. Capturing images as if he were going to collect significant moments. He had no intention of being a photography professional, but rather developed it out of emotion. It was a way of penetrating spaces and capturing significant moments in terms of context, textures, the situation, the people, the human question.

“He is not a photographer who was looking for a style, a professional personality, at all. He put all that aside. He was interested in, and looked for, what had human meaning. For me, he realized over time that that was his real interest and he always continued photographing, just that he was not interested in disseminating his work.”

When Juan Rulfo worked at the National Indigenous Institute (INI), he was in charge of the publications department and the audiovisual ethnographic archive.

During his stay in that organization, from 1964 until his death, he took photographs on some trips he made, which were published. “For my father it was a matter of registration. That speaks volumes about his inclination for the visual.

“One of his great interests could have been cinema and in fact it was. The film’s photography The dispossession (1960), by Antonio Reynoso, in which he participated, has a lot to do with his aesthetics. It was an experimental collective project. There was no script and my father was doing it at the time. “He portrayed the people of a town in Hidalgo.”

Pablo summarizes: “My father’s interest in photography was a way of approaching the image, of contexts that had a lot of human information. One thing is verbal narration and another is visual narration.

“This breadth of interests can be seen in his literature, because sometimes he made very visual descriptions of spaces. It had a multimedia character. Both the sound, the visual, and the text, had the same value and it can be seen in his literature.”

So far there are no activities planned to commemorate the 40th death anniversary of Juan Rulfo; However, it is very likely that conferences or round tables will be scheduled over the course of the year, says Pablo.