THE Magazine - Los Angeles

Joseph Rodriguez has long carried on a one-man exposé of one aspect of Mexico's black economy: sex, prostitution, and transvestitism. In the first shot in Rodriguez's latest installment, Porno magazines are gaining in popularity, a man gazes at a wall bedecked with pornography. The magazines -- Plumper, Rump Bust -- form the public image, a skin past which one can see only so far. With that as an opener, how much can we expect to be revealed? How much truth, how much of the world rendered in black and white? Across these twenty-five photographs on the barrios of Nezahualcoyotl, La Condesa, and Mexico City, Rodriguez shows these living shadows at (sex) work and play, the city posed at odd angles in a mirror image of the skewed, but not warped, paths these lives have taken. It would be tempting to cast his subjects in the fuck-you rhetoric of Anne Liebovitz or the crawling sideshow prurience of Diane Arbus -- and of course it's the easiest parlor trick to present the repellent in an artistic context so that by the very experience of seeing art we are inclined to be sympathetic at the outset. But Rodriguez's pictures avoid such grandstanding. This is not to say that these lives are not startling; but it is by dint of their context, the larger framework of the hypocrisy of society, that these pieces truly come alive. Mexican society assigns damnation to whores and gays. Homosexuality is tolerated so long as the person indulging in it is on top. Rodriguez reveals such nonsense by portraying, not preaching. His images are life writ so captivatingly large that you can almost smell it. And that's the point, really, that Rodriguez's images capture things hidden in plain sight.