Death artfully shot

Enrique Metinides

Forty-five-year-old Antonio N. tried to jump off a stadium girder, because he 'wanted to know what death was like'. He was dissuaded from finding out, but not before Enrique Metinides had snapped a series of pictures. Metinides, who published his first front-page picture (of a corpse) at 12, also wants to understand death, but he uses his camera.

These extraordinary photos are so beautifully composed they look arranged - a formalism that only makes the subject matter more disconcerting.

Crashed planes and crumpled cars are centrepieces, the people around them staring, usually, not at the injured or dead but at the camera. Metinides's fascination with human curiosity is what gives his pictures their power.

For 50 years, he chronicled disasters on the Mexican streets, moonlighting with the Red Cross so that he often arrived with the ambulance. Most are black and white, and they are the more beautiful - one, of a man swimming out to a corpse, bystanders reflected in the water, is astonishing - although occasionally colour works in his favour, as when a woman in red tries to jump from a tall building, or bright blood flows from a covered car accident victim.

These are difficult pictures, but Metinides's obsession never feels creepy, partly because of the elegant composition and partly because of that energetic dialogue with the mystery of death. Antonio N. wanted to jump, but we want to watch, and Metinides obliges us to acknowledge that unpalatable fact.