Mexico

The duality of Mexico - a lust for life juxtaposed with an obsession with death, a craving for the outward symbols of the American Dream alongside a passionate nationalism - has been caught in this collection of photographs.

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Mexico is a vast country of immense cultural and geographical diversity, ranging from tawdry border towns and cactus desert in the north to the Mayan ruins and Caribbean beaches of the Yucatan in the south. It inherits a violent past, is home to fiercely independent Indian groups and boasts the largest and one of the most polluted cities in the world, Mexico City. The duality of Mexico - a lust for life juxtaposed with an obsession with death, a craving for the outward symbols of the American Dream alongside a passionate nationalism - has been caught in these photographs. Tom Owen Edmunds has taken the uniqueness of Mexico, those things which make it so potent and different from its neighbours, and distilled them into this portrait. He has allowed ordinary images of small-town life to sit side-by-side with the extraordinary and bizarre. Tom Owen Edmunds travelled over 25,000 miles and took 38,000 photographs to produce this book. In doing so, he was beaten by riot police, indecently assaulted, tricked into joining a satanic ritual and witness to a miracle.