©Gerardo Montiel Klint, “Segunda ola. La inmersión en el mundo, el estado más puro I” (Second Wave. Immersion in the World, the Purest State I), from the series Caudal (Flow), 2022

When I think of Mexico Week I don’t just see it as a series of interviews, but as a compass of what’s yet to come.

Seven artists, each working from a different place—whether it’s femininity, nature, society, history, identity, architecture, or the unconscious—share an undoubtable longing to express themselves in an innovative and true way.

While doing these interviews I didn’t only find photographs. I found passion, devotion, ideas, processes, humor, time, effort, and a true sense of humanity that deserves to be shared.

This isn’t an academic work. It’s a series of conversations about how our practice as photographers continues to evolve day by day. About how life shapes us and grants us the power to give meaning to what we capture with a click.

In a rapidly changing world, these artists continue to honor the origin of the word “photography” by bringing light and stories into it.

These photographers can look to the past and the future, move between worlds, and build a contemporary curiosity that will inspire many more to follow the path they’ve traced. The image is changing, and I believe we should stop for a moment and ask “What is Mexican photography saying today?”

The artists are: Iñaki Bonillas, Tomás Casademunt, Paola Dávila, Carol Espíndola, Cristina Kahlo, Gerardo Montiel Klint, and David Muñíz.

Before photography became Gerardo Montiel Klint’s space for intuition and the unconscious, there was the sea. As a child, he dreamed of becoming an oceanographer, captivated by Jacques Cousteau and exploration. As an adult, he too has become an explorer. He dives into the unknown, but inward.

In this conversation, he reflects on a trajectory shaped by transformation rather than structure: moving from science to art, from technique to meaning, and from control to experimentation. The result is a practice based on intuition, error, and transformation, where photography becomes not just a way of seeing the world, but a way of understanding oneself.

©Gerardo Montiel Klint, “El gran misterio de las cuatro verdades nobles y el óctuple sendero III” (The Great Mystery of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path), from the series Caudal (Flow), 2025

Gerardo Montiel Klint (Mexico City, 1968) is a product designer, photographer, teacher, and writer particularly interested in examining the photographic image as a phenomenon of ideological transition and its repercussions on the public imagination. His work is held in museums in the USA, Japan, China, Brazil, Spain, France, Denmark, Hungary, and Mexico. He received the Acquisition Prize at the 11th and 13th Mexico Photography Biennials, the 2024 Medal for Photographic Merit (SINAFO/INAH), and the 2008 Bellas Artes Silver Medal (INBA). He has been an advisor to EXIT magazine (Spain), an advisor to the Getty Foundation and the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts (MOPA SD) from 2013 to 2017 (USA), and a member of the advisory board of Alquimia magazine (Photographic Archive of the National System of Photo Archives [Mexico]). His professional activity, always centered around photography and the image, ranges from exhibiting his work and curating exhibitions to advising museums and publishers and writing theoretical works.

Follow Gerardo on Instagram: @gerklint

©Gerardo Montiel Klint, “Duino: Primera elegía con bruma del norte ante el mundo interpretado I (Duino: First Elegy with Northern Mist before the Interpreted World I), from the series Finlandia (Endland), 2020

The shadow functions as both a motif and a psychological metaphor for delving into the unconscious, and for unveiling it through that strange phenomenon we call photography. It is a probe I consider self-referential—one born of constant experimentation, a narrative-psychological obsession with modifying and transcending pre-existing reality.

A process of psychoanalytic introjection and projection unfolds throughout my explorations. Recurring yet intertwined themes include the unconscious, philosophy, alchemy, symbolism, psychology, archaic imagery, Jungian active imagination, literature, painting, and photography.

Its backbone consists of death, nostalgia, melancholy, anxiety, loneliness, unease, illness, affection, eroticism, desire, violence, anger, and even the Freudian slip—the existential conflicts of being and its enduring psychological fragilities. — Gerardo Montiel Klint

©Gerardo Montiel Klint, “D630A,” from the series Finlandia (Endland), 2018

Lou Peralta: How did you go from wanting to become an oceanographer to becoming a product designer and eventually a photographic artist?

