11 · 12 · 06

Nacho López: Still Relevant Today

Clara Sánchez

The short film Los hombres cultos was shown during the tribute to Nacho López. In this piece (winner at the Guadalajara Film Festival,1972) López talks about a fictitious nuclear holocaust.
Jesse Lerner, who is currently doing some research on Nacho Lopez, and two of his former students, Elsa Medina and Daniel Mendoza, were also present at the tribute.

How did you meet Nacho López?
In 1977, I was studying Fine Arts at the University of Veracruz, and he came to teach some courses. It was the first faculty that offered a degree in Cinematography and Photoragphy. Mr. López taught film until they eliminated the program, then he taught photography. The first classes were extraordinary.
Why?
I was working as an independent photographer at the time, and wanted to go into Film school so I enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Nacho López had already done so many things, he had such a solid career, and had experience in film. We were very impressed.

Did he have a strong influence on you?
Yes: he had a very strong personality, and not just as a teacher. He made us think about where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do.
What do you remember most about his classes?
There were a lot of things, not just the academic part: we were really creating a life around him. We rarely left his side until he died, and always asked for his advice. There weren’t any photography schools back then, you learned by working with a teacher inside and outside the classroom: Nacho had all the experience in the world and helped us decide what path to follow. I also valued him because he was a good listener.

What was he like?
I don’t know, I just saw Los hombres cultos, which shows a part of him I didn’t know very well. Twenty years have passed since his death, so I decided to read all his texts again, thanks to his daughter, Citlali López, who lent them to me. He’s hard to define. He’ll never receive an official tribute, that’s for sure, because he wasn’t like that; they’ll pay tribute to Juan Rulfo and other personalities but not to López, he was anti-establishment. Some of the pieces we saw today at the National Indigenous Institute are very official, so to speak. But if you read the texts, they are quite open; he talks about a type of democracy that’s trying to rid itself of paternalism, but doesn’t succeed; and also about caciques, and the absence of democracy. Nacho was a filmmaker, writer, critic, and worked as a curator and editor. He was multitalented; and not enough has been written about him, only John Maraz has written about him. More research needs to be done. Luna Córnea will devote an entire issue to him.
Which of his pieces do you most admire?
Los hombres cultos remained unreleased for 25 years; it showed in Morelia and then here. It’s an important document. I also admire his essays, such as La Venus evade la puerta which had a filmic quality to it. He wrote a few scripts and shot a few documentaries which should be around somewhere.

What legacy did Nacho López leave?
Many of his texts were published in the newspaper Unomasuno, and they still say a lot and are relevant today; they talk about how a photograph has its own language, like film or video, and that they should be committed to saying something, and to an ideology. His arguments are significant to this day: photography is a language that has to be studied in order to be understood.