evicted from Donceles 99 in 1987, when the bulding, damaged by the 1985 earthquake, was resto red and converted into a Museum of Caricature. For decades this colonial College of Jesus was honeycombed with workshops of distinguished carvers and photo-retouchers, a center for foto-escultura. Bruno Eslava Molina, the only surviving sculptor of relief-portraits, now works at home in the San Pedro El Chico section. Lately he has produced a number of superb exhibition pieces, including Marlene Dietrich (for an UNAM film tribute), María Félix and Jorge Negrete, Frida Kahlo and Pope John Paul 11. The rediscovery of this most Mexican of photographic artifacts shows a renewed interest in historical photography generated by the 150th anniversary of its invention (1989). It also reflects an active mining of urban popular culture by artists like Ricardo Anguía, Marisa Lara and Carlos Jaurena, who are searching for a contemporary iconography. Anguía, in particular, seeks deleberately to revaluate foto-escultura, evoking his own childhood in phantasmic images of the megalopolis like "The Spectators are Wood" (1984), a boxed construction of repainted relief-portraits. Jaurena, by contrast, commissioned portraits of himself from Eslava, which he assembled into satiric "types," appropriating foto-escultura to ex-
plore objective issues of identity and self-presentation. Foto-escultura combines miniaturization, plasticity and a lave of color, all characteristics of Mexican folk art. Not only does it provide a vivid record of a transformative period in Mexican history the dress, decorative styles, physiognomic variety and cultural heroes-it also portrays the ideals and aspirations of its subjects. After all, foto-escultura is collage. Individuales could be "married" without benefit of clergy,
dressed to impress, reunited with estranged loved ones, eves "raised" from the dead. While some cut-and-paste jobs resulted in surreal disproportions or awkward pairings, the majority of fotoescultura exude an uncanny physical presence-an aura of pure nostalgia.
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