Biography:
Born in Mexico City in 1958, he has lived there ever since. He holds a B.A. in Communications Science from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Xochimilco campus. He was a photojournalist for La Jornada newspaper for six years after its creation. His photographic works have been published in some of the main newspapers and magazines in the United States, Spain, Canada, Italy, England and Mexico. There have recently been exhibits of his photographs in Mexico, Holland, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, England, the United States, Scotland, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, Panama, Uruguay, Ecuador, Peru, Honduras, Cuba and Costa Rica, to mention just a few.
Mata has also received the following awards, among others:
• Acquisition award of the Mexican Photography Biennal, 1988
• Honors at the Bicentennial of the French Revolution Contest, 1989
• Young Creators' Grant from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA), 1989
• Third Annual Mother Jones, USA, 1993
• FONCA Co-investment Award, 1994
• First International Award for Internet in Japan, 1997
• FONCA Promotional Award, 1999
• He has been a member of the National System of Creators since 2000
In the editorial field, his pictures can be found in over twenty books. He is the individual author of Sábado de Gloria (Easter Saturday), 1994; América profunda (Deep America), 1999; Litorales (Coasts), 2000; Mexico Tenochtitlan, 2005; One Trip (Mexican Subway) 2006 and Tepito ¡bravo el barrio!, 2006. He has also participated as lecturer in most of the photographic events in Mexico, has been a judge of several national and international contests and has given talks and courses over the past ten years in various universities and cultural centers in the country and abroad.
Statement:
Over these years, I have frequently discovered parallels between the representations within the fiestas and daily life in Mexico City, I saw the relationship between political acts and religious expressions, I linked urban landscapes with moods, I found explanations for what is collective in the individual, I tried to understand the internal mechanism that keeps coexistence going in this city and I claimed something that already belonged to me: a sense of humor and irony that are part of our reality. In these barrios, at these fiestas, on these streets, I often ran right into what I had already seen, and I recognized in the midst of the messiness and the visual chaos pre-Hispanic, colonial and contemporary art, all one has to do is isolate it.
Most of the time, I felt limited by the medium I had chosen —photography— but, on the other hand, I recognized its virtues of synthesis, dramatization, and most of all, metaphor. I also understood that the city is too vast to be contained or photographed in its entirety. When this certainty became a part of my work, my anguish and my pretensions decreased: I no longer wanted to broadly document the traditions, I no longer worried about offering a definitive testimony regarding Mexico City in the final stretch of the 20th century; I just wanted to be there, to be a part of those cycles, reconfirm my liking for popular expressions, for friendship, for the chaos and the order that are created on the fiesta days, for the truces made between the rough barrios and, above all, I just wanted to do my work well, to photograph for me, for my wife, for my family and for my friends. |
