MARCO ANTONIO CRUZ
Niño ciego y serpiente de fuego /
Blind Boy and Fire Serpent
Marco Antonio Cruz was born in Puebla, Mexico on November 3, 1957. He studied painting in Puebla and later worked in Mexico City as Héctor García’s assistant. As he learned more about photography, Cruz was heavily influenced by the work of Nacho Lopez. Since 1979 he has been published as a photographer in major Mexican newspapers such as La Jornada and in magazines, most notably LIFE, which featured one of his well-known images from the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. In 1984, he and a group of colleagues created the photographic agency, Imagenlatina. He has participated in numerous exhibitions—both individual and collective—in Mexico and the U.S.; and he has published two books: Cafetaleros (Imagenlatina, 1996), documenting the exploitation of coffee workers in Guatemala and Contra la pared (Grupo Desea, 1993). His series on blind people in Mexico is only one of the many distinguished photo essays he has created during years of work. In 2004-05, with the cooperation of Héctor García, Cruz printed 50 images from García’s own negatives for the Wittliff Gallery collection. He lives and works in Mexico’s Distrito Federal. To date, the Wittliff Gallery has in its collection fifty-five photographs by Cruz.
PHOTO Self-portrait, 1995