Gerardo Montiel Klint: When I was a child, I was obsessed with the sea. It began in elementary school, when members of the Cousteau Foundation visited my school and showed films of Jacques Cousteau’s explorations. From that moment on, I would say, “That’s what I want to be when I grow up.” To me, being an oceanographer meant swimming with seals, filming aboard the Calypso, and living at sea.
That romantic idea faded in high school, when I discovered the field was mostly physics and mathematics. Disillusioned, I stepped away for a while and moved to Puerto Vallarta. When I returned, I took an aptitude test that showed I needed something balanced between the technical and the artistic. That’s how I found my way to product design. I worked in that field for several years, but eventually realized it wasn’t the path that was meant for me. Then, during the 1995 economic crisis, I was fired from my job as a head designer. That same day an opportunity arose to work as a photographer for a family-owned hotel in Cancún. I remember I learned how to photograph events, food, and even get aerial footage over a single weekend, and they ended up hiring me for many years. This event helped me decide to use photography as a way of life. Before that during the day I worked designing interiors for an architecture firm, and at night I focused on my own personal photo-based projects. I had also studied photography at the Escuela Activa de Fotografía, a technical course, for almost two years, but for me it was just a hobby. That’s where my true photographic journey began.

LP: How did your family and your education influence your relationship with art and photography?

GMK: There were no artists in my family. The closest connection to art came through my father, who was a psychiatrist. My mother died when I was nine, so my brother and I grew very close to him. Although he came from the scientific world, he had a deep love of culture. He would take us to concerts, to see murals at San Ildefonso and the Palacio de Bellas Artes, and at home there were a few paintings and prints he had bought simply because he liked them. It wasn’t a significant collection, but it created an atmosphere of curiosity.
The way he introduced us to classical music was especially formative. Before concerts, he would ask us to read the program and during the performance, he encouraged us to close our eyes and let the music activate our imagination.
My grandmother’s photo albums certainly had a big impact on me. Although she was an amateur photographer, she had a powerful way of capturing everyday life and would make annotations alongside her images. Those family albums became my window into knowing her, my mother, and their lives. Both of them had passed away, so this was my way of allowing myself to understand where I came from.
My more formal encounter with art came later, driven by that same search. I was about to move to Spain to pursue a master’s degree when I came across an ad for a short fine printing course at Centro de la Imagen. There, I discovered an entirely new dimension—authors, practices, and questions I hadn’t even known that I could have. One day in the lab, Marco Antonio Pacheco picked up one of my photographs from the washing tray and asked me what I wanted to say with it. I had never considered that a photograph needed to say something.
He invited me to join his personal creation workshop. I thought I’d only be there for a month and a half, but I ended up not going to Spain at all and stayed in the workshop for two years. There, I learned how to look at and talk about photography beyond technique—through concepts, emotions, and discovery. We visited exhibitions, analyzed work, saw books and Marco was generous in sharing his real creative process. Gradually, I came to understand that photography was a form of expression, not just documentation. Without realizing it, that experience shifted me from design to art, and from technique to meaning.

LP: In your own creative process, how important is it to leave space for error, drifting, or even failure? What kinds of discoveries appear when you let the image construct itself within uncertainty? And what place do play and intuition have in your practice?

GMK: From the moment I began photographing for personal meaning, I understood that my interest lay in working from the unconscious. For me, that means exploring, experimenting, and letting go of control. We’re often afraid of failure, but I see it as essential: it allows us to retrace our steps and move in new directions. I don’t seek predetermined results; instead, I’m interested in the intersection of uncommon ideas that leads to unexpected discoveries.

In Dune, Frank Herbert wrote: “He always avoided the temptation to choose a clear, safe path, warning: ‘This road leads inevitably to stagnation.’”

I encountered that sentence in my adolescence, and it struck me like a quiet revelation. It lodged itself deep within me, becoming a personal mantra—one that still guides me, unresolved and alive, to this day.

Carl Jung wrote of relinquishing egocentric control, of letting rigid structures dissolve. In my own practice, that surrender found form in my practice even at the darkroom. I began to alter photographic developers with caustic soda—an act both reckless and reverent. It burned my hands, but it also summoned images that could never be repeated.

