Mortgaged. The title of the impeccable aerial view of Tlatelolco shot by Rodrigo Moya summarizes the critical sense of his visual work produced for illustrated magazines between 1955 and 1968. A symptomatic example of Modern progress, the iconic brand-new housing unit that Moya portrayed in 1963 as a perfect model, became a double symbol in 1968: of the authoritarian nightmare of an institutionalized revolution that indebted the country, and of the utopian promise of a social revolution that would invariably remain pending.

Just as that powerful photograph of contradictory meaning, all of Moya’s work is dialectic: in the visible space of the image, he attempts to synthesize those opposing values, which, through permanent confrontation and clash, constitute the complex and hybrid essence of what Mexico is as a country.

Blunt and critical, but also sensitive and compassionate, the visual work contained in Rodrigo Moya. México serves an extraordinary testimony of a country in times of change. This selection of 200-gelatin silver prints ―many of them vintage― depicts the clarity and the artistic excellence of a documentary project that intended to show the contradictions of a country whose “stabilizing development” was already showing its structural failures. In 1968, when Moya quit the press, the country’s different social and cultural fronts would claim for a politic and economic change as he had foreseen in his photography.