The Brooklyn Rail

Photographer Daniel Ramos’s first solo show in New York is not large. Eight 40-by-52-inch, black-and-white prints span the walls of the Camera Club of New York’s intimate Baxter St Project Space. The photographs themselves do not at first appear complicated either; Ramos took each portrait with a four-by-five view camera at the same bar in Monterrey, Mexico over a two-year period (all works summer 2018–winter 2019), while living in the Northern Mexican city with his wife. Ramos’s seemingly simple, “straight photography,” however, belies the complex social negotiations and bonds in which they participate.

For the first several months that Ramos spent visiting Los Socios (approximately “The Partners” or “The Friends”) in downtown Monterrey, he took few pictures. The bar patrons he and his assistant approached as potential subjects regarded him with suspicion. Ramos, whose childhood summers were spent traveling from Chicago to Monterrey to visit family, was viewed as an outsider in this tight-knit community. It wasn’t until he had shown up night after night, week after week, getting to know the bar’s regulars, that people began to allow the artist to point his lens in their direction. His major selling point? Ramos gave each subject an eight-by-ten print in exchange for sitting.

Daniel (2018), a young flower seller with a black eye whom Ramos photographed hugging a bouquet of roses, upon seeing the print, apparently asked the artist, “Is that what I look like?” “He had never owned—or even seen—a photograph of himself,” Ramos explained when we spoke. “It was the realization that many of these individuals had never seen themselves in photographs that made me want to take their pictures.” The show’s title, Eres Muy Hermosa (You Are Very Beautiful) functions as an affirmation for a subject first encountering his or her likeness. Daniel appears proud, almost regal in his portrait, despite his injury—obtained as punishment for straying into someone else’s sales territory. Ramos’s portraits, brutal, surprising, and tender, are a kind of love letter to their sitters in the tradition of Peter Hujar or Nan Goldin. Ramos knows each of his subjects by name, by story, and by role in the social fabric of Los Socios: the older man and younger woman in Delicious Dancers (2019) are famous at the bar for their cumbia and norteñas dancing; the cowboy-hatted gentleman next to the jukebox known as Querendón (2018) [Lover] solicits song requests (for a fee) from customers. The jukebox, like the promise of “billiards” advertised in the bar’s upstairs, is decorative: dance music at Los Socios comes courtesy of the live band Selva Negra [Black Forest] that plays on the same level as bar patrons, and there isn’t a billiard table to be found.

The series’ early photographs—there are over two hundred negatives in total, including nighttime cityscapes of Monterrey that do not appear in the exhibition—use the environment of the bar as setting. After about a year, however, Ramos began to set up a makeshift photographic studio within Los Socios each night, complete with props and backdrops. Ramos’s subjects appear in front of floral and tiger-print fabrics from the popular Mexican Parisina textile shop, alongside ceramic swans and plastic flowers from his grandmother’s house. Studio props receive special focus in Ramos’s work. The objects he includes index a joyful artifice particular to Northern Mexico, while also grounding the images in the tradition of artificial studio accessories so foundational to the history of photography. Ramos’s passion for props extends into the viewer’s space: the artist ordered a bar table and chairs inscribed with the insignia of Mexico’s Carta Blanca beer to sit in the gallery for the duration of the show. The furniture, echoing the tables and chairs that appear in two of Ramos’s photographs, creates a mirroring effect between viewer and photographic subject, facilitating a kind of encounter between the two.

One leaves the exhibition with the sense that it is this encounter that most interests Ramos. He shot the images in Eres Muy Hermosa at the height of the Trump presidency, amid speeches denouncing Mexicans as criminals and chants of “build the wall.” Ramos’s portraits implicitly contest the rampant xenophobia of the Trump era, rehumanizing the men and women of Mexico for viewers across its northern border—the characterization of sitters as beautiful is as much for the benefit of viewer as for subject. But the exhibition does more than challenge preconceived notions about working-class Mexicans. The years Ramos spent getting to know the citizens of Los Socios allow him to include the viewer in some small part of those relationships. Ramos’s exhibition encourages visitors to meet these life-size figures head on, to encounter them on their home turf, to inhabit their space. His medium is not only the photographic image, but also the “whole of human relations and their social context” that Nicolas Bourriaud notoriously dubbed “relational aesthetics” twenty-five years ago. Though the term has accumulated no small amount of baggage for its perceived failure to live up to its own utopian ambitions, Ramos’s practice serves as a reminder of what the relational impulse can achieve. It can provide viewers in New York’s Chinatown with a different understanding of what it means to visit a small bar in Northern Mexico—and it can provide the patrons of that bar with a different understanding of themselves.