That is the territory I am drawn to: acts of technical and conceptual disobedience, where rules are pushed into crisis, disciplines blur, and chance is invited to speak.

Play, intuition, and error are, for me, ways of thinking differently. The unconscious is my backbone—the hidden layer that shifts over time. We’re not the same people we were ten or twenty years ago, and it’s that inner movement that I seek to follow in my work.

LP: Your photobook Amoníaco (Ammonia) is one of my favorites, both visually and technically. In that project, what role did losing control and working with error play? How would you describe the concept and materials of the book?

GMK: Invited to photograph the city of Monterrey for an upcoming show. Amoníaco began as a drift toward new forms of experimentation. After working through the friction between image and image, image and text, I turned to a less obedient sense: smell. Ammonia lingered in my childhood, in my first departures from home. I tried to let that presence migrate into images, to give form to something that cannot be seen. What emerged was an act of affection—ammonia not as odor, but as a passage to my father, to a time when fear, curiosity, and care occupied the same space. The reference was never visual. It was emotional, unstable, alive.

I resisted the idea of a tourist’s gaze. Monterrey appears here only as it exists within me. Faces of friends surface alongside industrial and ecological traces, bound by a fictional rupture—an ammonia spill spreading silently through the city. There are no captions, no explanations. The images speak laterally, connected by something felt rather than read.

Experimentation guided the making. Many types of papers, varnishes, and instead of the main CMYK process inks, I substitute them with fluorescent inks of cyan, magenta, yellow, combined with an ultra-process black ink—pushed beyond their known limits, reflecting light in unfamiliar ways. Whether it would work was uncertain. The result revealed colors without precedent, images that could not have existed in the darkroom or through conventional printing—artifacts born from risk, accident, and surrender.

©Gerardo Montiel Klint, “Flores y Amoníaco I” (Flowers and Ammonia I), from the series Amoníaco (Ammonia), Monterrey, Nuevo León, 2015

©Gerardo Montiel Klint, “Amoníaco 01” (Ammonia 01) from the series Amoníaco (Ammonia), Monterrey, Nuevo León, 2015

©Gerardo Montiel Klint, “Amoníaco 02” (Ammonia 02) from the series Amoníaco (Ammonia), Monterrey, Nuevo León, 2015

LP: Traditionally, photography is taught as the art of capturing light, but in your work shadow appears as a central element.

GMK: When they teach you photography, they tell you that you have to capture light, look at light, work with light. Photography is thought of as a practice of luminosity. They teach you to use light, to measure it, to be attentive to it. But without shadows, there’s no contrast, and without contrast, there’s no volume. In a two-dimensional practice like photography, in the world of representation, without volume, there are no planes, no depth, only a very flat record.

Metaphorically or symbolically, I was interested in working from shadow, with what was hidden, but present. In my specific case, the unconscious. All of us human beings have a sort of persona that socially interacts, but there’s also an inner voice where our phobias, fears, traumas and our most deep-seated desires reside. That’s what interests me.

Jung speaks of the shadow that we all carry. And it’s necessary to know that shadow, not to hide it, but to embrace it and know that it’s part of us. It’s not about banishing it. For me, reaching that shadow—not only individually, but also collectively—is a way of exploring and probing a sort of collective unconscious. In that way, photography is for me a tool of self-exploration to find my place in the world.

That is why I am drawn to the shadow, to what stays hidden.
What is already known remains known.
The world remains outside.
But the inner universes—the personal ones—are where my attention settles.
In recent years, I have been exploring images of thought, images of the mind.

Photography is my medium: a complex and unfamiliar phenomenon through which I think.

©Gerardo Montiel Klint, “D620B,” from the series Finlandia (Endland), 2018

©Gerardo Montiel Klint, “Más negra que el cuervo” (Blacker than the Raven), from the series Finlandia (Endland), 2020

©Gerardo Montiel Klint, “Weltschmerz: el mundo real no puede satisfacer los anhelos del espíritu IV” (Weltschmerz: The Real World Can’t Satisfy the Yearnings of the Spirit IV), from the series Finlandia (Endland), 2020

LP: How did the shift from Finlandia/Endland to Caudal happen, and why did you include sound in that transition?

