In the summer of 2010, the artist Stefan Ruiz bought the first batch of photographs in this book from one of the many stalls of the vast second-hand market in Mexico City called La Lagunilla.
After a year he returned to the same place, hungry for new and surprising abandoned images. The seller confirmed to him that there were no others available.
However, a friend of the street vendor agreed to meet the artist on a bench in any park in the Mexican city. Hence the beginning of numerous clandestine meetings where the man stealthily delivered packages and packages of photographs to him.
Although Ruiz was never able to trace the exact provenance of the photographs, the images clearly came from the Mexico City police archives.
The work is presented as a selection of more than a hundred mugshots interspersed with the narration of an armed robbery and artists’ impressions of some notorious criminals, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s.
Ultimately, the images, many of which are damaged and embellished with handwritten white text, are presented in their original groups with the intent of providing information about crime in mid-century Mexico.
