García, Romualdo

He was born in 1852 in Silao, Guanajuato. From a young age, he was interested in music and photography. Entirely self-taught, he established a portrait studio in Guanajuato in 1887, becoming the most famous portraitist in the city. Countless members of all social classes paraded before his camera, enabling him to compile the most comprehensive iconographic document of the Porfirio Díaz era in just a few years. In 1889, he won a bronze medal at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. In 1905, his archive was almost completely destroyed due to a flood. As a result, the thousands of negatives that remain date from after this year. The Revolution caused a decline in the work of his studio, which was inherited by his children. He died in 1930 in Guanajuato. Claudia Canales has compiled an anthology of his portraits in the book "Romualdo García: A Photographer, A City, An Era" (1980).