Yvonne Venegas

The Pencil of Nature

Yvonne Venegas

I cut my hair, I wear a tailored suit designed to accentuate a masculine figure, I look at myself in the mirror. Whose reflection is that? I sit on the sofa spreading my legs and I have the feeling that I am in control of the situation... By appropriating the masculine —from the way I dress and look, to the attitude with which I direct the subjects that appear in my photos , the words that come out of my mouth, the body gestures with which I portray myself—, I make a simulation to understand how this masculinity lives in me...

In the Mexican provinces where I grew up, a woman's wedding day used to start with the bride standing in front of the mirror, looking at herself, while the photographer directed her. He told her everything from how to move her hand and look at her parents, to how to make the gesture of applying perfume behind her ear; in short, she taught him gestures to represent herself feminine...

I seek to create a space to remember the history of women's portrait photography by male photographers. I work with a Hasselblad camera, black and white film and natural light. The demand imposed by the weight and sound of the camera takes me back to the past —to the photographic studio of my childhood in the 1970s and 1980s— and at the same time forces me to feel my body while we work. This exercise takes me back to a past in which I learned from my father's gaze and that of other men. Teachers, colleagues, and photographers I have assisted, as well as others I have admired—such as Newton, Araki, Álvarez Bravo, Avedon, Halsman, Furuya, Mapplethorpe, and Man Ray—appear in my head as authorities. I review his photographs one more time; although I have seen them countless times, now I direct women to imitate the poses choreographed by them. In doing so, I seek to learn something new, something that I had not understood before, and then reinterpret them.

Yvonne Venegas, The pencil of nature (fragment).

Yvonne Venegas. USA-Mexico, 1970. Lives and works in Mexico City. Graduated from ICP NY with a master's degree in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego, she has participated in the collective exhibitions Pulsions Urbaines, Rencontres d'Arles; Point Counterpoint, mopa, and Mexican Photography, SF-MoMA; individually at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica; University Museum of Contemporary Art MUAC; House of America, Madrid; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Gallery of Mexican Art in Mexico City, and the Baxter Gallery, New York. Her work was awarded at the X Biennial of Photography of the Centro de la Imagen. 

Venegas won the 2010 Magnum Expression Award from the Magnum Photos agency; member of the National System of Creators of Fonca in 2011 and 2015. Gestus was published by Editorial RM with a grant from Fundación Bancomer in 2015. She obtained the 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship for the realization of his project San Pedro Garza García and in 2020 he obtained the prize from the Cuervo Foundation, the support of the Jumex Foundation for its project El lápiz de la Naturaleza and FONCA 2020-2023 National System of Art Creators Scholarship for its Mar de Cortés project. In 2022 she was a finalist in the Portfolio Prize, convened by Aperture magazine. 

Yvonne has published: ME de Hank (2010), Inédito (2012), San Pedro Garza García (2018), El Lápiz de la Naturaleza (2023, RM), Nunca será más joven que este día, (2012, inba ) and Días Únicos (2019, MUAC).