GMK: With Finlandia, I wanted to transmute myself. An alchemical process. The four main stages: from Nigredo, Albedo, Citrinitas, and finally arrive to Rubedo of the Magnum Opus. I felt I was reaching the end of the road in photography. Nothing provoked me, everything seemed derivative, even my own work. I wanted to say goodbye to photography as I understood it and to move to a different state. That’s why I worked from the hearing sense. Sibelius and his Finland as well as Richard Wagner and Les Baxter were decisive evoking powerful images from music: then I traveled constantly to amazing places like the Galapagos Islands and photographed a lot, but I was really frustrated returning home because as a result I only saw “photos,” not what I imagined, they had no emotion, no meaning. Sure, they were good, but they were only photos. Then the pandemic came and forced me to pause, review my archive, and work in the digital lab in unexpected ways. That’s where emotion came back. It was a revelation to use the computer as an experimental tool, not just to fine tune and archive pictures. It was quite a trip inside my computer and software to make those “just photos” flourish and transform them into mental images!!!

However, to me Finlandia wasn’t only a technical or sensorial shift. It began as an alchemical process. I was interested in transforming lead into gold: the shadow, darkness, void and the unconscious, into something luminous. That shadow-work is not just personal; it also touches the collective unconscious. Photography became a tool for self-exploration and for provoking something in myself and hopefully in whoever looks at the images. In Endland the “being” transmuted.

Then comes Caudal: the second act. The transmuted being sees the world, listens to it, and contemplates it. That’s where sound enters. I field recorded wind, insects, waves and ambient noises. Then, I altered the frequencies with analog hardware and granular synthesizers.
My idea is for the images to be accompanied by sound. Not as an illustration, but as a whole installation experience.

©Gerardo Montiel Klint, “Représentations naturelles de l’esprit VI B” (Natural Representations of the Spirit VI B), from the series Caudal/Oscillateur Period (Flow/Oscillator Period), Frelighsburg, Canada, 2025

©Gerardo Montiel Klint, “L’être transmuté écoute la nature pour trouver sa place dans le monde” (The Transformed Being Listens to Nature to Find His Place in the World), from the series Caudal/Oscillateur Period (Flow/Oscillator Period), Frelighsburg, Canada, 2025

©Gerardo Montiel Klint, “Études naturelles de l’esprit II” (Natural Studies of the Spirit II), from the series Caudal/Oscillateur Period (Flow/Oscillator Period), Frelighsburg, Canada, 2025

LP: You’ve returned several times to self-representation in your work. What does it activate, and why does it appear differently than when you work with other bodies or scenarios?

GMK: I began making self-portraits simply because I was always available, and because I was too shy to ask others to pose. Over time, I came to distinguish between self-portrait and self-representation. For me, a self-portrait is photographing oneself as one is, while self-representation involves assuming a character in front of the camera.

In my first series, Transmigración (Transmigration), I worked through self-representation.

Later, in Desierto (Desert), I returned to my own body through pictorial and tragic references. One of those images was my version of Ophelia—but not drowned in a river; instead, floating in a natural pond in the middle of the Mexican desert, a symbolic place where the self confronts itself.
For many years self-representation in many of my series was common. Suddenly, I just stopped doing them. Last November, after a ten-year pause, I returned to them. I think these are cyclical processes, guided by intuition rather than logic.

@Gerardo Montiel Klint, “Ofelio” (Ophelio), from the series Desierto (Desert), Cuatro Ciénagas, Coahuila, 2002

LP: How do you understand your intuition and apply it in your creation? Especially when you don’t fully know the reasons for making certain works.

GMK: I work largely from intuition. But do a lot of deep research in the fields the project asks for. Cross referencing concepts and experimentation at the same time. Sometimes I look at the finished photographs and wonder where they came from. It’s not that I don’t know what I want to say, but rather that I feel I let my unconscious unfold. I’ve come to realize I’m the vehicle, the medium that translates the images behind the head, rather than in front of the eyes.

