Mexico at the Hour of Combat: Sabino Osuna's Photographs of the Mexican Revolution

The Mexican Revolution offered a nascent generation of photographers an opportunity to document a moment of drama, celebration, and tragedy. Advances in technology such as the regular use of halftones in popular periodicals and the ability to transmit phototelegraphically contributed to an increased use of photography to tell the revolutionary story. Both sides in the conflict relied on the visual exposure that photojournalism could provide. Gun and Camera were intimately connected, and the photographers were aware that they were recording history. Among he hundreds of photographers who appeared on the scene was Sabino Osuna, a skilled portrait photographer that was ripping open its core. The rules of war allowed him to be a noncombat and not a target and to get close to the action. The images he produced cover primarily the early years of the Revolution, in particular the Decena Trágica, the ten days in February 1913 in which the Madero government was overthrown and the old order briefly restored. The 427 glass-plate and film negatives of the Osuna Collection, now preserved in the Special Collections & Archives Department of the Tomás Rivera Library at the University of California, Riverside, are not only historically important but photographically impressive, and a number of the images are works of art. This volume reproduces striking images. The photographs are placed in context and illuminated by essays by Ronald H. Chilcote, Eluid Martinez, Tyler Stallings, Carlos Cortés, Georg M. Gugelberger, and Peter Briscoe.