Commissioned Work, Sad Visual Universes

Curated by José Antonio Rodríguez Since some fifty years ago, Pedro Meyer has been doing photographic work for a wide range of clients: companies and industries with different commercial interests: banks, publishers, museums, public institutions and parastatal ones, such as the government’s oil company Petróleos Mexicanos. In 1957, hired by Black Star, he documented the devastation of the earthquake in Mexico City. Many other projects followed; two from 1977 exemplify this phase: the photo series that served as magazine covers for Sucesos para Todos —whose allure blended Pedro’s disturbing scenes with phrases like “Beauty contest or slave trade?”— and shots of industrial installations for the rubber company Negromex, “as if a human subject, as a model with which images are created” —wrote Meyer in July of that year...