When Jorge returns to Mexico from the U.S., he may say he is craving something specific: sun, or tlayudas, or the gut-punch scent of cempazuchitl as it is harvested just before the day of the dead. But in fact I think he is craving something much larger: the sense of life in all of its intensity, immensity, and complexity, life in its full exquisite and absurd panorama. His Xpan photo series is a stunning, almost painful reflection of this craving. The Xpan’s panoramic format allows Jorge to capture not only the geographical landscapes of Mexico – the crenelated mountains extending on and on under a huge, hot sky – but the emotional and cultural ones as well: the demons of carnival with their grotesque otherworldly grins haunting ordinary pueblo streets; the ancient intimacy between villagers and the land that sustains them, reflected in ritual sacrifice; the stoic patience and command of the herder, leading his goats to water; the reverence of carefully enacted rituals, in which the veil between this world and the next grows thin. In each panorama, a complex story of vulnerability, intimacy, relationship, in each a reflection of this absurd flicker of time between birth and death that we are lucky enough to inhabit. It is possible to read each photo as a life: the dark edges, the light in the middle filled with the granular heartbreaking detail of playfulness, suffering, work, devotion, performance, stillness, silliness, beauty – and beyond the frame, the quiet rooms, the streets, the landscapes we cannot know.

Text by Sarah Menkedick