Secular and Sacred: Photographs of Mexico

It has been over forty years since Van Deren Coke made his first trip to Mexico. As these color photographs show, he continues to be fascinated by the rich and complex culture he sees there. He is drawn to the teeming activity of the streets and markets where in even the humblest of objects and the most ordinary of transactions this photographer can find mystery.
On recent sojourns in the colonial centers of Mexico City, Patzcuaro, San Miguel de Allende, and Oaxaca, Coke has used his camera to explore his own visceral responses to a culture that is both familiar and exotic to North American eyes. "My major aim," writes Coke, "has been to turn ordinary events, registered at 1/50th of a second, into enigmatic or symbolic images that may tell us something about what goes on in people's minds. All kinds of cultural things are revealed - evidences of the effects of international pop movements and fads, as well as the persistence of cultural inheritances from an often dark past."
The sense of enigma is what Coke has captured here so successfully in his rich, saturated colors and humble yet mysterious imagery. In the tradition of Edward Weston, who photographed Mexican folk toys, Van Deren Coke has turned the ordinary into something strangely compelling.