Márquez Romay, Luis

Luis Márquez Romay was born in Mexico City on September 25, 1899. He began his training as a photographer in Havana at Estudio Feliú, known for its strong romantic tradition. There, he learned the trade while also developing his interests as an actor and film technician. Márquez returned to Mexico City in 1921, where he joined the Photography and Cinematography Workshop of the Ministry of Public Education as a photographer. He traveled to Janitzio, Michoacán, for the Day of the Dead celebration. This experience profoundly impacted him: the dance, music, crafts, landscapes, and especially the traditional costumes dazzled him so much that he decided to capture all that splendor with his camera.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Márquez defined and consolidated a style, marking his most productive and creative period. This phase of technical and aesthetic exploration in Márquez's work coincided with the presence of leading avant-garde foreign photographers: Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Grigori Alexandrov and Eduard Tissé (from Sergei Eisenstein's team), Paul Strand, Josef Albers, and Anton Bruehl, to name a few. These prolific photographers greatly influenced the emergence of what has been called modern Mexican photography, whose most notable representatives include Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Agustín Jiménez, Emilio Amero, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Aurora Eugenia Latapí, and Luis Márquez Romay himself. These Mexican photographers became interested in new themes akin to those characterizing international modern photography at the time: urban life (light posts and cables, advertisements, etc.), industrial architecture, machinery, foreshortened or fragmented framing of the human figure, and compositions with common objects, close to abstraction or surrealism, in clear rejection of pictorialism.

From the 1920s to the 1960s, Luis Márquez worked intensively throughout almost the entire country, inaugurated his first solo exhibitions, and received significant recognition for several of his images, such as the Grand Prize for Photography at the Ibero-American Exposition in Seville (1930) and the "First Prize" at the International Photography Exhibition at the New York World's Fair (1939-40). He also actively collaborated with major newspapers and magazines in the Mexican capital, illustrating the "artistic" section or graphically documenting special interviews about his work. Notably, he contributed to several publications of the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at UNAM, including books by its founders, Justino Fernández, Manuel Toussaint, and Salvador Toscano. In this way, he earned prestige both nationally and internationally.

After the 1940s, when he had already discovered the hyper-aestheticism that became his working formula, he continued actively with his photographic production, achieving significant accomplishments. However, he gradually subordinated his photography to a new passion: his collection and exhibition of Mexican ethnic attire. Like many photographers of his generation, he illustrated books, magazines, newspaper supplements, and notably produced postcards, collectible prints, and calendars. In 1950, his most important photography book, Mexican Folklore, was published, compiling a selection of his best work. Márquez passed away in Mexico City on December 11, 1978.