An Expat Photographer Seduced by Mexican Ritual
The late photographer Michel Hurst happily endured what most of us might consider suffering. In his adventurous youth, he rode a rented bicycle a thousand miles across India. For a spell, he posted up in a commune in the South of France that didn’t have electricity or running water. He once lived in a cave in the Canary Islands for four months, naked, like a hermit chasing the beatific vision. He hitchhiked across the Sahara Desert, twice.
His ability to endure might, in a perverse way, have been a gift from his father, who, by Hurst’s account, treated him cruelly. From an early age, it was clear that Hurst was gay, and some of the cruelty undoubtedly sprang from his father’s homophobia. At six, he begged his parents for a doll for Christmas. This was out of the question for Hurst’s father, though his grandmother interceded on his behalf and was able to negotiate a diplomatic solution: a less offensive paper doll. When Hurst, a voracious reader who claimed to have read Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Nausea” when he was ten, told his father that he wanted to become a writer, his father responded that it was “a job for fags.”
Hurst didn’t become a writer, but he fashioned himself into the kind of character that a writer might wish they had imagined: an astute antiquarian, a swashbuckling adventurer, a pioneering tastemaker, a lover, and, periodically, a photographer. In typically defiant fashion, he also realized his father’s fears. His first serious photographic foray, undertaken in the nineteen-seventies, produced a vast collection of elegant, self-assured male nudes, some of which made their way into the pages of the French gay magazine Gai Pied.
Hurst went on to become a prominent dealer of mid-century furniture, a period that his partner in life and in business, Robert Swope, described as a “thirty-year detour” in his photography career. But, after the couple retired and migrated south to Mexico City, Hurst dove back into photography with gusto, until his death, from cancer, in 2023.
“The last five years of his life, photography was the only thing that mattered,” Swope told me. Every day, Hurst would hit the streets, hunting down pictures with the same avidity that he had applied to his decades of work scooping up rare antiques. The result was a collection of photographs that both capture the culture and the people of Mexico and record Hurst’s particular proclivities, the food that fed his hungry eye. There is no small amount of homoeroticism in these pictures, for instance. In one image, a pair of young men, one shirtless, wrestle on a mat laid out in the Parque México, their arms looped around each other in what appears to be a tender embrace. In another, Hurst snapped a picture of a man sleeping rough on a slab of cardboard, one arm shielding his eyes from the sun, and the other pulling up his shirt suggestively. The city itself sometimes seems to bend around Hurst’s vision: a section of the final mural painted by Ángel Zárraga, “The Will to Build,” is transformed from a scene of heroic male industry into an orgiastic tangle of flesh, looming above an unsuspecting gentleman’s head.
Many of the pictures were captured on the Day of the Dead, at the annual feast of the cult of Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte (Our Lady of Holy Death), in the Tepito neighborhood of Mexico City. Santa Muerte has become one of the fastest growing religious movements in the Americas by attracting legions of the dispossessed—migrants, L.G.B.T.Q. people, single mothers, street children. But its primary association in the public consciousness since the nineteen-eighties is with the criminal underworld, particularly the drug cartels. The cult’s deity, a skeleton shrouded in a hooded robe, resembles a morbid inversion of the Virgin Mary, often blessed with tequila and marijuana smoke. In Hurst’s pictures, men attending the Santa Muerte feast day simmer with sex and the threat of violence. One young man, his shirt off and loosely draped around his neck along with a Santa Muerte necklace, sports tattoos of a Kalashnikov rifle and a flaming skull, regarding the camera with bedroom eyes. Another man, rakishly smoking a cigarette and dressed in an incongruous outfit of sweatpants and a plaid peacoat, has painted his face to resemble the Joker. As if offering a counterpoint to these men’s enticements, another picture features a sulking, burly fellow with a diminutive statue of Santa Muerte in his hand, wearing a muscle tee emblazoned with a bleeding, broken heart which says “Love is for Suckers.”
Like other expat chroniclers of Mexico, Hurst was clearly seduced by the country’s culture of public rituals, particularly those involving what the photographer Graciela Iturbide described as “Mexico’s death fantasy.” The cult of Santa Muerte could, of course, be said to be in the thrall of that fantasy, but the same could be said of the cult’s main antagonist, the Catholic Church, which has vociferously denounced the movement. In Hurst’s travels outside of Mexico City, he photographed a handful of Semana Santa (Holy Week) celebrations during which penitents and play actors restaged the suffering and death of Christ. In Taxco, a city known for its tradition of bloody displays of penance that have largely been suppressed in the rest of the country, Hurst captured a baleful, hooded figure who could have easily been mistaken for a medieval executioner if not for the heavy bundle of thorny blackberry canes lashed on his bare shoulders. In San Mateo Mexicaltzingo, Hurst shot the reënactment of the Crucifixion itself, complete with gawking Roman soldiers in their broom-bristle helmets, and a milling crowd of bored-looking costumed children.
These festivities are called Passion plays. “Passion,” derived from the Latin passio, originally meant “suffering” or “enduring.” Only centuries later did the word acquire its now more common meaning, associated with enthusiasm and sexual abandon. Somehow, the word, in its double-pronged definition, gets to the heart of these pictures, and perhaps is the key to understanding Hurst himself. Through his camera, we see a Mexico that is racked with pain and beset with poverty, but which is buoyed by the perpetual engine of eroticism and the promise of spiritual grace.
