Silva, Gustavo F.

Michoacan-born photographer and cameraman, who built his professional career in Mexico City. In 1907, he captured on 8 x 10 plates the independence route of Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. He is responsible for four documentaries, including "Viaje de Justo Sierra a Palenque" (Secretaría de Instrucción Pública, 1909). By late 1921, while living in the populous Guerrero neighborhood, he registered an official portrait of Obregón with the Fine Arts. During those years, he had his photographic studio at number 21 Madero Avenue, where he portrayed Salvador Novo and Xavier Villaurrutia in colonial costumes. His stay in 1926 as a government pensioner in New York, like the wax sculptor Luis Hidalgo and the cartoonist Matías Santoyo, has not yet been documented. Around 1930, he died of typhoid fever. His photograph of Obregón would illustrate, albeit without giving him the slightest credit, the cover of the first edition of "Un día en la vida del general Obregón" (SEP, 1982), by Jorge Aguilar Mora. In his "Fuga mexicana" (Conaculta, 1994), Olivier Debroise jokingly rechristened him as "David Silva," like the famous actor. Debroise notes that Edward Weston recorded in his diary that the "crazy" Silva, upon visiting his exhibition in 1924, tried to appropriate one of his photographs of a naked Tina Modotti with the cry of "This print is mine! I must have it!". All he could do was tear it. In her "Diccionario de directores del cine mexicano" (Conaculta-Cineteca Nacional, 2000), Perla Ciuk acknowledges his career as a documentarian but does not mention his photographic trajectory.