This is why I don’t practice direct, documentary or street photography for personal projects. My attention is drawn instead to interior territories, to mental universes. To that disturbance David Lynch spoke of—the symbolic eruptions of Jodorowsky’s cinema, the soiled, uneasy atmospheres of Raymond Carver’s short stories, like badly remembered dreams finding their way to the surface. It was through these currents that I arrived at this path.
In the beginning, I drew detailed images before they existed. I sketched them, named them, after that cycle I tried to contain them through notes and concepts—Freudian slip, melancholy, affection, states of being. With time, that structure collapsed. Now I move as a channel, kind of a medium or shaman; a transmuted being. Images rise from the unconscious and pass through me as a form of transmutation, answering the insufficiency of the real. The photographs no longer belong to me; they arrive like presences. At times they resemble patients who speak in fragments, while I listen, assisting them in recognizing their own form.

In the book Finlandia (Endland), this process was taken further through psychoanalytic sessions with Rebeca González (the book editor who is also a psychoanalyst) in which the photographs themselves “spoke,” and I acted only as an interlocutor. That experience led to a text on the alchemical transmutation of the self—one that became essential to understanding the project and was included in the published book alongside a really meaningful text to me by my admired friend, editor and writer Mauricio Ortiz called: “El camino del oro” (The Golden Path).

LP: You’re deeply connected to your Mexican roots. If your work had a Mexican ingredient—it could be a gesture, an obsession, or a shadow—what would it be, and how does it appear in your practice?

GMK: For me, it’s our magical thinking—but not in a folkloric sense. I mean something telluric and primordial, what lies beneath the surface. Mexico has a brutal visual force that’s not always explicit: Coyolxauhqui, Huitzilopochtli, the codices, rituals, blood, the Sun, and even offerings. For years, I worked with Editorial Raíces photographing archaeological pieces at the National Museum of Anthropology and that experience left a deep mark on me.
I believe the Mexican element in my work is what cannot be fully explained, only sensed.

My grandmother, who was from Tlaxcala, used to tell me about the charro negro, chaneques, nahuales, cadejos, tlahuelpuchis (witches) who became balls of fire crossing the fields at night, to suck the blood of the babies at their homes—and she spoke of them without irony. That magical thinking coexisted naturally with a rational life: my father, who was a psychiatrist, would listen to grandma and then wink at me.

I recognize that same coexistence in my work: scientific consciousness alongside ancestral imagination. What’s visible and what lies beneath, like parts of the Templo Mayor hidden below the Cathedral.

LP: In this same cultural awareness, you founded a collaborative project in 2012. What does Hydra.lat mean to you, and what was your role in the project?

GMK: For me it was very meaningful because it was born from a need to share knowledge, ideas, and provocations from photography. I studied design, not art, and I built my own interlocutors. Photographer and artist Ana Casas Broda was fundamental: she hired me for the first time and gave me the confidence to teach. In the nineties I created for Ana and Centro de la Imagen a staged-constructed-conceptual photography course because it didn’t exist something like that in the country. Educational programs, workshops, courses and seminars followed, and so did a friendship.

Hydra emerged when we realized we had ideas that didn’t fit institutions. There were no resources, no real space for new ideas and new photographers abroad, few photobooks, no ecosystem. So, we said: let’s make it ourselves. Ana offered her house and expertise as an educational place, Gabriela González Reyes contributed with structuring, research and operations, and I brought some ideas, pedagogical and conceptual aspects to the table. The name Hydra came because of the ancient guardian monster of Hydra. We were all heads: you cut one and two appear. It wasn’t hierarchical, it was communal. Hydra in one of his first research projects called Develar y Detonar supported 52 artists, most of them newcomers for an international exhibition and book when there was a weak ecosystem for them. Some of them today are nationally and internationally known.

Over time I understood I couldn’t handle everything: I had my commercial photo studio with my brother Fernando, my personal work, trips, and other interests. Today what I love to do is photography, not teaching or organizing for others anymore. So, I let go of Hydra from a healthy place. I’m a founder, but I’m no longer active. Nonetheless, I’m happy to see it grow. Ana and Gabriela are visionaries and they deserve total credit. Hydra literally became a lighthouse, an international reference and a strong and admired guardian monster of many heads, as it should.

LP: How did your interest in Artificial Intelligence begin, and what drew you to working with it?

GMK: I first approached Artificial Intelligence around 2022, when it was fairly primitive. My initial impulse was to see how I could fracture it.
AI is fed by databases full of visual clichés and unspoken rules, so the question that immediately came to mind was: what happens if you push it to its limits?

At the time, platforms had very strict guidelines: no nudity, no sex, no politics, no violence. And I thought—so now the machine is also going to tell us what we’re allowed to imagine? My response was to try to trick the machine. I worked with scenes tied to a heavily photographed underworld—mostly documented by German and North American photographers—connected to submission and sadomasochism. It’s a historical territory of “underground” photography that has never been gentle or domesticated. I wanted to see how far AI would tolerate this imagery before repressing it.
The result was that the platform punished me several times: I’d be blocked for three days, then warned that my access might be shut down entirely. And I kept thinking: if this is supposedly a creative tool, why can’t it tolerate bodies or eroticism? I was not using nudity or sexually explicit references. But there’s an idea of digital control over the body that deeply concerns me. From cave paintings to today, we’ve always represented bodies—why does the machine have the right to dissociate us from them?

The project ultimately became a small book entitled La Doctrina (2023), published by an independent guerrilla type press called Rhuinas that is specialized in projects that mix sound & images. I first worked AI using DALL-E at a very early stage. There was no photographic realism; the results were rough, almost childlike. But that very crudeness felt valuable to me: images that don’t aspire to be real, yet leave an unsettling feeling. The fact that a platform designed not to disturb could end up producing disturbance felt like a fascinating paradox.

©Gerardo Montiel Klint, from the series La Doctrina (The Doctrine), 2022

LP: You’ve mentioned that your long-term projects unfold in “acts.” How did that structure come about?

GMK: It began with Finlandia/Endland. When I started that project, I felt I was reaching the end of the road in photography. I wanted to say goodbye to photography as I understood it and to transmute myself as a creator. The play between Finlandia and Caudal emerged from that impulse: an alchemical idea of transformation, of turning lead into gold, and ultimately, of transforming the self.

After finishing Finlandia, I realized that “the being” had already transmuted, and there was no point in forcing that direction any further. That’s when Caudal, the second act, appeared. The question shifted to: how does a transmuted being see the world?

Therefore, in Caudal, the being can perceive the visible world and the unconscious simultaneously. The studies of form and context are contemplative exercises: looking at space, shape, and presence within reality. These studies dialogue with inner states and with the photographic tradition of the Vancouver School of photography (Jeff Wall) or the New Color Photography (Shore, Sternfeld, Meyerowirtz, Eggleston) mixed with the telluric and painfully heroic landscapes of Dr. Atl, David Alfaro Siqueiros or José Clement Orozco’s paintings. The conscious and the unconscious!!!
From there, the idea of a long-term project took shape: four acts, each lasting four or five years.

In Finlandia/Endland the first act, I worked with Jung and the concept of active imagination. In Caudal the second act, I engage with Schopenhauer who understood art as a suspension of human suffering. The human condition, for him, is governed by a blind and insatiable will that condemns us to desire and pain. Art offers a temporary arrest of that will, allowing a disinterested contemplation of nature and of ideas—moments in which the individual is released, however briefly, from the weight of existence. The next acts will involve Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt. I don’t know if I’ll live long enough to complete the entire cycle, but I do know that if I hadn’t begun at fifty, I never would have.

Lou Peralta is a visual artist and contemporary photographer based in Mexico City. She belongs to the fourth generation of a family dedicated to portrait photography—a legacy that continues to nourish her ongoing exploration of the genre. Her practice expands the limits of the two-dimensional photographic image, reimagining portraiture as a sculptural and spatial experience through hand-built structures using materials such as paper, fabric, agave fiber, and wire.

Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico and abroad. Peralta is a Fujifilm brand ambassador through the X-Photographers program. Recent recognition of her work includes being selected for the Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 (2023 and 2025), the FRESH Photography Award (2025), the 22nd Santa Fe Photography Symposium in New Mexico (2023), the selection of one of her works for the Ibero Puebla Biennial (BIP) 2025, and an artist residency at The ANT Project (2026).

Instagram: @lou_peralta_photo_based_artist